Moon Sand

MOON SAND!

The latest and greatest thing around here is been moon sand. The kids just can't get enough of it! Its soft and fluffy but mold-able. The older tots (three years old) enjoyed printing their numbers, building castles and running their cars through the moon sand. The younger tots (one and two years old) enjoyed squishing, sculpting and destroying things in the moon sand. 

This could easily be an indoor activity, if you laid out the rules and boundaries before beginning play. I usually say spillage from engaging in play is fine, however deliberately making a mess outside of the bin result in a warning and subsequently the activity being put away.  We played out on the deck and I enjoyed watching the children mix the moon sand with the rice from the rice table and pour the moon sand into the pool. Just a warning... wet moon sand is super slippery. After a day of having the moon sand out on the deck, it dried and I simply swept it off. 

There are a couple of different ways to make moon sand. I modified a recipe a bit in order to make it safe in case anyone sampled any of it! 

Our moon sand: 
7 cups of flour 
1 cup of vegetable oil 

1/2 cup of olive oil 

Another recipe calls for 2 sticks of chalk. Other recipes are just 7 cups of flour and 1 cup of baby oil. 

Have you made moon sand before? What recipe worked for you? 

Until next time! 
Alicia 

Cars!

The boys love, love, love cars. All three of them do. The girls - well they could take them or leave them. In order to captivate the boys, we had a a week full of car themed activities.

The big ramp:
First we took a garage door header and built a huge car ramp. The ramp was wide enough that even our garbage truck could go barreling down it. After playing with the ramp at different angles Spider man (3 y/o) and Superman (3 y/o) decided that it needed decorating. They took the chalk to the top, sides and bottom of the ramp. This soon became a colour mixing task as they enjoyed pouring water down the ramp and watching the colours mix together. Since it was a hot day, the ramp dried quickly and they were able to continue decorating. Not long after that, we used the stop watch to conduct time trials for various vehicles. It was interesting to watch their thought process as they quickly discovered that they needed a starting line. Apparently I was cheating by having my car start half way down the ramp... there's nothing like encouraging some problem solving without directly stating the problem! A few days later, the ramp was still a hit as the boys took to having distance competition. This raised another problem as the younger tots kept moving the cars so the boys were unable to determine which car went the furthest (only one car went down at a time). After a mini-melt down we all put our problem solving hats on and the boys realised that they needed some sort of a recording system. Since we left our chalk out in the rain (a good lesson in putting things away!) they boys decided to use mud lines on the deck to record the distance that each car went. 

Painting with cars:
Another hot day activity was painting with cars. We gathered an assortment of vehicles with various tire sizes and treads from around the house. After putting paint on paper plates and laying out the paper, the kids got to it. Even Lighting McQueen (10 months) loved painting with the cars. Despite being an open invitation to play (an opportunity to use the materials in whatever way they wanted), the older kids just enjoyed driving the cars on the paper. The younger tots, Lighting McQueen and Princess (17 months), decided to explore by painting with the sides, roof and headlights of the cars as well. This was a fantastic deck activity, especially since we had the pool set up just a couple of feet away. 
Learning about the letter C: 
The older boys (both 3 y/o) are developing their phonemic awareness. We decided to stick with our car theme and create a paper car. First I prepped all of the materials (a large letter C, three smaller C's, 6 round wheels for each boy). First the boys glued down their large C's, then drew the dotted lines down the middle of their C roads. After that, they added the smaller C's (cars) and the wheels to the cars. Once we were done adding our cars, we added our c shaped gas fumes to the backs of the cars. It was a hit! 

Literature link: 

Box cars: 
Since we still have a bunch of bankers boxes that we used for moving in the basement, I decided that box cars was going to be our next car themed activity. After covering the side with the boys choices of construction paper, they decorated their boxes. We added paper wheels and steering wheels. Once those were assembled, we added ribbons (seat belts) to help keep the cars up. This allowed the boys to have their hands free to drive their cars! 

We had a lot of fun with all of our car activities. We will definitely revisit it again soon! 

(Pictures coming soon!)

Sensory Rice

Lately, we have been spending a lot of time playing with rice and dry noodles. I decided to up the fun and colour the rice and pasta. It was relatively easy to do. I just separated the rice into different plastic bags, added a splash of vinegar and then a few drops of food colouring. After mixing everything together, I left the bags sitting open on my kitchen counter for a few days. A few times a day, I would break up any hard chunks in the bags. The pasta took longer to dry, but it could have been a case of too much vinegar. 


The kids love mixing, pouring, scooping and serving up the rice. Although the cupcake tin would lead you to believe that we are making cupcakes, Spiderman is really serving up ice cream with various toppings! We took turns roll-playing being the customer and requesting different toppings. It was interesting to see that he remembered which "topping" was suppose to be in which spot. We tackled some simple vocab words such as "more, less, pour, mix" as well as colours. 

Sunshine and Lightning McQueen were not interested in our cupcake game. They preferred to mix, pour and transfer the rice into various containers. Lightning is very into spoons right now, so I made sure to have a variety of different types and sizes of "scoopers" for him. 

Of course our coloured rice quickly ended up in the "sand" table. Fireman enjoyed mixing the coloured pasta and rice with the water. He was excited to watch it turn back to "white". We talked about the paste that is created when the rice and water combined. We enjoyed filling up our dump trucks and using our front end loaders to pour the rice into various sized bowls. 

We often play with rice inside, but it does scatter everywhere. I will usually set up our picnic blanket inside for the rice to stay on. It makes clean up (shaking it outside  easy. However today it was beautiful out so we enjoyed some time out on the deck. 

This all makes me thing... what else could I dye? 

Spiderman (3)
Fireman (3)
Sunshine (18 months)
Lightning McQueen (10 months)

Until next time! 
Alicia 

Finger painting for all ages!

When you have group of children who vary in ages and ability levels, it is sometimes hard to find an activity that appeals and is appropriate for everyone. We all love to finger paint. Spider man (3) especially likes to finger paint.
Even though there are a variety of non-toxic finger paints on the market, I still feel better just having the tots use homemade paints. I can't trust Princess (17 months) and Lightning McQueen (10 months) enough to be sure that they are not ingesting a copious amount of non-toxic store bought paint.
Home made finger paint:
2 cups of water
1/2 cup corn starch
1/2 tsp salt
3 tbs sugar
A few drops off food colouring or jello powder.
Heat all of the ingredients (except for the food colouring) on the stove until it is smooth. Split into containers and add the food colouring. This finger paint is a little bit thicker making it easier to glob, spread and spear on a variety of surfaces. Spider man (3 y/o) and Sunshine (3 y/o) usually like to help make the paint while the babies sleep. I store it in the fridge for about 3 days. The kids love taking this paint outside to paint our water table, deck, toys and bins. It also works on paper, however you need to let the papers dry for a long time after. Lightning McQueen and Princess usually enjoy painting the inside of my white basins. When we are done, we all clean up and spray everything off with the hose. Any clothes that are coloured usually get stain spot treatment and thrown into the washer on a rinse cycle. We have yet to create any stains.

Another popular "finger paint" is home made pudding. Sometimes I just mix it with coco so we have brown pudding. Other times, I make vanilla pudding and add a little bit of food colouring to it. The kids love licking their fingers while creating their masterpieces. Although I do let the kids pudding paint on paper, we have yet to keep a pudding masterpiece.

Another method of finger painting I have tried with the little tots (I usually do this when the bigger tots are painting with brushes and other tools), is painting in a bag. I add a sheet of paper, and paint to the inside of a bag, then tape it down with painters tape and let the little tots go. After they get board with the painting, they usually put their fine motor skills to work and tear the tape off of their trays in an effort to free their painting.

Until next week, 
Alicia 

Construction

Construction Sensory Bin
As we are living playing in a new neighbourhood that is under construction and the kids are completely obsessed with all of the heavy duty machinery, I figured what better sensory bin than a construction bin! I usually like to set up the bins prior to the children arriving as I enjoy seeing their excitement at all of the fun they are about to have. 

Set up:
I filled our bin full of dirt. Originally I was going to use beans but decided what is better than real dirt! We have been getting a ton of rain here lately so this station might get messy! I was able to find all sorts of little vehicles (rollers, cement mixers, dump trucks, jeeps, front end loaders) at Giant Tiger. I threw in some coloured stones to serve as rocks and later Spider man decided to throw in part of his rock collection as well. For the initial lay out I put a large hill of dirt and a valley running through the box. I had the dump truck dropping its load of rocks into the valley. I always throw in smaller measuring spoons or something that the children can use to scoop with. Some of the kids prefer to use the spoons over their hands. 

Discovery:
The kids loved it! They were so excited to play with miniature replicas of the vehicles they have been seeing around the neighbourhood. They spent over an hour reenacting and creating various construction scenes. Initially there were a lot of questions "What does this vehicle do?" "What should I do?" "Where can I put these rocks?". After answering a few questions such as the names of the machinery that they had forgotten and redirecting a few questions "Where would you like to put the rocks?" I stepped back and allowed their imagination to flow. Moving a few feet away and becoming "busy" with one of the babies allowed Spider man to discover the sensory bin independently and try things out and fully engage in the act of playing. 

When setting up sensory bins or open ended play tasks, I refrain from telling the children how the play should be conducted. It is interesting to see their take on how to play with different objects. Sometimes their play leads me in a completely unexpected direction. That is the beauty of the imagination! 


Spider man (3 y/o boy)
Builder boy (1 y/o boy)
Monkey (1 y/o girl)
Lightning McQueen (9 m/o boy)

Until later!
Alicia

Colours!

We have spent a lot of time discussing colours lately. After completing a mini unit all about rainbows we decided to try out a colour experiment. This task helped to develop our fine motor skills as the tots had to fill their eyedroppers with the coloured vinegar. This was a fairly open ended task with a lot of chance to build on language and inquiry skills.
First we filled tin pans with an inch of baking soda and mini containers full of vinegar. Initially I wanted to only add primary colours to fill our vinegar containers, however I decided that since this was an introductory colour activity, I gave the tots six different colours. Red, yellow, pink, light blue, dark blue and orange. After a demonstration of how to use the eyedroppers, the tots were off. It was interesting to see the various approaches that they took in creating their project. One approach was to put various drops of different colours throughout the pan, another approach was to layer the colours.
I did not to any direct teaching in this lesson, but simply posed questions to get the children interested in exploring and thinking about their project. Below are some of the questions and statements I used to help the children expand upon their thinking.
"I heard a sound when you put the colour in your pan! Did you hear a sound?" (fizzing)
"H, I noticed that you put the blue colour on top of the yellow colour in your pan. What happened when you did that?" (This drew his attention to something he may not have observed on his own.)
"What happened when you put the vinegar onto the baking soda?" (It made little bubbles that quickly disappeared). 
"What colour are you adding now?"
"Do you prefer the light blue or the dark blue?" 

After some time dropping the vinegar into the pans, one tot decided to use his eyedropper to mix up his concoction.
"What happened when you mixed everything up?" (It made clumps of baking soda). 

After about half an hour worth of play, the tots were still into it but looking for a new way to continue their discoveries. They asked for spoons. Using the spoons we mixed, packed, and carved the baking soda and vinegar mixture. This lead to a whole set of observations. The kids created holes in their packed down baking soda and found out that when they put the vinegar into the hole, it disappeared. They also created lines in their packed down baking soda and attempted to have the vinegar "flow" down their roads and rivers.

 All in all this is a good one! We will try it again soon! 
Alicia 

Sunshine and Rainbows!

Well the sun is out but so is the wind! With all of the dust flying around, we have unfortunately spent most of our time inside the past few days. We have been enjoying a rainbow theme this week. Our literacy links this week were Magic School Bus Makes a Rainbow and What Makes a Rainbow. I decided not to use the book The Rainbow fish  because there is so much you can do with it and I wanted to use it on its own another week. 

We completed two paper rainbow crafts. Today our task was to create a paper rainbow.  First we talked about the colours of the rainbow and the order that they follow. Next we matched construction paper colours to the rainbow colours. We tore strips of construction paper into smaller pieces. This was a great fine motor task for the little tots as they had to use their "pincher" fingers to tear the paper. Once we had all of the paper torn into smaller pieces, we used glue sticks to trace the rainbow lines. After that we glued our smaller pieces of paper into the correct spots. This was a longer task with lots of repetition but the kids stuck to it and created beautiful masterpieces. 

On Thursday we created 'jumping rainbow . I used this as a fine motor task. I cut the paper into strips then the kids applied glue at each end Once glued, they flipped the paper over and made the rainbows jump on the paper.

When it was finally nice enough to head outside, we were able to make chalk rainbows on the road and deck. We had mini rainbows everywhere!

Usually we use our coloured beads to make bead pattern necklaces. This week we used them for matching and sorting. We focused on colour sorting. The kids loved sorting their beads into colour columns. They also loved when I sorted them with a 'mistake' that they had to fix. 



Until next week! 
Alicia 

Car Wash! Car Wash!

Every kid loves water. Especially water with bubbles in it! With the warmer weather we figured it was a perfect day for a car wash - kid style! After selecting the "dirtiest" vehicles we could find, we filled our bin with warm soapy water. We use all organic soap making this project safe for all ages. Next we determined what other cleaning supplies we needed. Rags and brushes (in this case new tooth brushes) were deemed perfect tools for the job!  Once we had all of our supplies we went to it... scrubbing, brushing, wiping, re-scrubbing. An hour later we were all soaked but our vehicles were spotless. 
The only thing that could have made this project better? Grass to hold our car wash on.... 

Alicia 

Mother's Day!

For Mother's Day we made salt dough prints and stepping stones. Both projects were a hit with the kids (and Moms!) and both projects turned out fantastic! For the salt dough prints we mixed 1 cup of salt with 1 cup of flour. Then we added 1/2 a cup of water. It took a little bit more than half a cup of water to make it the right consistency. We flattened the dough in a bowl then flipped it out onto a cookie sheet that was lined with parchment paper. We put our hand prints (bigger tots) and footprints (little tots) into the dough. After the prints we completed we put the salt dough into the oven for multiple hours (I admit I lost track of time) at 170. Once they were hard we took them out and let them cool. After lunch we were able to paint them. We mixed two shades of the same colour and painted the background the lighter shade and the print the darker shade. Aren't they beautiful? 

For our stepping stones, we mixed cement then put it into metal containers. Again we made hand and foot prints in the cement then decorated using a variety of stones and beads. 



See you next week! 

Alicia 

The Very Hungry Caterpillar

It is the end of April but we are still getting snow and 50 km/hour winds! I had to think quickly to revamp our plan for the week as it was clear that that majority of our time was going to be spent inside. I decided to do a literature study of The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. 


On Monday, we read The Very Hungry Caterpillar story during Circle time. After reading the book we got busy with the paints! Big Tots painted egg cartons while the little tots did mess free finger painting. After the egg cartons had dried, We added pipe cleaners for antenna and googly eyes so our caterpillars could see! 

On Tuesday, we re-read the story then worked on our own personal Hungry Caterpillar books. We used the printable books from Making Learning Fun and just added some of our own drawings. These books served as picture prompts for re-telling purposes. They turned out great! To continue with our weekly theme, we took a trip to the John Janzen Nature Centre and enjoyed playing in the Discovery zone. This gave us a nice break from the house! 

On Wednesday we did a retelling/sequencing activity to see how much of the story the children remembered. First we coloured the food that the Very Hungry Caterpillar ate. During the colouring stage, we worked on our fine motor skills and colour recognition  After colouring, our pipe cleaner caterpillars "ate" the food in sequential order. The children loved counting the food and trying to remember what came next!
On Thursday, we took a bit of a break from the Very Hungry Caterpillar story and read Crunching Munching Caterpillar. We used this book to compare and contrast it to the Very Hungry Caterpillar story. The children enjoyed predicting what would happen next in our story. I used this time to ask various comprehension questions and probe some higher-level thinking. 
On Friday, it was a gorgeous day so we spent the majority of the day outside. We drew caterpillars and butterflies with chalk and discussed the various colours we were using. We even saw a butterfly! When asked "Before it was a butterfly, what was it?" the children happily responded "a fat caterpillar!" You can't get a better demonstration of learning than that! 




Until next week,
Alicia