Today we read two of my favorite books - Bartholomew and the Oobleck and The Sneetches.
We started with Bartholomew and the Oobleck and of course we HAD to make oobleck. If you've never made it before, it's really quite simple. Mix 2 parts cornstarch with 1 part water. You can add a few drops of food coloring if you want (we made ours green like in the book).
When the oobleck is touched, stirred or in any way played with, it becomes hard and solid.
(Don't worry he wasn't eating it - he didn't want to touch it at first)
When left alone, the oobleck starts to "melt" (turn liquid).
We even tried forming the oobleck into shapes using cookie cutters. The kids REALLY enjoyed this part.
Clean up is not as hard as you might think. As the oobleck dries it becomes powdery again and easy to sweep up and throw away (do NOT put this down your sink drain!).
Next we read The Sneetches. I love this book for so many reasons. It's a great jumping off point to talk about how we are all different, but still the same. Pinky really related to this book and even came up with a game for us to play. Using some star stickers, some of us became Star Bellied Sneetches and some of became Sneetches Without. Pinky and Chaos had a great time role playing.
Fighting sneetches
Sneetches who can be friends, despite being different.
The role playing went on for a very long time and even extended to their stuffed animals. They even transitioned into the activity that I had planned (don't you love it when things work out that way?) - sorting. They began sorting their stuffed animals into groups - gold stars and silver stars, one star and more than one star, big stars and little stars, etc.
Using an idea I found on the Imagination Tree blog, I made a counting and sorting activity using an empty egg carton and some Melissa and Doug lacing beads.
This was mostly aimed at Chaos who is both learning to count and learning his colors, but all of the kids enjoyed it. We spent time counting the wooden beads, matching the beads to the color of the number inside the egg carton, and sorting by type of bead.
Even Wild One got involved in this activity. Though she's too young to really grasp the concept, we continued to talk about colors and numbers as she enjoyed putting the beads in and out of the egg carton (she preferred the dump it out method). She even tried stacking the beads.
To end the day, the kids colored some more printables from Seussville and did some "Which is Different" activity sheets. I'm not usually a fan of worksheets, but I couldn't resist seeing Pinky work on this with her Thing 1 pencil!
Be sure to join us tomorrow when we read two more classic Dr. Seuss books. If you've missed any of our fun this week, click the button below to see it all!
No comments:
Post a Comment