Summer of Science - Week 1 - Magnets

This week kicked off our first week of what I'm calling our Summer of Science. I am using Memorizing the Moment's Alphabet in Simple Science and adapting it to fit the needs and ages of my kids.

We began with Wild One's first First Start Reading Lesson on the letter M.  I really enjoy the simplicity of these lessons and the fact that everything is done for me.  Wild One was really excited to start her very own workbook too!  She loves to write and draw - she will sit for hours and write letters and draw pictures - which is one of the reasons I chose this curriculum for her.

After she finished her lesson (it took us about 15 minutes), we began reading some books about magnets.  I've done a magnet theme in the past for the older kids so it was fun to revisit some of our favorites.  Some of the books and supplies we used are listed in the widget below (nonaffiliate links).

Before we kicked off our experiments with magnets though, I asked the kids if they wanted to keep a science journal.  I want the focus of our studies to be on having fun and exposing them to science concepts, not on writing.  Pinky in particular is not fond of writing, and I didn't want something like a science notebook to stand in the way of her participating and enjoying our lessons.  They all agreed that they wanted a notebook, so I pulled together some free printables and made a couple of my own as well.  I will let them choose when they want to use the notebooks and when they don't.

The cover of their journals is a free printable from Read Like a Rock Star on TpT.

Chaos, Wild One and Sprout are all using the the free printables from Memorizing the Moments.

In addition, I made an observation sheet for Chaos and Wild One to use while viewing experiments.  Again, I wanted to focus on the science, so I chose to allow them to draw what they could see - something they both love.  You can download this very simple page by clicking on the picture.

For Pinky, I created a page for her to write out a definition of the topic we are studying and to make predictions about what she thinks will happen.  I also left room for her to draw a picture of what she sees.  You can download this page by clicking on the picture.

Because we've done a unit on magnets already, we repeated a lot of activities.  For that reason, I didn't really take pictures this week.  Here are some pictures of our last magnet study.  You can click on the pictures to learn more.

Some of our fun included:

A magnet sensory box:

Testing the strength of magnets (magnet "jumping"):

Painting with magnet marbles:

Discovering if magnets work when submerged in water:

We tried a few new things as well.  Together Pinky, Chaos and myself read The Magic Schoolhouse Amazing Magnetism.

We also tried making a paper clip dance like Kaysha did on Memorizing the Moments.

It was a fun week and the kids were excited to be back in "Mommy School."  I'm really excited to spend the summer diving into science with the kids!

Spring Sensory Bin

The warm weather has inspired me to change out the sensory bin for something more Spring-like!

The base of the bin is Easter grass and black beans (for the garden area). To keep the two bases seperate, I used a line of playdough across the bottom of the bin and inserted the fence pieces. It's not perfect, but has done well so far.


The grass area of the bin features a birds nest (Micheals), 2 birds (Dollar Store), feather butterflies (Dollar Store), a metal bucket (Target Dollar Spot), a shovel, a wooden birdhouse (Dollar Store), a tiny plastic paint bucket that has been used as a bug jar (Michaels), and various plastic insects (Insect Toob).


The wooden fence posts are from Michaels. The garden area has 3 terra cotta pots (Dollar Store), silk flowers (Dollar Store), and a plastic bee (Insect Toob). I added some black beans inside the pots so the flowers can be picked and planted.

The kids quickly added some pompoms to be used as both eggs and seeds to plant the flowers. They also managed to find the watering can I was looking for!

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What We Did This Week

**Just a quick note - I welcome any pinning from my blog as long as it does not include pictures of my kids. If I credit the idea from another blog, please be sure to pin from the ORIGINAL source so proper credit can be given. Thank you!**

Pinky is 6 years, Chaos is 4 years, Wild One is 2 years, and Sprout is 11 months

In addition to doing letter of the week with Chaos, I also began Before Five in a Row with Wild One.

This week we talked about the Letter M. Here are the crafts we made (again while listening to the music on the Hooked on Phonics software).


We started by creating our uppercase letter craft - Mountain M. The idea for this craft came from No Time for Flashcards.

We did our usual pages: tactile letters, coloring page, color by number and handprint art. Sources are below.

1. Tactile M (masking tape). The idea for this craft is here at The Active Toddler and the letter sheets were printed from Quality Kids Crafts.
2. Animal M coloring sheet from here at Education.com
3. Color by number picture from here at 1+1+1=1
4. Monkey handprint art from this post at Handprint and Footprint Art.


Our favorite craft this week was our mosaic art. I drew a basic outline of a sun and rays on a sheet of paper. Chaos cut squares from strips of construction paper and glued them down to form the sun and sky. The idea for art inspired by the alphabet came from here at Kidscount1234.com

We also played some fun letter M games:


Using the alphabet blocks from Hooked on Phonics we played a great movement game. You could recreate this game with any alphabet block , foam letter, card or even letters written on construction paper. I scattered the letters around the room. The kids (Pinky wanted to play too) would have to run, skip, hop, jump or whatever fun and crazy movement we could think of - to the letter I called out. The kids loved to "do a silly dance to..." and "go crazy to..." Can you tell that my kids love to be wild? :)

We had a lot of (surprise) fun with our wooden alphabet blocks. I originally brought these out for Sprout to stack, but Chaos took quite an interest in them. The blocks have a lowercase letter on one side and an uppercase on the other side. He would turn the letters over to lowercase side and try to guess which letter it was. He could simply flip it over to check if he was right.


Next he pulled out his alphabet poster (from the Hooked on Phonics set) and matched the blocks to the letters on the poster.


He also did a lot of lining up the blocks in order and pointing to them as he sang the alphabet song. I love it when impromptu learning fun happens! Don't worry - we did our share of building and knocking down towers too!


Our favorite non-craft activity was writing in flour! I thought this would be a fun way to have Chaos practice his writing.

He had so much fun with this! Even Pinky decided to join us. It made a big mess, but it was worth it.

Finally, we did letter hunts using the Letter Hunt worksheets from COAHS and the nursery rhyme pages from Education.com.

After doing a lot of reading, I decided to give BFIAR a try with Wild One. She's always loved, loved, loved books. We will stick to only play activities (no lapbooks or worksheets) because she is so young. It's my hope that this will be a fun way for us to "hang out" together while the older kids are at school.

The first book we "rowed" was We're Going on a Bear Hunt. We had read it before, but this was the first time Wild One really LOVED it. She even carried it around with her everywhere we went. I'm not sure what made it "click" with her, but it certainly made this week fun!


The first day we read the book I built a cave (out of an old sheet) for us to explore - complete with a bear too! She was initially terrified (whoops!), but once she saw Pinky and Chaos exploring, she was excited too.


Wild One really enjoys coloring so I was really excited to find this coloring page at scholastic.com.


I made her her first ever sensory bin based on the idea here at Delightful Learning. The base is corn and split peas (leftover from our St. Patty's day bin last year). I used green foam sheets and Easter basket grass for the grass, cotton balls, snowflakes and sequins for the snowstorm, pipe cleaners for the roots of the trees in the forest, shaving cream and blue paint (well sealed in a plastic bag) for the river, brown foam for the cave and brown foam covered in contact paper for the (sticky) mud (we were all out of brown paint). I added a small toy bear to complete it.

She was a little unsure of what to do at first, but Chaos helped her. They eventually grabbed some dolls from her dollhouse and reenacted the book.

We also tried our hand at sound effects using the ideas here at Reading Confetti.

Throughout the week we also turned the book into a game for wherever we were going. When we picked Pinky up from school we were "Going on a Pinky Hunt" and I made our trip into it's own story (mud in the front yard, bumpy road to drive on, playground to walk through, etc). Wild One had a lot of giggles for this game and wanted to play nonstop.

Coming up next week: Letter T, Goodnight Moon and fun with Pinky!

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Cars Sensory Bin

Chaos recently celebrated his 4th birthday. I'm not really sure HOW it's possible that he's four already. Anyway...he has been asking me to update the sensory bin for awhile so I thought his birthday was a great reason to change it out!

I decided to make a cars sensory bin for him. The base of the bin is black beans. The roads are bathtub foam "stickers" that connect together. It's from Rub a Dub Stickers for the Tub by Alex. You could also make your own road using black foam sheets. The cars came from his Cars Busy Book (it was a gift, though I think Barnes & Noble carries them). I added in some construction cones, various signs, a boulder, pom poms, K'nex (for construction), a foam block "tunnel", and a bulldozer for moving black beans.

It's pretty fun all set up and he has had a really great time playing with it. The bulldozer has buried the K'nex for "pipes", the K'nex have been made into lamp posts, boulders have blocked the street and, of course, there have been a few races too!

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Fun with MUD!

For the start of summer vacation I thought we needed to do something good and messy!

We started by reading a few books:

We had to start with the classic "dirt" book, Harry the Dirty Dog.


Next we read "Dirt Boy." It's the story of Fister Farnello who, to escape his bath, runs away to the woods and meets "Dirt Man."


Diary of a Worm is a hysterical story told, in the form of diary entries, from the point of view of a worm. This was a family favorite!


Finally we read Mud. The beautiful illustrations show the world turning from snowy winter to the big, muddy mess of spring.

It's the last book that leads to our craft today - MUD painting!

I simply dug up some dirt from the yard and mixed it with water to make a nice muddy mixture. I gave the kids some paintbrushes and recycled cardboard to paint on and told them to have fun.

They quickly gave up on the paintbrushes and moved to using their hands.

While the finished pictures aren't something we'll frame, the process was fun, fun, fun! And I have to say, clean up wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be. :)

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What We Did This Week

Pinky is 5 years, Chaos is 3 years, Wild One is 17 months, and Sprout is 1 month

Counting and Numbers
We read two great books about numbers this week. The first, aimed more at the younger kids, was 1,2,3 to the Zoo by Eric Carle. It's a simple animal counting story, but, as with all Eric Carle books, is beautifully illustrated.


The second book we read was a new one to me, but has quickly become one of my favorites - Numbers, Counting in the Natural World. Filled with beautiful nature pictures, this book counts to twelve and discusses sequence, comparison (lot, little, none; smallest to largest, etc), greater than and less than, evens and odds, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. I have the feeling we will be reading this book a lot!


Math Activities:
Pinky has decided that she really wants to learn to count to 100 before she starts Kindergarten. She knows the basic pattern but forgets the 10 place holders. I printed out a number chart from 1-100 for her to count with. I highlighted the 10 units and she practiced skip counting another love of hers) to help reinforce her memorization.

You can find the number chart here at apples4theteacher and the skip counting charts here at Homeschool Creations.

Chaos and I made sticker math charts together. He's gotten very good at counting, and I was surprised at how interested he was in completing the charts with me. The idea for this activity came from this post at Ramblings of a Crazy Woman.


Magnets:
We had a lot of fun exploring magnets and their properties this week. We started by exploring our new magnet sensory box.


Next we tried an activity I read about on the Prekinders blog. Using a ruler, we placed a magnet marble at one end and slowly pushed our magnet wands toward it. We took guesses as to how far the marble would "jump" to the wand.

We then experimented with different strength magnets to see which could make the marble jump the furthest.

Our magnets - magnet wand, refrigerator magnet, a MagnaDoodle magnet and our magnetic cabinet lock "key"

Our next activity (inspired by this post at Tinker Lab) was to see if the magnets would work through glass and water. We submerged a marble magnet and tried to retrieve it using our different magnets. Both the wand and the cabinet lock key were able to move the magnets.

This was definitely the favorite activity for the kids. They loved "rescuing" the magnets over and over again.

We also read two books about magnets: Magnet Power and What Makes a Magnet?


We tried a few of the activities in each of these books which included magnetizing a needle, discovering North and South poles, making our own compass, and discovering that the refrigerator seal is magnetic (this was news to me too!).

Finally, we decided to do some magnet painting!! This is such a fun project to do. We filled 4 small bowls with Crayola fingerpaint and added a magnet marble to each one.

We put paper in the bottom of a shoe box and dropped in the magnet(s) of our choice.

By moving the magnet wand on the underside of the box we were able to paint our pictures.


Reading:
Pinky continues to read the Bob books. I've noticed she has some trouble distinguishing the lowercase b, d, p and q. Using an idea I found here at Turning Ordinary into Extraordinary, I made a letter matching game for her to practice matching uppercase and lowercase letters.


And since I had even more plastic eggs, I also made a few word family eggs to play with. The idea came from this post on Living and Learning Now.


Other Reading Activities:
This week we were also lucky enough to host Pete the Pigeon - a friend from Pinky's preschool class. He takes turns visiting each student during the school year.

This was our second visit with Pete the Pigeon. The first time he visited he brought along Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus for us to read. This time he brought Pigeon Finds a Hot Dog. Pinky and Chaos both find the Pigeon stories hilarious.


At the end of Pete's visit, we record what we did with him in the classroom journal and Pinky is able to share her story with her classmates. It is so much fun to read all the stories! This week Pigeon Pete joined Abby at dance class, Spanish class and was even able to attend Sunday School and sing in church! I think he had a good time.


Also this week, Wild One had fun with her first sensory box - The Texture Box. She liked to cuddle the softer fabrics and had a fun game of emptying and refilling the bin over and over again. Finally, Pinky showed her how to use the squares as small blankets for her Little People.


Speaking of Little People, Wild One had the best time playing with the Little People school bus this week. She would open and close all the doors, pull out the stop sign, and push it all around the house. She even let her baby dolls take a few rides.


Sprout continues to grow bigger every day. I am amazed that she is a month old already. We spent a lot of time cuddling this week and spent some time on exploring her playmat (she has just started noticing the toys hanging from it). She surprised us all by rolling over from her belly to her back this week too!

Here's one of my favorite pictures from this week. Sprout was crying so Wild One gave her back her pacifier and was stroking her cheek. So sweet!


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