Transportation Sensory Bin

We borrowed The Scrubbly-Bubbly Car Wash by Irene O'Garden from the library. It's such a cute book with great illustrations. I made a car wash sensory bin that evolved a little and kept M very intrigued.

We started with an aluminum tub outfitted with a curtain of "fabric" (foam strips). I added clear water beads and shaving cream, and gave M some scoops, small cups, scrubbers, and a bunch of toy cars. She and her friends had an amazing time with this bin! M isn't really a messy kid, and it doesn't occur to her to splash the materials out of the tub, but I know this is not typical of toddlers. We had three friends over for a playdate, and this was a big hit. It was pretty messy, but the cleanup wasn't bad. Next time, I will either do this outside or put a tarp under the table.

The next day, I decided to switch out the shaving cream for some flubber. This was really interesting, because the flubber could be used to make tire tracks as the different cars drove over it. It was also fun to press the different scrubber brushes into the flubber to make impressions. M also realized that she could "hide" the water beads in the flubber to make little bumps for the cars to ride over. This was a lot less messy than the shaving cream!

 

The bin made one final appearance filled with water beads and water. This was a "keep M busy while I finish packing" activity, so my lack of attention made this the messiest by far (although M liked helping to clean up the water off the floor and table when she was done). I started with regular water, which made the clear water beads "disappear." M liked scooping the water and "invisible" water beads and dumping them over the cars. I gave her a small colander so she could pour the water and bead in to separate out the water beads.

Some of the water beads had a blue tint from being in the flubber, so I later added some blue food coloring to the water to see how that would look. The bluish beads disappeared, and the clear beads looked really cool in the blue water.

 

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Check out the rest of our Transportation Week activities!

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Princess Week: Princesses Paint on Trees?

Friday was our day out, and we had so much fun! We started with a parenting group meetup at Creating Artists for Tomorrow, which was amazing! If you live in the Greenville, SC area and haven't been there, you're really missing out! Then we spent a couple of hours at the library before finally heading home.

Table Time

Creating Artists for Tomorrow is an art education program near our house that offers lots of art classes for different ages and levels. We had never been there before, so I wasn't really sure what to expect. They offer a program called Table Time for children to explore with 4-5 different art activities. M was a little overwhelmed at first because there was so much to choose from, but once she got started she had an amazing time!

Here are some of the activities they had set up:

Painting with Cars

There was a bin filled with different types of toy cars and trucks. They had different sizes and numbers of wheels, and some had different textured treads on the tires. M spent a good amount of time experimenting with the different cars to see what kind of tracks they would make. She also liked mixing the blue and white paint.






Water Table

M probably spent most pf her time inside at the water table. There were just three small cups and a paintbrush, but for some reason she found this fascinating. She spent a long time pouring the water from cup to cup, and trying to trap the water between two cups. Whatever works, right?

Play-doh

We have play-doh out at our house a lot, but this was different because of the cool textured rolling pins, and the fact that they had uncolored play-doh and food coloring to mix your own colors. The rolling pins were the perfect size (I need to get some of these!).

Painting Outside
This was clearly the highlight of the day - painting trees! We went outside to find paint cups, paintbrushes, and jugs of paint. M started with red, and asked if she could paint one of the trees. Sure, why not? Everything in the yard was painted - the house, the trees and bushes, the grass, the steps. It was a child's dream, nothing was off-limits! M was so excited, and it was really cool experience for her to paint on something other than paper. I'd like to try something like this at home (not painting our trees or house... but some kind of nature painting - bark, leaves, sticks.)

 

Other activities not pictured: finger painting with shaving cream and food coloring (M isn't huge on getting her hands messy, so she didn't do this long enough for me to get a picture), painting with golf balls (this looked so cool - dip golf balls in paint and roll them around on paper to make designs - but I couldn't get M interested), and easel painting (we have an easel at home, so M wasn't interested - too many other new things).

We will definitely be back!

Library

I love our library. So does M. I literally have to drag her out when it's time to go! We're planning a Transportation Theme week for next week, so we picked out a bunch of books about cars, trucks, planes, trains and boats. I have a feeling this theme may last for more than one week...

Our library has a children's room with toys, books and puppets in the back of the children's area. They regularly move things around and rotate some of the toys, so I was excited to see a couple of new things on this visit. As soon as we walked in M noticed the Goldilocks and the Three Bears puppets that were stuck on the wall. I never noticed that the wall on one side of the room was actually like a giant felt board! The puppets had velcro on the back so they would stick to the wall - so cool!

I told the story of Goldilocks, and M moved the puppets around as we went (tasting the porridge, sitting in the chairs, laying on the beds).

They also had some different puzzles out on the tables. We have a bunch of nice puzzles at home that M is never interested in, but she loves all of the puzzles at the library. Weird.

She was pretty tired from all of the excitement of the day, and fell asleep in the car.

We wrapped up the day with a pink pig collage to finish P is for Princess week.

Check out all of the other princess activities we did this week: P is for Princess.

Water Week - Update #5

Friday

Today was another low key day. We were getting ready for vacation, cleaning the house, doing laundry, and starting to pack. There was just one more activity I really wanted to try.

Water Xylophone

M has an app on my phone with a xylophone (she calls "duck piano," but the app is actually called "Kids Piano Lite"), so I thought she'd really enjoy a water xylophone to play with. We added a little extra to the activity by making number and alphabet shaped ice cubes with food coloring the night before. I got the silicone trays on clearance at Hobby Lobby a few months ago. We made all 4 trays, one blue, one red, one yellow, and one green.

After lining up 6 glasses, we started dropping the ice cubes into the glasses in rainbow order. As we took the letter ice cubes out of the trays we named the letter and made the letter sounds. 

 

We didn't have orange or purple ice cubes, so we talked about how we could mix colors to make those.

  

Now the hard part- wait for the ice cubes to melt. You could very easily add some warm water to each cup (or do this outside on a hot day), but we decided to let them sit and come back later. It was cool to see how much M is leaning- I told her we needed to wait for the ice to melt, and she said "so it will turn into water?"

When we came back later, we added more water to the glasses so the red glass had the least and the purple glass was full.

 I gave her a striker from her marching band set (a spoon would work just as well), and let her explore the different sounds. We talked about the difference between high notes and low notes and how they can be combined to make songs. I explained why the glasses made different sounds. (Adding more water increases the mass, which lowers the frequency of the sound wave, and we hear a lower note.)

M had a lot of fun with this, and I'm sure we'll do it again when she's older and can learn more about sound waves, pitch, frequency and amplitude. You can find more activities here --> Math, Science and Sound Activities

Water Fun with Friends

After lunch we went to a friend's house (who happened to be playing along with our water theme for the week!). They set up several tubs of water with toys to explore. There were 6 kids total, including some little crawlers and some older toddlers. There was something for everyone- boats, water guns, water beads, stones, magic capsules that dissolve and release foam animals...

I will definitely buy some of those water beads to use again. The clear beads disappear when you drop them in water, and you can feel around in the water to find them. They come in different colors too, which could be fun for sensory bins.

Overall, I'd call Water Week a big success! Next up- Vacation!

Water Week - Update #3

Wednesday

$1 Summer Movies

Regal movie theaters run the Summer Movie Express, which shows $1 kids movies on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings for 9 weeks during the summer. You can find more details here. Today's movie was Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked, which was very fitting for our water theme! The movie was adorable, and M loved it. She asked if she could get up and dance several times during the movie, and finally had a "dance party" during the credits. She is hysterical!

Water Experiments

 After the movie, we spent some time doing a few kitchen science activities. First, we explored oil and water. Yesterday we read in one of our library books about how ducks have a coating of oil on their feathers that keeps their feathers dry when they swim. We tested this out by mixing oil and water. We added some food coloring, and talked about why the food coloring didn't mix with the oil (because it is water based), but "exploded" and diffused throughout the water when it got through the layer of oil.

I put M in charge of pouring and adding the food coloring, so we ended up with a VERY dark blue. We dumped out half of the mixture, poured it into a bowl, and expanded the activity to talk about color mixing. M added a few drops of yellow food coloring to turn the water green! This gave us another opportunity to talk about how the food coloring mixed with the water to change its color, but didn't mix with the oil. This was  big hit.

 Next, we washed out the measuring cup and made some new green water. M poured the water into a small mason jar. We added a paper towel "bridge" from the jar with water to another empty jar. We talked about capillary action (she thought that was a pretty funny word) and guessed how long it would take for the water to "climb" up the paper towel.

NOTE: This took quite a bit longer than we guessed. Here's what it looked like after 20 minutes:

After 30 minutes:

 We checked it again at bedtime (about 9 hours later), and the water had started pooling in the second jar. I was impressed. M, not so much. Maybe we'll try it again when she's a little older.

After setting up the capillary action experiment, we moved on to talk about states of matter. We talked about the properties of solids, liquids and gases. M is only 2, so the conversation was very basic.

Solids are hard and have a definite shape (we can make ice cubes in different shapes, and when we take them out of the ice cube tray they keep that shape). Water turns into a solid when it is very cold, like when we put it in the freezer.

Liquids flow and take the shape of the container they are in. We can pour water because it is a liquid. We poured it from a jar into a measuring cup and then into a bowl, and each time the water changed shape to fill the container. When ice heats up, it melts and becomes a liquid.

Gases have no shape; they will expand to fill any container. When they aren't in a container they will rise into the air, like the steam that rises out of a pot when we are cooking. Water turns into a gas when it is heated, and we call it steam. When steam cools, it condenses and turns back into a liquid.

We heated up water in a kettle, poured it into a jar, and added food coloring. We observed how quickly the food coloring diffused throughout the water (molecules have more energy and are moving faster). We watched the steam rise, and put a bowl of ice on top of the jar to speed up the condensation. The idea was to make it "rain," but the neck of the jar wasn't wide enough, so the water just dripped down the sides of the jar. It was a little disappointing.

Our last experiment of the day was supposed to simulate how rain falls from a cloud. I found the idea here, and it looked really cute, but didn't work the way I expected it to. We made a shaving cream "cloud" on top of a glass of water. M added food coloring until it "rained" down into the cup. She was very interested in the shaving cream (we later took an entire bowl of shaving cream out to the baby pool to play and explore), but didn't really get the rain part. I'm wondering if this would work better with cotton balls somehow... maybe we'll revisit this when we get into weather.

Chalk Paint Round 2

Yesterday's attempt at chalk paint was a bit of a disaster, but I thought it was such a good idea that I wasn't willing to give up. This time I mixed the cornstarch, food coloring and water myself (while M was busy playing with a bowl of shaving cream in the pool). I added more water this time and got out the foam brushes. This was SO much better! I found that the more watery the solution was, the easier it was to paint with. The foam brushes definitely slid across the pavement much better than the regular paintbrushes too. We got out our foam hopscotch set and used the pieces as stencils to paint numbers all over the driveway. I also painted the alphabet across the driveway, and we stepped on each letter as we sang the ABC's. The only issue we had was that the watery paint was very easy to spill (see the big splash under the letter I). I'm wondering if small cans might work better, like recycled pineapple or tuna cans (and as a bonus, they would look like mini paint cans).