Water activities

L has been enjoying doing water activities outdoors. 

First I set her up with a sponge and two bowls.  She soaked up the water from the left hand bowl and squeezed it into the right hand bowl until she was done.  She looked at me like "too easy Mom!" so I then gave her this sieve and we put some twigs and flowers into the bowl for her to remove. 

Once she'd done that a few times we moved on to making bubbles with an old hand held beater.

Oh the concentration!!

The best water activity of all was helping to wash the dog! Granny also got very wet in the process!

The next day L asked for more water activities so she started with dropping single drops of water into her plastic fish.

I then colored these dots on a folded paper towel.  Some of them have two colors together so they blend to make a new color when wet.  She really enjoyed this and when she was finished I gave her a blank paper towel and a red, yellow, and blue marker to experiment with.

Color Blending

We've been talking about color blending lately and doing lots of fun activities.

The first one was the along the same idea as the butterflies using coffee filters but this time L just used two primary colors on each. (This works best if you use one color on top of the other)

Then she sprayed them and voila a new color. 

I saw this next idea on The Wonder Years ages ago.  We put a few drops of food coloring into three glasses for each primary color.  We then put one in front of the other and presto a new color appears.  This color blending stuff is just like magic!

After we were finished with the water we poured each color into two small containers and froze them.  The next day we put them together into some glass bowls with a bit of warm water and L stirred them up.  Once again the magic happened and this time it was so obvious.  You could see the two different primary colored ice cubes plus the new secondary color in the water.  Super cool and fun.  Once the ice cubes were melted L poured the water into one bowl and found it made black.

As well as using water colors to practice blending I cut out these tissue paper circles.  They are so beautiful in the sun and such an obvious example of what happens when two primary colors are put together!

Montessori Monday

I am so happy to finally have my laptop back! Oh yes and my husband ; ) he's finally finished his training. So now I can post whenever I get the urge.
For Easter we got L an African safari book that has puzzle like pieces you can put in and out and also stand them up to put in an African plains scene. I decided to get L to pair them up with these African animal cards I found at a boot fair ages ago. L really enjoyed this but it was very easy for her. After she paired them up we sorted them into meat eaters and non-meat eaters.

We haven't done anything with color tablets for ages so when I found these old paint samples I'd brought from England I thought I'd see how she did with color grading. Amazingly this was really very easy for her and she did three different color grades in a few seconds. I used the uncut paint sample for a control card that she would turn over to check her work.

I also got these plastic shapes ages ago for sorting. They are supposed to be used to link together to make jewelry. L can now do this so we've been having fun making all sorts of things. I also took it as an opportunity to introduce patterns. I think L sort of gets it but she wasn't in the best frame of mind for it. I think next time I will take the rest of the basket away and just use a few pre-selected ones to make the patterns.

I saw this brilliant idea for counting on The Wonder Years and thought I would change it up a bit using our ladybugs and not putting dots on. Just in case it's not clear in the picture the numbers are written on the top of the stick and L has to pick one from the glass. She then places the correct number of ladybugs on the stick. She liked this one a lot and has brought it out several times.

Making a rainbow and treasure bottle

The last few days have been really fun because we've had G.A.S. (aka Great Auntie S) staying with us. We did lots of projects and even went to a castle!
A few days ago I was perusing some blogs and found this fantastic idea on Unplug Your Kids.
Coloring rice!!! Love it, love it, love it! It was so easy and all three generations had a great time making it. I won't write out the instructions as I've posted a link if any one wants to try this.

We decided to make a rainbow. First we put the food coloring in and shook up the bags. I put tape across the tops just in case. It was also really cool to do the secondary colors and see how the two colors blended to make a new one.

Once we had all the colors for our rainbow L layered them according to one of our favorite songs I Can Sing a Rainbow.

Here she is singing and pointing out the colors. (anyone who is really observant will notice we got two of the colors mixed up!)

We also made the "treasure bottle" from Unplug Your Kids. I took a picture of all of the objects so L can see what she has to find. I have to say this was a really fun project for me as well and I can imagine I will be trying to find all of the objects after L has gone to bed! : )