Seattle Sea Shells

Ahh Seattle, it's so fun to be on the coast.

We headed to a little lagoon on the island to do some exploring.

We found some big crab shells,

and small sand crabs.

H. would look, but was afraid to touch.

After collecting all of our sea shells, we took them home and popped them in the oven,

and colored them with crayons.

We turned the oven on to 350 degrees and left them in there

 for 7-10 minutes.

I let her use a glove because they were a little hot.

The most fun was to turn the sea shell over onto the smooth side,

because it melted so much better.

You can do this same process with stones as well

{but you prob already knew that :)}

Afterward we learned more about the letter Ss by using the pages here, here, and here.

Happy Summer!

Exploring Seattle Part One

Okay, I have an announcement....

I'm pregnant with baby number #3!

Aka why I haven't posted for a while.

But now that I'm {mostly} over morning sickness,

I'm ready to get back to work!

We had the chance of a lifetime to take a vacation to Vashon Island, WA.

Which is an island in between Seattle and Tacoma.

Our friends live on a six acres oasis.

One morning while the boys were working out,

we decided to go exploring.

I gave the kids their own baggie with their name on it,

and they could pick anything to put in their bag.

It was such a gorgeous day, I ran and grabbed my camera.

They had a ball picking beautiful things,

and claiming them as their own.

It was a fun activity that used many senses.

We headed back inside,

and they were all thrilled with what they found.

This picture feels like such a time piece.

I can almost imagine all of them in the same pose in 5 years.

We went inside and made some flower art.

Then they exercised, just like their daddy's did.

Just look at H.'s face, he wants one too!

Weather Unit: It's Raining, It's Pouring

We had a great time making it rain today!

We made clouds out of shaving cream, and added blue water to the clouds, when they would get too heavy the blue water would rain into the clear water below. Thanks, Teach Preschool for this idea!

We read the book, Once There Was a Raindrop

By Judith Anderson and Make Gordon
This book went perfectly with our activity.
It talks about the water cycle and shows it in action.

Then we made it rain on paper towels.
This was fun,
and great for their fine motor skills.
You can think of this as cross training for writing muscles.

For Baby H. I filled up a bottle with the food coloring water mixture.

He had a blast along with the girls,
and he didn't even attempt to drink out of the bottle. :)

They were having so much fun,
that I thought,
"Hey let's work on letter recognition."
So we worked on the letter Rr for Rain.

All I did was to write a letter R in permanent marker.
You could write it in washable marker, and it would make a fun smearing letter. I wanted to keep the letter visible, so I went w/ permanent. 

Then I wrote the word Rain all over the paper towel,
and they found the letter R.

Then, for the extra fun stuff.  I let them play in shaving cream,

as long as they kept it in the pie tin.

This part, made her really connect to clouds.

For the rest of the day she was looking up at the clouds,

and comparing them with shaving cream.

Then I gave them each a bottle,

and they squirted it on their cloud,

and sang about rain together the whole time!

It turned their fingers a little blue,

but it washed off by dinner time.

After we finished with the fun messy things,

we went into the bathroom and turned on the shower and watched the whole room steam up. This made the whole idea click with Miss Sweetie.  She could see how hot water turned into vapor,

and when we opened the door we could see the vapor rush out to join the clouds in the sky.

Here are some former posts that we did about the water cycle and states of matter:

Little Cloud

Where we made clouds out of shaving cream,

for the backgroud of our butterfly pictures.

Air, Water, and Ice

Where we filled beach balls with air, water, and ice.

Making Ice Cream

Where we saw how liquid changed to solid.

Ice Water Balloons

Where we froze water balloons, and had fun tossing them around.

Weather Unit: Salt Crystal Snowflakes

For our Weather Unit we learned about snow!

We read the book The Snowflake, A Water Cycle Story

By Neil Waldman

Then we whipped up some salt crystal snowflakes,

Using 1/3 c. Borax and 2 c. boiling water.

Thanks, Delia Creates, for the easy DIY instructions!

We let it sit overnight,

And magically, salt crystals have formed!

 

We talked about how salt crystals are kind of like ice crystals that form when the water freezes in the clouds.

Then we wanted to play with spray snow,

We placed our snow flakes down to spay them with spray snow.

And when we took them away,

A snowflake is left on the paper!

Then M. drew a girl snowman in the snow.

It was so fun to play in,

but I'm not sure how safe it is,

So I watched her the whole time,

and we washed her hands really well afterwards.

She even shoveled the snow like Daddy does!

Here are our older posts we have done about ice & snow:

Ice Boats

Ice Water Balloons

Indoor Igloo

Painting the Snow

Have a Snowball Fight Without Snow!

 

Weather Unit: Melted Crayon Rainbows

This is day one of our Weather Unit.

March is the BEST time to study weather because the weather is so versatile in March.

Ever since I saw these hearts I knew I wanted to make my own wax paper/melted crayon project.

We read the darling book, What Will the Weather Be Like Today?

By Paul Rogers.

This book is a MUST for weather units,

the pictures are great and each page is filled with cute rhymes.

We were lucky enough to inherit this book from my mother-in-law who is an AMAZING Kindergarten teacher. 
Right now this book is listed on Amazon for $85, so if I were you I would check it out from the library, or try to snag it at a Thrift Store or library book sale.

The book ends in a beautiful rainbow with the rhyme,
"And sometimes the rain and the sun come out to play,
and make a beautiful rainbow in the sky that day."

We talked about rainbows and then we practiced the sequence of rainbows, which was a new concept for M.

Then we got out our less used cheese grater and grated some crayons in rainbow order.

Then I used our iron placed old rags on top and on bottom to iron the crayon and wax paper together.
(If you do this use old rags, because the rags get stained and waxy.)

Here's what they looked like!
We did not iron them on the ground. :)

Then I cut them out into arches and let M. practice rainbow sequence again.

Then I taped them onto a string and hung it in our window.

I'm hoping our cheese grater will make a full recovery...
But if not it looks kinda pretty like this.

Here are some old posts about

Rainbows from our weather unit last year:

Taste the Rainbow

  

Let's Build A Rainbow

 

And Edible Finger Paint

Sense of Hearing

Did you ever think we were going to do the Sense of Hearing?

I wondered myself...

But today I bit the bullet and did our Sense of Hearing activity.

(I think my problem was that I am very very visual,

and for all of the other senses we did things that were strongly represented visually, aka the cute scented play dough.)

We decided to make sound shakers,

we went around the house gathering things that could make noise,

that was fun in and of itself!

Here are some of the materials we found:

We used cleaned out yogurt cups and added our ingredients.

M. is adding the sand, and not making a mess...

It's a happy mess though.

Then we covered them with duct tape,

and shook them.

M. tried to guess what what inside.

When she guessed I would label it.

She sure took this seriously,

and got stumped on a few.

What could it be??

Then the big reveal!

She got most of them right.

Fun, easy simple activity, and great for learning.

Just what I like.

Easy and smart.

I found a new website!

Cookie.com

It has a little animated video about the 5 senses,

and then it has some review games you can play as well. I added this to my Educational Website list and did a full review of this great resource there.

Here are some of my other posts that help explore

the Sense of Hearing:

Five Little Ducks

Where we made puppets and sang the song Five Little Ducks.

Duck Park Field Trip

Where we could feed the ducks and hear them quacking.

Popcorn Popping

Where we listened the the popcorn popping,

and we sang the song that goes with it.

Here are all of my posts on the Five Senses:

Sight:

Smell:

Hearing:

Touch:

Taste: