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Our tornado in a bottle didn’t turn out as well as the ones online did, but we did get it to work. (It didn’t work when we used food dye, oil and water. everything turned red.) LD wanted to “do his own experiment” with the oil and food dye (which he noticed formed bubbles in the oil). He put the oil and dye on a leaf, broke the bubbles...
We have been doing a unit on natural disasters. We have yet to put our lapbook together, but I’ll share some of the activities we did. (Still to come in the next couple of days is the tornado activity.) Update: We have a new Natural Disasters Packet. See you again soon here or Homeschool Den Facebook page. Don’t forget to Subscribe to our Homeschool Den Newsletter! ~Liesl You can find out more about...
The majority of damage from hurricanes comes from heavy winds. We watched a youtube video about hurricanes where the wind blew the roof off of a house. Then we did our own activity. We built a house out of index cards and then tested their strength with level one winds (one straw). Seeing that the house blew down, we reinforced it (with more tape). It then withstood the level one...
Our next activity was to recreate a tsunami. In a flat pan, the kids built up a sandy beach (sand, corn flour) and built little houses. Then they added water and created an earthquake. It didn’t work when the kids hit the table with the bat, but when the table was given a good shake the tsunami hit fill force! We looked...
Last January we made a volcano out of paper mache. This time around we just used sand and corn flour. The mixture actually dried to rock hard (later), but the kids didn’t have the patience to wait a full day. Of course we had to make our “lava” realistic by using not just baking soda and vinegar but also red food dye and dish soap (to add to the foaming...
We talked about mud slides and land slides. Mud slides usually occur after heavy rains, so our butter container (again covered with our sand/corn flour concoction) was watered for a time and the mud slid down the “mountain.” The girls enjoyed playing in the mud for a long time after that while LD kept exploding his volcano again and again!
JULY 2009’s postings are all preschool/toddler related. I’veposted a lot of the homemade (and Montessori) typeactivities I’ve put together for my 3 year and 18 month oldand placed them together in one month for easy access.
About four months ago we started really delving into worldgeography. We started with the seven continents. We got some beautiful (free) 3-part continent cards and havebeen using them in conjunction with this map I had fromteaching days (it’s from world history, the age of explorationand the kids just love the fact that people believed in seamonsters (on the map if you look closely). Anyway, we’ve learned the continent song (to...
The continents cards (both the small and large cards in the post above) are available in our World Animal Packet. We placed world animal cards on each continent. There are three for each continent. LD, DD and I take turns saying, “This is a __buffalo__ it lives in __North America___” and putting it on the correct continent. There is a much more recent post about Animals Around the World with...
We spend a fair bit of time learning about geography. A lotof it is incidental because we have a world map hanging on thewall behind the dining room table. LD likes to test us, “whereis South Africa? Where is Brazil?” But we also have a fewgeography activities that show up in the workboxes everycouple of weeks. Pictured below is DD (age 3) doing a continent push pin map.I printed it...
I don’t like this anywhere near as much as the push pin andfoam that I made (pictured above), but here is the flag andcountry matching activity. It was made with a laminatedmap of Asia taped onto of styrofoam (and placed in the boxso our toddler wouldn’t destroy the styrofoam!) We still pullthis out every few weeks. I think I got the Asia flags (free) from this site:http://www.montessorimaterials.org/geo.htm If you are...
We got a wonderful assortment of mini erasers from OrientalTrading and have been using them for all kinds of math and sorting activities. Below LD did skip counting by 3s (http://filefolderfun.com/FirstGradeMath.html)and grouped three items below each wagon. I asked himhow many items there would be with 4 groups of 3 (12) andso forth. DD did some general counting (pictured below) while ED,the toddler, just put the erasers and numbers into...
DD did a couple of different masks while LD made a knight’shelmet out of paper mache. He came across this project in aScooby Doo magazine and begged to do it. “I’ll even get my handsdirty this time!” he told me. (The first time we did a paper macheproject he didn’t want to get his hands dirty with the flour-glue.) Paper mache recipe: mix 1/2 cup flour and 1/2 cup water. ...
We tried this spider web craft that we came across at http://www.artprojectsforkids.org/2008/01/colorful-spiderweb.html
