St. Patrick's Day Part 2 2012

Here are a few of the fun activities we did to go along with our St. Patrick's Day theme.

 I filled four green plastic eggs with these cool submersible LED lights. (Michaels for $7). 

 I turned off the lights and tossed them in the tub with the three amigos. :) They had so much fun!

 These egg-filled lights kept them busy for over an hour! They soon learned they could open the eggs and play with the lights, but they were so bright, I couldn't get a picture!

:Sensory:
 Rainbow Rice Texture tub. Contents- rice as a base. Gold coins, green eggs filled with LED lights, a rainbow wood piece, green shamrocks, and some scoops. I kept it simple at first, and we ended up making a boat for Kenna's Peg Einsteins to float around in.

 (cardboard boat with peg people is in Kenna's hand.) Quinn LOVED the texture of the rice.

 She's almost 9 months. She loved watching the rice run through her fingers. She loved squishing it around in the bin. She was completely enamored by this bin!  She also loved the glowing eggs.  She carried one around with her all morning!

 :Color Mixing:
The setup- coffee filters, eye droppers, and four colors of food coloring. I used about 5 drops of color, and then filled the rest of the way with water. This made a nice, watery color that ran beautifully on the cofee filter.

I also provided a misting bottle, which Kenna enjoyed immensely, to the point of soaking her filters into oblivion. Happiness is a squirty bottle!

 This was a different technique we tried- turn the filter over and let the color run down. It would have been pretty, but by this point, Kenna had mixed our colors to a murky brown. :)

 My attempt at a rainbow.

 Drying. We are a paperless household, so I used a dishrag to dry the filters- needless to say, some bleach will be in order if you do this to your towels.

 My rainbow shamrock!

They came out so pretty!! We are going to hang them in the window for the sunlight to stream through.

 :Cooking:
For our Social Studies connection, we have been studying Ireland. Kenna can now find Ireland on the map, identifies it as an island, and knows the colors of the flag! We baked some sugar cookies and used some almond glaze (Grammie's secret recipes) to decorate the flags.

 They really came out great, and tasty too! We also tried to make some freehand cookies in the shape of Ireland, but I'll spare you the gory result. :)

Lastly, we made some GREEN popcorn! (don't adjust your screen... I can't find the pic of our green popcorn, so I'll reshare our pic of pink popcorn from Valentine's day. LOL)

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

P is for Penguin

(Kenna is 35 months old.)Antarctica is an interesting part of the world, and since we aren't seeing much snow here in our neck of the woods, I thought it would be a good first continent to learn about in Geography. I pulled out our Penguin Toob and we got to work with some fun penguin and snow themed-trays.

 Of course, we started with an iceberg. And since Dora is our favorite little friend, we became Diego and tried to rescue Baby Penguin. (Notice the glass of ice water, with a straw? I think all that talk about ice and water made her thirsty...)

 We used salt water in a squirt bottle. We talked a lot about why salt makes ice melt, and all about how water freezes into ice. She was rivoted.

 And Kosher salt to sprinkle around. It ate through the ice beautifully.

 Finally, Diego spotted the poor baby penguin's feet. He was in desperate need of rescue.

 Tada! Rescued! We did it! We did it!

P is for peanuts, the perfect snack for after rescuing a penguin.

Here are our trays for the week.

 

:Counting:
Use snowflake stampers to count to ten. Stamp one snowflake next to the number 1, stamp two next to the number 2.  Talk about snowy/icy Antarctica.

:Pattern Blocks:
I love this cute pattern block penguin mat. It's black and white, which should be harder compared to last week, where the pattern mat was color-coded.
From Prekinders.

 :Playdoh:
White playdoh snow for our penguins to play in and make tracks in. We love our homemade playdoh.

 :Penguin Identification:
Five species of penguins, to talk about differences in each penguin species. These little cards are great- they are meant to be strung up in a mobile, but they are really detailed illustrations and have the species name labeled. Printable at Scholastic.

 :Continent Map:
I got this great idea from AdventuresofBear. Turn a world map into a puzzle of the seven continents. Ours is backed with magnets and stored on a cookie sheet. Kenna and I have been placing and naming all of the continents, but this week we will examine the map and find Antarctica.

 :Thermometer Clipping:
Use these great little cards from Making Learning Fun to learn how to read a thermometer. Kenna practices with the thermometer every day during calendar time, so she will likely understand this quickly. Also, these cards practice reading "tens" numbers.

 :Matching:

Snowflake patterns to put back together. The snowflakes are all black and white, so Kenna will have to acutally match the pattern on the cards. I did simplify it a little by splitting the cards into two compartments, lefts and rights. Got these here.

:Penguin Cards:

I was going to attempt to turn these amazing cards into three-part cards, but I decided that Kenna is going to love looking at the pictures, and be done. I may still create an extra set of labels for her to match up, but with words like "Galapogos" and "Emperor", I'm not sure it matters if she can ID them or not.  The cards are from Lapbooks.com.