Here’s a quick sensory table idea for your unit on plants, seeds, flowers, or gardens. Fill your sensory bin with soil – either right out of the bag, or right out of the ground. Add some pansy pony packs, hand tools, magnifiers, a few small containers with water, gloves, and even worms if you’re feeling extra organic! Let the children plant the flowers in the bin, examining the roots as they go. If they want to pull the flowers apart, examining their parts, that’s OK too!
Grow Something Together
When doing a study of seeds, plants, flowers, and gardens with children, the obvious, absolutely best activity is actually growing something from a seed! The transformation is magical and empowering to those little ones, and the applied activity really reinforces all they’ve learned about the needs of plants, and how they grow. Here are a few of my favorite planting activities!
The Empty Pot Seed Experiment
I just wanted to share some photos from the experiment we did after reading The Empty Pot (details on the experiment here). I used pea seeds since they’re nice and large…..and because I already had them on hand, seeing as how I’m way behind on actually getting them in the ground. Here’s the difference between the two samples after about a week’s time.
Seed Finger-Paint
When exploring seeds, plants, and gardens, it’s great to mix in some seeds with this classic finger-paint recipe. Here, I used culinary seeds, since I had them on hand. I used fennel seed in the green, sesame seed in the yellow, and poppy seed in the blue. (As a side note, it’s fun to use two primary colors and the secondary color they create as a trio of paints for an activity. The mixing and blending is exciting!)
Playing in the Gutters
Anyone who knows me well, knows I am no stranger to Home Depot. Having married a man with a penchant for home remodeling, I have learned to navigate the aisles well, in search of the right size of screws, the critically needed electrical wire, or the aesthetically pleasing cabinet pull. Almost without fail, I see something at “the Depot” that appeals to the preschool teacher in me (or maybe it’s the preschooler in me).
Exploring Magnets
I apologize for disappearing for a bit. I was being held hostage by a computer virus and spent the better part of the last couple of days trying to put down its hostile take-over. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why people make a hobby out of creating something to waste other people’s time. If you want to waste your own time, by all means go for it, but why waste some stranger’s? Is that entertaining to some people? Though I have to confess, if, in the midst of my virus-inflicted frustration, I had actually followed through with my fantasy of throwing my computer through the window, someone might have found that entertaining. But alas, the computer is still here on my desk, and the mutiny has been laid to rest. So, on to the better things in life…..like magnets!
Five Favorites….To Start
OK, for those of you looking for more Dr. Seuss activities, here are five favorites to start off with! More to come!
(Does anyone else ever feel like they’re juggling this many things?)
3-2-1-0 Day – Time to Blast Off!
It occurred to me this morning, that not only is this Dr. Seuss’ 106th birthday (in honor of which I will be posting more activities soon), but it is also 3-2-1-0 Day! I thought that to celebrate a day made for countdowns, you may want to try Film Canister Rockets or Steve Spangler’s Mentos Geysers. I don’t need much encouragement to do “blast-off” projects – it may be my favorite type of science activity- but a day that comes around once every century or so, seems like an exceptionally good reason!
A Brainstorm of Snowstorm Painting Projects
There are so many fun ways to paint a snowstorm, I couldn’t settle on just one! So instead, you get my rambling brainstorm of the many ways to paint a snowstorm! With each method, I like to start them out with a background picture, the scene behind the storm. I may have them color something with crayons or provide geometric shapes cut out of construction paper for them to glue on to create houses (square+triangle), trees (triangles), or even snowmen (circles). You could also cut out scenery pictures from travel magazines. Of course, you can also just paint the snow, particularly with younger children. For many children, the fun is just in controlling the storm, so the background doesn’t really matter much. Just be sure to use colored construction paper for each of these methods, so that the snow will show up! Darker colors like blue, gray, and black show the snow even more dramatically!
Amber’s Fresh Snow Ice Cream
On my first giveaway post, I asked readers to comment with their favorite snowy day activities. Amber posted these instructions for Snow Ice Cream:
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