Big Energy-Little Learners...Can I do it all?

Jerry stayed home yesterday so some of our activities were put on hold for later days. When he is home we try and soak up all the time we can. I set up some stations the kids could visit through out the day if they were bored.    I set out magnets with some laminated papers they cold match the magnets and fill in the missing number or letter.  Next to it I had a box full of big cardboard cut out shapes.  I supplied play dough and encouraged the kids to make the shape they pulled out with the play dough.   She picked out a square. Then she pressed the dough onto the square turned it around and peeled the excess off.  TA DA a square!   To her right you can see the small circle she made for the circle she pulled out of the box.  Earlier in the day while Jerry was still sleeping an idea hit me!  I had the two tp rolls left over from 'feeding the elephant' game and when I looked at them I saw binoculars. Now was th...

Finally finding time to sit down and blog. I do have to say I am happy to be sitting down to write. I got home from my short wedding vacation and over the stomach flu so today is the day! Last week Monday: Stations:  Spring discovery station: We went for a walk on Sunday and the few things we collected along with the brochure I picked up were set out on a table with a magnifying glass to have a closer look.  Storyboard: No real theme for this one.  I let the kids pick out what they wanted to play with and they enjoyed playing pretend with all sorts of different things.  Once stations were set up I gave out stickers for good behavior the previous school day.  I tend to be too busy at the end of the day to remember or find time for rewards and have found that taking care of this in the morning works for me. This particular morning the kids chose tattoos for their reward.   Iron Man and Pinky Pie The first ...

Thursday's are our family time.  Jerry is off work and both kids are home. I decided tonight would be the perfect night to construct an egg drop experiment. I have been waiting to do this activity since I checked out egg drop   from the library. Egg Drop First I had to introduce the idea of the egg drop to the kids, what better way to do that then a book?  I found a great story for the egg drop experiment, egg drop.  Jerry was home for the whole activity and read the book to the kids.  The kids were introduced to some new words like 'aerodynamics' and 'Bernoulli's principle'. When the story was over we asked the kids what they thought would happen if we dropped an egg from a tower.  Answer: it would crack.  Question: What could we do so it wouldn't crack? Answer: put something soft under it. Great! They were getting the idea.  The questions continued and we brainstormed letting the kids think of how/what we could do to...

Kids day is on Wednesday, usually, but this Wednesday Athena was not home.  I still wanted to have kids day and did a project I knew Spencer would really enjoy.  Painting With Cars!  Spencer picked his colors and lined up his cars.  He didn't know what to do with the first one, just kept looking at me so I drove the first one down the paper.  Of course he caught on quick!  Although he did not want to pick a few cars to paint with, he wanted to use all of them and line them up at the bottom of the paper.  He ran out of room to paint so I added another paper.   He moved every car (almost) onto the other paper!  With no more room he found the best way to keep painting was to roll the cars in the paint.  The art work under the play!  Now that the cars were all covered in paint they needed a bath.  I was going to set up a sensory sink for Spence to clean his cars but decided on the bath be...