hands on learning Archives

How to Science Kids Guide: How You Can Make Water Flow

May 12, 2015 By Deirdre

Yesterday I shared with you a science discovery center that is set up in my backyard. Today I want to share a science kids activity my son and I came up with using funnels. (We have used this set of funnels over and over again. They are a must have for creative learning in my opinion.)

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The funnels were connected with plastic tubing to create a tunnel for the water to flow through. The tubing we used had plastic connectors on the ends. Those connectors helped the tubing stay in the funnels. What type of tubing did we use? We used some unused Rollerflex Food Grade Crystal Clear Vinyl Tubing, 5/16-Inch ID x 7/16-Inch OD, 10-FT that my mom had to use with her oxygen tank. I cut off the section that would have gone in her nose.

A plastic pitcher, plastic storage container, and measuring cups were also used in this science kids activity. These items were used to transfer, pour and catch the water.

Experiment One

We started with the water being poured from up high on our deck into one of the funnels. The tubing was wrapped around the top shelf of the garden table and then down into a plastic container.

We found that the water flowed fastest when the funnel was held up high in the air. Unwrapping the tubing so it had a straight path into the container also helped it move faster. It was not as much fun as getting to watch it zip through the tubing spiraled around the gardening table.

Experiment Two

My son came off the deck and worked with both funnels right at the gardening table. We took turns holding the funnel and dumping water from a measuring cup into the funnel. A second funnel was added to the end of the tubing. The second funnel was placed in the plastic water pitcher. It helped the bottom section of the tubing stay in the pitcher.

We experimented with holding the tubing vertically and horizontally to see if we could get water to flow through the tubes both ways. We also explored what height to hold the first funnel at. How much tubing was pulled through the second funnel and into the pitcher was the final part of this experiment.

Here are some more How to Science Kids Guide activities:

Experimenting with a Balloon Yo-Yo

Windy and Cool Science Experiments with a Printable Pinwheel

Fun Experiments with Pollination

Measuring Forms of Water

Please stop by and see more of our experiments during the week. Information about them will also be share on Facebook and Pinterest.

Awesome Star Wars ABC Games with Free Printables

May 4, 2015 By Deirdre

Both Star Wars and LEGO are popular with kids. I decided created some awesome Star Wars ABC Games that feature light sabers made of LEGO. Pictures were taken of the light saber LEGO creations so that could be used build alphabet letters. You will want to printout these LEGO light sabers to play the games with your children.

The LEGO light saber printout contains a set large light sabers and a set of small light sabers that can be used for building letters. Some letters may need a combination of larger and small light sabers.

Here are some of the ABC Games You Can Play

Call It and Build It

Two players can take turns calling out a letter and building it. You will need to decide at the beginning of the game as to whether you will be building uppercase or lowercase letters. Actually, you could have players build both if you like. It is just a good idea to decide ahead of time what kinds of letters you will be building. The goal of this game is create the correct formation for each letter.

Alphabetical Order

Rather than randomly calling out letters. Players could have to build the letters in alphabetical order. They can alternate as to who is building a letter. If they need to sing the ABC song to remember what letter comes next, that would fine. Singing the alphabet is a great way to work on letters.

Build the Letters in Your Name

Children can work on building uppercase and lowercase letters as they spell their names. They can work on spelling one letter at a time and then clearing the workspace. If they have short name, they can try building their whole name on the workspace.

Build the Next Letter

This is one of those ABC games that needs two players. One player calls out a letter and the other player has to build the next letter in the alphabet. If your children are just learning the letters of the alphabet, you may want to have an alphabet chart out that they can refer to if they need to.

See what other awesome ideas are being featured for Star Wars Day!

Star Wars Tatooine Desert Sensory Bin– Frogs and Snails and Puppy Dog Tails

Star Wars Family Fun for May 4th – Mama Smiles

Star Wars kids’ embroidery: Yoda quote – Hodge Podge Craft

Star Wars R2-D2 Craft for Kids – Mom-Inspired Life

Light Saber Fine Motor Activity – Something 2 Offer

Make Your Own Star Wars Landscape – Planet Smarty Pants

Yoda Puppet Star Wars Craft – Coffee Cups and Crayons

Awesome Star Wars ABC Games with Printable- JDaniel4’s Mom

Free Play Dough Printable Set for Pretend Play – Life Over C’s

Star Wars Children’s Books – Kelly’s Classroom

Make a Toilet Paper Roll Yoda ‎ – Kitchen Counter Chronicles

Crayon Resist Death Star – Fun-A-Day!

Star Wars Moon Dough – In The Playroom

Light Up May the Fourth Be With You Cards – Left Brain Craft Brain

Star Wars Day Perler Bead Pattern R2-D2 Brain Power Boy

Here are some other LEGO-themed learning activities:

Over in the Meadow LEGO Creations and Book

How long will your boat float?

LEGO Fraction Games

Geometry Riddles Solved with LEGO

Valentine Ideas – Graphing with Candy Hearts and LEGO

If you try these ABC games, please leave me a comment below telling me about how your experiments went or share a picture of it on my Facebook page. If you are looking for more early-learning games, you will find a number of them on my Early Learning Pinterest board.

Math is Fun- Valentine’s Day LEGO Graphing

January 24, 2015 By Deirdre

$Math is Fun-Valentine's Day LEGO Graphing -Adding red bars$

LEGO can be used to build all kinds of things like story characters and science tools. We recently used them to work on an activity I am calling Math is Fun- Valentine’s Day LEGO Graphing. My son and I built a graphing base plate using some of the oodles of bricks he has in his room. We were able to use our LEGO graphing base plate to create bar graph and a picture graph that displayed results gathered while counting the candy in a Valentine’s treat box.

$Math is Fun-Valentine's Day LEGO Graphing -Adding red bars$

Hints for creating a LEGO graphing space:

If you don’t have a lot of long white bricks like 2×8’s , you can uses maller bricks

We created wide columns. It made it easy to add the bricks to their column on the graph and to remove them.

We used a 10×10 base plate to create our graph. If you have one larger that would be great, but we found this size base plate worked really well.

$Math is Fun- Valentine's Day Lego Graphing$

The links below are affiliate links.

The candy from the box was sorted by color and placed intocandy brix heart shaped silicone muffin cups . You could just place them in a pile beside the graph if you like. We sorted them so we could then count them. I wanted to make sure we would have enough of each of the colors of candy in bricks.

Before we started graphing we gathered bricks that sort of matched the colors of the candy in the box. The bricks were placed in a Valentine’s Dayheart cupcake tins. My son suggested that we place a colored brick in each of the colors at the bottom of each of the columns so, we would know what column to put each color in. I thought that was a great idea! We could not find enough 4×2 for each color so we combined smaller bricks together to equal a 4×2.)

Starting To Graph

With everything organized we were ready to start our math is fun graphing activity. We started by displaying the bricks for each color to create a bar graph. Each candy color was recounted as we went. You may decide to add a step to this activity. We did not record the number of each color of hearts that we had on a chart before you start.Thus we had to recount the candies.

We found that there were so many green and blue candies that we have to continue bar graph off the edge of the base plate. It actually looked kind of cool!

Math is Fun- Valentine's Day Lego Graphing

Then we created a picture graph using the candy hearts. We talked about how the hearts would need to be stacked the same way in each column to clearly display the data. Actually they really could be displayed anyway your kids want them to be.

$Math is Fun-Valentine's Day LEGO Graphing -Adding red bars$

Once we had finished the display we talked over the answers to the following questions.

Which column has more?
Which column has less?
Which columns could be combined to come up with as many candies as the column with the most?

$Math is Fun-Valentine's Day LEGO Graphing -Adding red bars$

Here are some more math is fun activities:

Printable Math Fact Fortune Teller

Apple Seed Counting

Plastic Jug Flip Chute

Planet Math Fact Bounce

Here are some more LEGO learning activities:

How long will your boat float?

Over in the Meadow LEGO Creations and Book

LEGO Count and Move ( Free Printable)

$Math is Fun-Valentine's Day LEGO Graphing$
If you try this Math is Fun-LEGO Valentine’s Graphing activity, please leave me a comment below telling me about it or share a picture of it on my Facebook page.

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Spelling Games- Skeleton Bones Words

October 13, 2014 By Deirdre

Cotton swabs just look a long skeleton bones so, I decided that they made a perfect Halloween themed building tool for Halloween spelling games. We left some of the cotton swabs full sized. Others were cut in half or just below their fluffy ends. My son and I found that we needed three different lengths of swabs to build the words in our spelling games.

We started by building the words on my son’s spelling list. The spelling list was actually on the table when the words were formed. That way we could review the spelling of his words tacitly. We both said the letters as he formed them to add an auditory element to this the first of our spelling games.

Some of the letters are challenging to build. The letter “e” was probably the hardest for either of us to make. It took several attempts, but we finally found a way to build an “e”. The letter “u” gave us some trouble too.

Children don’t have to get the letters formed perfectly. Our letters definitely weren’t perfect. The goal of this and the other spelling games we played was to spelling the words correctly.

Other Spelling Games

Call and Form

One person can call out a spelling word and the other can form it with skeleton bones. The person forming the words will have to have learned the spelling of each of the words or be able to sound them out.

One Starts and the Other Finishes

After review the words that will need to be spelled one person can select a word. That person can form the first two or three letters of the word they have selected. The second person will need to form the rest of the word. After they have completed the word, it is their turn to pick a word and start it.

Other Words with That Sound

Right now my son’s class is working on short vowel sounds. Each week half the words feature one vowel’s short sound. After reviewing the words on his list that feature that short sound, other words with that same vowel sound were explored. If your children are familiar with word families you could ask them to come up with others words in each words family. Following the brainstorming of words the words can be built using the skeleton bones.

As you can see there are a wide variety of spelling games you can using the skeleton bones. This is just a list of a few to get you stared. If you can think of other spelling games you can play, please tell me about them in a comment below.

Here are Some Other Spelling Games

Spelling Games with Mixed Up Words– Spelling words on written on index cards. The index cards are cut so that one letter appears on each section of the card. Each set of mixed up words is hidden under a cup. One at a time a cup is selected and the letters under the cup are unscrambled.

Spelling Activities: Trace and Write– A spelling spelling words are written on printable worksheet and the worksheet is placed in a photo frame. Children are asked to trace the words in the frame with a washable marker. Then they are to write the word themselves beside the word they traced.

Practicing Spelling Words with a Place Mat- Children can practice writing spelling words with washable paint, washable markers, straw sections or cookie cutters on a fun place mat.

Preschool Activities with Bugs-The Sunday Showcase

August 2, 2014 By Deirdre

As I scrolled through the amazing collection of activities shared last week on The Sunday Showcase, I noticed that many of them had to do with bugs. My son just loves searching for, learning about, and creating bugs. I decided that I just had to share them with you in this round up. If you have a bug lover at your house, I know they are just going to love them.

Preschool Activities with Bugs

40 Awesome Preschool Printables by Powerful Mothering

Grouchy Ladybug Craft from Buggy and Buddy

The Grouchy Ladybug Hand print from A Little Pinch of Perfect

Bug Themed Lunches also from A Little Pinch of Perfect

This week I have been featuring a series of posts that feature preschool activities and kindergarten activities that have to do with turtles. I thought you might enjoy looking them over:

Learning Games for Kids- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle

Science Experiment for Kids- Turtle Balancing

Educational Games- Color Sorting Turtles

Kids Crafts- Potato Print Turtles

The Sunday Showcase is hosted on the following blogs:

Mom to 2 Posh Lil Divas
Here Come the Girls
Inspiration Laboratories

We each feature different posts that have linked up, so be sure to check everyone out! We’ll also be pinning our favorites to our Pinterest board.

If you are here for the first time please read this informational post on Mom to 2 Posh Lil Divas’ site for the full details. Anything kid friendly and/or child centered is welcome! You are welcome to share more than one post, but we don’t accept links for giveaways, shops, or downloads for purchase, etc. They will be deleted.

An InLinkz Link-up

Kids Activities With Sensory Learning

July 12, 2014 By Deirdre

This round up shares kids activities that involve sensory bins that help children build on known concepts and explore learning some new ones too. Each of these posts share bin fillers that many of us may have at home already, are reasonable to purchase or could borrow from a friend.

My son loves to explore and learn through kids activities in sensory bins or his water table. I think you may have children in your life that will love learning in sensory bins too.

The kids activities in sensory bins share below were linked up to The Sunday Showcase last week. If you would like to share a wonderful post you have done this week or in the past, please add it to the link up below. Who knows it may show up in my round up of activities next week here on The Sunday Showcase.

Kids Activities With Sensory Learning

Playing the toys in individual tubs of water gave kids a chance to pretend play and so much more in a post by Life With The Moore Babies.

Adventures of Adam’s tunnel sensory bin started out being a Meerkat Manor and ended up being a bin for cars traveling through tunnels. Both activities sound like fun to me!

If you squirt water out of a spray bottle, rubber ducks will move. Fantastic Fun and Learning’s two girls took turns exploring that concept and learning several more.

Frog, Snail and Puppy Dog Tails‘ tub of balls and bowls explored a number of basic concepts. I love how she had two children working and learning together in this post.

The ocean was the themed of a wonderful tub shared last week by The Chaos and The Clutter.

Rubber Boots and Elf Shoes shared a bin filled with wooden beads, wooden utensils and bowls. This looks like a wonderful bin to explore.

Several sensory bin ideas along with tips for setting up sensory bins was shared in a post from Mama Smiles.

Lalymom sent up a really cool bin with coins and a piggy bank. I love the idea of exploring money in a bin.

Ice cream game with shaving cream and ice is one of my son’s favorite summer kids activities in in his water table.

The Sunday Showcase is hosted on the following blogs:

Mom to 2 Posh Lil Divas
Here Come the Girls
Inspiration Laboratories
JDaniel4′s Mom

We each feature different posts that have linked up, so be sure to check everyone out! We’ll also be pinning our favorites to our Pinterest board.

If you are here for the first time, please read this informational post for the full details. Here’s the short version – anything kid friendly and/or child centered is welcome! You are welcome to share more than one post, but we don’t accept links for giveaways, shops, or downloads for purchase, etc.

If you’re linking up, I encourage you to visit some of the other link-ups! Everyone appreciates comments, encouragement, feedback, etc.

*Please note that by linking up you are giving us permission to use a photo (with proper link to you!) in our featured section!

An InLinkz Link-up

Together Box Review

March 18, 2014 By Deirdre

We all have times in our lives when we want to do activities with our kids, but we don’t have the time to gather all the materials we would need to do them. At my house having to rush out at any moment to meet my mom at the hospital due to a fall or keep things running at home when I come home from work, really hampers time to shop for the bits and pieces I might need for an activity. When I came across Together Box, I knew that I had found a great way to have the materials for fun activities sent right to me.

Everything needed for the activities featured in the each kit comes with the kit. It was truly wonderful to open up the box and know that we were ready to get started. There was no running out to get something or searching for something in a cabinet.

JDaniel and I just took the box to the kitchen table, flipped through the activity choices and selected the one that we wanted to do first. It was totally stress free. It was truly a wonderful opportunity to spend time together and play.

The first activity we selected was the Balloon Ninja Marshmallow Launcher activity. I tried to create a face on my balloons that looked just like the one in the picture on the activity card. JDaniel created his own original design. All the activities on the cards are open to creative tweaks. I just love that.

We hung the ninjas on the fences in our backyard and put a sheet on the ground just below the ninjas. We didn’t want to get the marshmallows dirty. ( You can’t eat marshmallows that have fallen on the ground.) It was such fun to try to hit the balloons. JDaniel found that if you got too close to the balloons that they rebounded off of the balloons and flew behind the sheet. It took several marshmallow launches to find the right distance to pull back the balloon launcher.

The second activity we decided to try was the rock launcher. We set up this activity between the handrails on our front steps by tying a string with a straw on it onto each handrail. Then we attached a balloon to the straw with tape. (Yes, even tape came with the kit.) I think my son liked the noise the balloon gave as it flew across the string as much as watching the balloon fly.

We did our activities outside, but each could have been done inside. That is another wonderful thing about the activities that come in the kit they can be done anywhere.

I think the kit would be great to get for your own family to do just for fun, but I also think it would be fun to send to a family that is going through a challenging time. It sure gave my son and I an opportunity to build a memory during a though time at my house.

Disclaimer: I was compensated for this review and was sent a Together Box sample box. I would buy another box in a heartbeat.

Counting Hands- Math Activity

October 14, 2013 By Deirdre

$Counting Hands- Math Activity$

When you are learning to count on or as we called it when I was little adding, it is helpful to have hands on math tool to work with. Counting hands make a math activity fun and are really fun to make. They also look a little Halloween like which is great for this time of year.

Materials:

plastic gloves
1 bag of mixed beans
rubber bands
Measuring spoon (Tablespoon size)

Directions for Making Counting Hands:

$Counting Hands- Math Activity$

Use a tablespoon sized measuring spoon to scoop the beans into the gloves. You may need someone to hold open the gloves for you so the beans won’t spill all over the table.
Lay the gloves filled with beans on the table and make sure that the gloves will lay flat. You don’t want to overfill them.
Hold the wrist end of the gloves closed and loop a rubber band around it. Don’t wrap the rubber band to tightly just yet.
$Counting Hands- Math Activity$
You will need to test out the fingers to make sure that they will be able to be folded backwards when you are trying to count. You don’t want them to be too floppy or too rigid. When you have them just as you want them, make sure the rubber bands are looped tightly.

Let’s Explore Addition

Now that you have the counting hands made you can work on adding with them. We put our hands on a black work mat and took out some dice with dots. (Dots are easier for children to add with then dice with numbers, but dice with numbers will help children visualize math facts as they will see them in their math books.)

$Counting Hands- Math Activity$

JDaniel is just learning to add at school. We have used math tools with plus and equal signs, but for this activity we didn’t use them. We just rolled the dice. Then we bent down the correct number of fingers and added up the bent fingers on each hand.

Additional Ways to Use the Counting Hands

If you like the idea of a plus sign and equal sign, you could use the hands on a white board or chalkboard. You could just draw them on the black work mat if you wanted to with white crayon or chalk. Adding the symbols will help kids see this math activity as more like a real math equations.
These hands could easily be used for working on subtracting or the nines table in multiplication.
You could place plastic rings on the odd or even number fingers of the hands.
Another math activity you can do with the counting hands is count by twos. Children can easily push the fingers together into pairs and count by twos.

If you like this math activity, here are some more you might like:

Roll and Cover Ocean Animal Mats

Free Printable Interactive Math Mats

Measuring Chalk Drawings

What other math activities can you think of to do with the counting hands?

Disclaimer: We used gloves that are rather thin. You may want to put one pair of gloves into another to make them thicker. It will make the beans harder to see, but may keep the beans in the gloves.