straws Archives - JDaniel4s Mom

Flying Reindeer STEM Activity

November 21, 2017 By Deirdre

Earlier this year I shared with you a straw rocket frog leaping activity and one featuring fireworks. Since Santa and his flying reindeer are fun to read about and see in movies in time of year, I thought your children would like to explore flying reindeer. This fun flying reindeer activity invites children to find the best way to get a reindeer to fly a distance.

Flying Reindeer Activity

Getting Ready

Getting the Printables

Flying Reindeer STEM Activity- Recording Printable

The first thing you are going to need to do is to download a copy of the Flying Reindeer STEM Activity. It includes a recording printable for your children to place the distance each of their attempts went and a set of reindeer cutouts. You will find a set of colored reindeer and a set of reindeer your children can color.

Gathering Supplies

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You will also need the following supplies for this activity:

Paper Straws- Red/White
Plastic Transfer Pipettes
Glue sticks
Scissors
Measuring Tape

Putting Together the Straw Rockets

First, we cut a piece off dome piece of the pipette. It will be about 2 1/2 inches long. You won’t need the tube part of the pipette that sucks in water.
Next, we taped the reindeer to the pipette dome. Its antlers should be facing the dome and its feet should be facing the open end of the pipette dome.
Finally, we placed the reindeer pipette section on the end of a full-size straw and blow on the open end of the straw.

Conducting the Flying Reindeer Activity

You or your children will need to place a measuring tape out on the floor. They will use it to measure the distance their reindeer travel.

Then it is time to place their reindeer pipette onto the striped straw and give it a good hard blow. (We found that the reindeer traveled the farthest when we lay prone on the ground.)

Flying Reindeer STEM Activity - Ready for Take Off

Next, you will need to measure how far the reindeer traveled and record it on the recording printable.

Then it is time to try to see if you can get it to travel farther. You can encourage your children to try holding the straw at various angles and blowing through it in different ways.

Flying Reindeer STEM Activity- The reindeer has landed.

The recording printable gives children the opportunity to record three flying distances. Your children can really attempt to get their reindeer to fly farther and farther as many times as they want.

Finally, your children will need to dictate to you or write down on their own what they did that made the reindeer travel the farthest.

If you like this STEM activity, here are some more activities your children will love:

STEM Christmas Building Shapes with Stickman

Building Shapes with The Stickman

Make Rudolph Fly Fast STEM Challenge- After constructing a flying reindeer, it is time conduct a science experiment to see how to make him fly fast.

Make Rudolph Fly Fast STEM Experiment

New Year’s Thaumatrope Printable Set

STEM Activity- New Year's Ball Drop: What fun it is to see what materials will help our homemade New Year's Ball drop fastest.

New Year’s Ball Drop STEM Challenge

How to Create Sewing Projects for Kids with Yarn

June 23, 2015 By Deirdre

Sewing projects for kids give them the opportunity to work on their fine motor skills and create. While you can buy sewing project kits for your kids, it is super easy to create sewing project for your kids. All you need are few craft supplies and your imagination.

Here are the supplies you will need to replicate the project we did:

burlap cloth
yarn
drinking straws cut into 2 inch lengths
a pipe cleaner
magic markers
ruler
plastic bowl

Steps for Creating a Sewing Projects for Kids

First you will need to think through the theme of your sewing project. I went with a summer sun. You could focus on your children’s favorite character, food, or sport.

Next you will need to draw the design your children will sew over. I created a sun by tracing a bowl and making rays with a ruler. You could trace cookie cutters or a cardboard cut out of a object that illustrates your theme. I traced the bowl and ruler with a marker that was color that would be easy to see. I tried to select a color that wouldn’t stand out too much if my son’s stitches wandered away from the hand drawn design. (Your magic marker design isn’t really what you want people to notice on sewing projects for kids

Hint: While you could create multiple objects for your sewing project, if you children are just learning to sew you may want to keep it simple.

Actually Doing the Sewing Projects For Kids

We could have simply sewn right on the drawing. If I were working on this project with younger children, I would have. My son is heading into second grade so I added threading a straw onto the yarn to our project.

First you will need to tie a knot at the end of three feet of yarn. If you would like your children to work with smaller lengths of yarn you can. (You may need to add more yarn as you go along.)

We used a pipe cleaner instead of a plastic needle. I thought it would be safer. Here is how we used it. We wrapped the end of yarn without the knot around the center three inch long section of pipe cleaner. Next we wrapped one of the ends up tightly against the yarn to hold it in place. (We didn’t just fold it up. It would have made the pipe cleaner hard to pull through the cloth.)

Now you are ready to have your kids start sewing. They can ecide where you want to start sewing and then push the pipe cleaner needle up from the back of your project through a hole in the burlap at that spot.

Once you have the yarn on the top of your project, you will thread a straw on the yarn. Then you will pull your needle down through the nearest hole in the burlap that is part of your design.

You will continue this process until you have completely sewn over your design. (If you run out of yarn, you can always tie on more year. You will want to make sure the knot stays on the backside of your design.) When you are done, you will tie a know it your yarn close to the burlap. Then cut of the rest of the extra yarn.

If your burlap has jagged or frayed edges like ours did, you can cut the off to make it neat or create a frame to tape your design behind. The frame will take the jagged edges out of view. Sometimes the backsides of sewing projects for kids get really messy. You may want to glue your finished project to a piece of cardboard.

Here are some other wonderful Craft Closet Boredom Busters:

How to Make a Minion Puzzle with Craft Sticks by me

Craft Stick Exploding Boomerangs from I Can Teach My Child

How to Make Balloon Yo-Yos by Frugal Fun for Boys

Newspaper Engineering from The Educator’s Spin On It

If you create a sewing project for your children, please share a picture of it with me on Facebook.

Kindergarten Activity-Exploring Positional Words

July 25, 2014 By Deirdre

While this kindergarten activity may simply look like blowing water around a blue plastic block, it is so much more than that. This kindergarten activity explores what will happen when you blow an object from various areas around the object. Each of those areas represents a positional words that kids in kindergarten need to learn. During this activity you can talk about the words above, below and under, beside, and behind. As you talked about each word and what it means, a child or children will blow a plastic straw from that position.

At my house we took the opportunity to talk about how much the blue plastic block moved from each position. We found that some straw blowing positions made the block move a lot more than others. I found that there was one position in particular that my son like the best and seemed to blow the hardest from. I bet as you look through the pictures in this post you will be able to figure out what position that was.

Putting This Kindergarten Activity Together

You will need the following supplies to put this activity together:

Plastic toy
Turkey roasting pan
Plastic straw

Optional: Positional words written on index cards. We didn’t do this but, it would make this a reading activity too.

Creating Your Learning Space

Fill the turkey roasting pan with water. You will want to make sure that you have enough water in the roasting pan for the object to move freely when it is hit with the breeze from the straw.

Place the object in the turkey roasting plan and you are ready to go.

Exploring Positional Words

Depending on how much experience your child or children have with positional words, you may want to review what the words mean before you start the activity. If you would rather jump right into the activity, you can select one positional word at a time and have your child or children test out that blowing position in the roasting pan.

As they are testing each position out, you can talk about how much the object moves when you blow the straw from that position. Know that some children may blower harder or softer just to see what happens. My son loved seeing the water fill with bubbles when he blew the straw under the block with great vigor. He also loved blowing the straw beside the blue block under the water rather than above it.

Some kids may try to test out all the positional words except above from beneath the water because they will love to see the water bubble. You can guide them back to focusing on distance the object you have selected moved or stick to exploring the meaning of the positional words. This kindergarten activity can be as flexible or focused as you want it to be.

If you want to keep it focused, you may want to leave the materials out for your children to explore later on. Of course you could put out the materials and have the children explore them before you even start this kindergarten activity. Either way I think children would love been given time to explore the materials