Butterfly Facts

One of my favorite sites thus far in my preschool website research has been:

http://scienceforpreschoolers.com/.

I love this site because it includes whole weeks worth of preschool lesson plans based on science themes. The lessons are great because they already include the science and background information you need to tell your kids what's going on, multiple craft ideas, gross motor activities, even snack ideas. I love it--so much so, in fact, that I'll tell you what I do...I print out a lesson plan and do everything in it!  Ha ha! It's the best.

So for the rest of this week I printed out the lesson plan called "Butterflies" and we got to work.  To start us out today, I chose to give the kids all the introductory information from the first part of the lesson plan.

The intro information was really fun to impart to the kids--facts like (the words in THIS color have been  copied straight from the scienceforpreschoolers.com website):

Why do we need butterflies?
Butterflies are the second largest group of pollinators next to honey bees.  We spent some time talking about pollination at this point. I talked about butterfly legs as being sticky like tape and it picks up the "flower dust" and when the butterfly lands on the next flower, some of the "flower dust" comes off as he rubs his legs on the petals and such. The flowers need each other's "flower dust" to make their fruit. We didn't really get into the why and how of all this stuff. Just some really basic basics.

• What is the difference between a butterfly and a moth?
Most butterflies fly during the day (diurnal). Moths fly at night (nocturnal). Butterflies have small bulbs on the end of their smooth antennae. Moths have “fuzzy” antennae. We pulled out the ol' google image search at this point to visualize the differences. 

• What is the life-cycle of a butterfly?
egg, caterpillar, pupa (cocoon), butterfly. While we were on the internet, we found a couple of excellent youtube videos that capture the life cycle of a butterfly in that kind of filming where they speed up the time...I can't think what it's called right now, but they were really awesome to watch!

• Where do butterflies live?
In every continent except Antarctica, with the majority in tropical zones.

• What do butterflies eat?
Sweet nectar from fruits and flowers. Butterflies don’t have a mouth. They drink nectar through a straw that they can roll up and down, called a proboscis.We pulled out some straws to talk about the butterfly's mouth-the proboscis. The kids curled them up and went around the house trying to uncurl them and then drink out of stuff. It was hilarious! 

They taste with their antennae.

Butterflies can see the colors red, yellow and green. We looked around the room and I had the kids point out the objects they would be able to see the colors of if they were butterflies. 

They don’t have lungs, but breathe through holes, called
spiracles, in their abdomen. 

My kids were pretty tripped out about this "spiracles" part...so I just touched on it briefly. All in all, it was a really great discussion. The kids loved learning all about butterflies and went about the rest of the day pretending to be butterflies themselves. Adorable :-)

Planting Day

After a few days growth, our bean plant was ready for a traditional planting. Namely--in a pot. So today, the boys planted it. I made them do it all by themselves. They went outside and got handfuls of soil. Then they gently pulled the plant out of the plastic baggie and placed it and the soil into a little pot. A dosing of waterage and we were ready for a sunny windowsill. Check out our bean plant now!

Isn't he so cute? We named him Benny. Benny the bean plant. Grow, Benny, grow!

Some Growth

This is what our bean/seed looks like today--you can see its little tap root reaching towards the water and the beginnings of a sprout emerging from the seed. So awesome! It's been fun to check it out every day, or a few times a day and note the differences we see, which are sometimes drastic.

Today we moved onto some more in-depth knowledge about seeds and plant growth.

I found a lesson plan online that I used to supplement what I wanted to teach the kids--it can be found here: bean plant lesson plan.

First, I must tell you that I quite accidentally broke one of the seeds/beans we had been trying to grow. It was falling down into the water and I was trying to pull it back up to the middle of the plastic baggie, when the bean just fell apart. Nevertheless, I was able to use this minor set-back as a positive experience. Since that bean was mid-growth, it served as a great opportunity for us to take out the seed and observe what was going on with it. I showed the boys how beans have two sides, and a skin-like structure surrounding the two sides. They were able to feel these things with their hands and see them up close. There was also a teensy, tiny little root that had begun to grow and so we got to hold that and inspect it as well.

When I was pretty satisfied the boys understood the parts of a seed, we went on to discuss the lifecycle of the bean plant. I had printed out the lesson plan I mentioned before, which includes a cut-and-paste style worksheet that illustrates the phases of life for a bean plant. I precut out a set for each boy and I allowed them to color the pictures while I explained each one. Then I drew a big circle on the middle of a piece of construction paper and asked the boys to glue the pictures onto the circle in the order they go in. As they guessed at, and tried to remember, which picture went where, I helped them along and reinforced the knowledge for them. I then had them draw arrows to indicate the the progression of the lifecycle of the bean plant.

I think my boys would tell you this was a more tedious activity and not as enjoyable as some of the others, but hey, they can't all be fun and games, right? I was very happy when, at the end of our time together, the boys could tell me about how a bean plant grows from seed to plant, and then from plant to seed. They could identify how this created a "cycle" which was a word they didn't previously fully understand. They knew vocabulary terms like "seed, root, shoot, stem, leaves, flowers, fruit" and could correctly apply them to the pictures we discussed.  More excitingly, they could then take a look at our own, real life, bean plant in the window and accurately determine which phase our plant was in.  That was pretty cool.

Sometimes I'm such a nerd. Like...all the time. I just love it when these kids know stuff!

Easter-ish Boardgame

While we waited for our seed to grow and grow, I decided to switch things up a bit and play a game today. Last year, actually, I printed this board game template off the net and put it together, but we never had a chance to play it. In fact, this year, Easter went by as well and I still had forgotten to make time to play this game. So I brought it out today, just to say we've finally played it...and surprisingly, it turned out to be pretty fun. We all enjoyed it. Maybe next year I'll remember this good experience and bring out the game before or on Easter.

I found the template at the kaboose website. If you click on the link it will take you right to a page where you, too, can print out this game. Anyway, I'm not really sure how the website says to play it because it's been awhile since I was actually on there reading it. So I'll just tell you how we played.

This is what the board looks like:

It's kind of a candyland sort of set-up. Except that the random pictures don't really mean anything to the play of the game, which is a tad disappointing.

All I did was get together plastic eggs that matched the colors of the eggs on the game board. I was lucky to have them on hand. After putting the four colored eggs in a buckety, baskety deal, we took turns dumping them out on the floor to determine each person's turn. We had to agree on a method of deciding which egg was the "one," so our rule was that the egg that ended up the farthest away from you was the "one" that determined your play on that turn. So, for example, if I dumped out the eggs on the carpet and the green one rolled the furthest away from me, then that meant I got to move my game piece to the next green on the game board. I'm hoping this makes sense; it wasn't very complex to play, but somehow I'm feeling like it is overly complex to explain. So anyhoo--that's all we did. It was fun to watch the kids rooting for certain eggs to roll the furthest from them so they could get a particular color, or trying different methods of bucket dumping to get the eggs to perform in a manner that they were hoping for. We also had to make up something to do with those random pictures on the board, so we kind of just made them into a little story that we told as we went along. Like this:

Me (making my game piece talk): "Hey guys, I'm way ahead of you and playing in this little brown house! It's so fun! Hurry up and come play with me in here. We'll play hide and seek."

Kids (making their game pieces talk): "Ok, here we come! I have to get a blue to get over there so wait for me, ok?"

And so on.

It really was a lot of fun. It's always fun to use our imaginations together and make up stories. Sometimes I forget how much I enjoy the simplicity of story-telling with my kids. They come up with the BEST stuff and I never come away without a good dosing of belly-laughter.

Sprouting Seeds

To follow up our discussion of capillary action, the boys and I decided to grow a bean on our sliding-glass door. It's a pretty easy thing, we got some directions off the internet--a simple google search will bring up tons of sites that tell you how to do it. Generally, it works like this:

Find a bean, any old bean, from your pantry. It can't be one that's been cooked in any way. We used a navy bean.

Get a paper towel or two all wet.

Place the paper towels in a ziplock bag and wedge the bean between the plastic side of the bag (so you can see it and watch it grow) and the paper towels.

Add a little water, approximately 1/2 inch, to the bottom of the bag.

Zip the bag closed tight.

Tape it (or attach in any manner) to a sunny window or door (keep the seed where you can see it, you don't have to face it towards the light).

Watch what happens over the next couple of days.

Here's what happens: the seed/bean will swell as capillary action draws the water from the paper towel into the bean; the bean will sprout a root that will grow downward reaching towards the water at the bottom of the bag (it will be white or light colored); the root will utilize capillary action to pull water up to the seed/bean where a green shoot will begin to grow upwards from out of the seed/bean (it may curl); eventually the two sides of the bean/seed will split and baby leaves will emerge and the plant will continue to grow.

You may have to replenish the water if your bean/seed drinks it all up.

So that's what we did today. It was pretty fun and very simple. I think the kids were a little let down that we didn't do more, but they'll get more excited as they watch the seed/bean grow and to eventually pot it in a little pot. Growing plants can be such a satisfying experience. I hope they feel this way too.

I did take a picture, but my camera is giving me fits right now. So I'll post one after a few days of growth.

Capillary Action Day 2

Ok, Day 2 of capillary action-ness was awesome! I have to say that with a big exclamation point to compensate for the failure of my carnation experiment. Which, at this point, we were still watching and waiting for evidence, doing a hopeful check every few hours with expectant graph in hand. Blah!

So...while we were waiting, I found this other idea that I loved. I got it here:
http://www.chromebattery.com/battery-kids/projects/capillary-action-experiment on a website called Battery Kids--turns out they have a lot of cool stuff, I'll definitely be checking it out some more on a day when I've got some time.

Anyway, this is what the experiment looks like when you're done.

This one really works AND you only have to wait about 2 hours as opposed to 24 or more AND you can really watch it working. AND you only need to have a paper towel and some water. How much better can an experiment get, huh?

So, first you fill up a glass with water--mostly all the way up to the top. Then you get another glass and leave it empty. Twist up a paper towel into a rope; I had the kids do this part and they worked together to get the paper towel wound up really tightly. Submerge one side of the "rope" into the glass that is full and bend the other side into the cup that is empty, creating a rainbow-ish shape of the paper towel between the two glasses. That's all you have to do. The water will soak into the paper towel and climb from one glass to the other. Over the course of a couple hours, it will fill the empty cup until the two cups have an equal amount of water in them.

I loved this experiment and the kids were way more excited about it too because they could see it happening. Sure, it's pretty slow, but it's obvious that the water is climbing up the paper towel. Even if the kids can't see it with their eyes you can have them feel the "rope" with their fingers and tell you where it's wet and where it's dry. My youngest son kept track of the water this way. They were both very interested to know why water wasn't dripping off the rope and onto the table. This question led to a great discussion about how the "rope" acted like a bridge. Necessarily, I had to delve into the concept of molecules and how they work in water. Once again, we used lots of dumbed down drawings. Pictures of big circle smiley-face water molecules holding hands and pulling each other up a rope, and big circle smiley-face water molecules going across a bridge while telling each other to hold hands tight and not let go. In this way, my kids came to understand some of the nature of water, why the table didn't get wet, and had the topic of surface tension reinforced (we've worked on it before) in their little brains.

Therefore, I'm very happy about this simple experiment. Although the flower one is a little showier, I think this paper towel one is a little more interesting.

Capillary Action Day 1

For whatever reason, unknown even to myself, I had the hankering to talk to the kids about capillary action. Maybe it's because I know spring is here and there is much of capillary action happening in the world around us. Maybe not. Either way, I snagged an idea from this website: http://jadaroo.blogspot.com/2011/03/carnation-science-experiment-rainbows.html and decided to give it a go. Here's what Jada Roo (from the website) did: get white carnations, slit stems, submerge in colored water, wait for the water to travel up the stems and into the petals causing the flower to "change color."

It's a pretty swell idea. We tried it and we followed all the directions to the letter. Here's what Jada Roo's experiment looked like:

 and here's what my less than perfect approximation looked like:

Here's what Jada Roo's flowers looked like after waiting a day, (pretty cool, huh?):

Here's what happened after I waited 5 days: I didn't take a picture. That's because I was so mad at this stupid experiment. Only 1 of our flowers changed color, the blue one. We even made a graph to chart the progress of the flowers and everything, but it was all in vain.

I don't have many hypotheses for why my flowers didn't work. I guess they weren't thirsty. My husband suggested maybe my stems were too long. I don't know. I've talked to various people who have reported that they've seen this work, so I know it does. It just didn't work for us--for some reason. Whatever the reason is, I'm mad at it.

Well, at least the flower in blue water worked, allowing the boys and I to have a small discussion about how the blue water travelled up the stem and got into the petals. I ended up drawing a few pictures, as is usually necessary for us. I think they got it. And even if they didn't, they have another chance tomorrow because I found another idea that I like.

Stay tuned. It's riveting.

Conference Conundrum

As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, we have the opportunity to watch a thing called General Conference on TV or stream it on the internet every six months. Not all people know all about General Conference, as my sons found out the hard way a few days ago.

We happened to be in the store looking for a new car seat and ran into a family in the car seat aisle who were willing to sell us their old one for cheap. So we followed them to their car to check out said car seat, which I then decide to purchase. As I was doing the looking-over, my sons were sitting in the cart talking to this family and I hear my oldest son yell to me, "MOM! They don't watch General Conference! Can you believe it?! They don't even know what it is!" This proved slightly embarrassing to myself, because...really...what am I supposed to say to that? So I got the chance to explain to this nice family what religion we belong to and the basics of General Conference. Nice. I'm always astounded at the knowledge that seems so obvious to us as adults. That not all people belong to the same church as we do was, apparently, a novel idea to my young offspring.

Back to the point. The point is, that General Conference is 8 hours long, spanning 4 sessions and 2 days. This is a problem for parents of young children. Parents like myself. How the heck do you get your kids to sit through all that? Or even some of it? Or even be quiet for a short amount of time so you can listen? There are TONS of ideas on the internet that one can implement, so for the past few conferences I have been doing this deal where we have activities in baggies. Each baggie gets a face of one of the conference speakers taped to it. Then, when that person comes up to speak, we pull out the activity in that baggie and do it, hopefully quietly. So far, it's worked ok. Here's what it looks like at our house:

But I have to say, after attempting to sit through all these hours and hours of general conference this weekend, and doing all these prepared activities: it's a lot of work. And I'm not exactly sure it all pays off. Next time, either I will be modifying the activities that go in our baggies, or choosing a new idea to implement. An easier one.  An idea that takes WAY less planning and WAY less effort.