Moon Dough

So we got some of this stuff for Christmas. After experimenting with it for a few minutes, I was pretty much stumped as to how I was going to put it to any good use with my kids. I had come to the same conclusion as this reviewer did: Moon Dough Review, and I was ready to chuck it. Today, though, I found a use for moon dough that I am happy to report.

Today was one of those hectic days that all mothers know and love. They come around every so often, usually on the same day in which you got about an hour's sleep - in total - from the night before. I was tired and not feeling up to the usual amount of energy it takes to bring about a successful preschool learning moment. In fact, I was considering NOT doing a preschool activity today because I was feeling the NEED to clean the kitchen, and bathrooms, and vacuum, and the eternal laundry mountain, and etc. I needed something that would engage the kids with minimal supervision. The insane mom voice inside me said, "Why not give them that obnoxious mood dough stuff and let them make a huge mess of it on the floor since you have to vacuum that floor today anyway." And I gave into this insane voice. I gave my kids the moon dough, accompanied by rolling pins, cookie cutters, cookie sheets, mixing bowls, measuring cups and the whole nine yards. I figured since it's called "dough," we might as well play with it like it's dough.


Well, the report is that the kids had the blast of their lives.  Moon dough actually acts just like cookie dough and will roll out and cut into shapes just like real cookies.  It can also be measured and mixed up rather realistically. My boys spent over an hour, on their own, making a grandiose mess all over my floor; baking up moon dough in their little play kitchen, carrying around lumps of moon dough cookies, cutting up moon dough cakes and pies and smearing it all from one end of my hard wood floor to the other. But I just smiled at their revelry.

The insane voice said, "don't worry about it--you can just vacuum it all up when they're done--and just look how happy they are!" And guess what, the insane voice was right. When the boys were exhausted of moon dough cooking, I pulled out my trusty vacuum and cleaned up that mess in a jiff. Seriously, a jiff. It really was no big deal. So I guess the insane voice isn't all that insane--not today at least.

Moral of the story: if you have moon dough you don't know what to do with and an easily vacuum-able floor that needs vacuuming-you could have a moon dough cooking hey day just like us.

P.S. here's the secret that's the best part: when you're done vacuuming it all up--the moon dough is ALL GONE and you never have to worry about it again.

Monkey Race

I pretty much never come up with any ideas on my own. Apparently, I'm not that creative. But I do enjoy making other people's ideas a reality. This particular idea came from a preschool book that I borrowed from a friend a long time ago. I can't remember the name of the book or I would reference it. It is a great book though. If I ever think of it, I'll ask my friend to remind me of the name of the book and then I'll come back and fix this post with correct information.  Until then...

Monkey Race is an enjoyable math activity. It is a game in which you spin a spinner or roll a die and move your monkey up the trunk of a palm tree to the number that you rolled (or spun).  First monkey to the top wins! The great part about it is that children at all levels of number learning and development can participate in and learn from this game while working within what they know.

For older kids, or children who naturally grasp math concepts more easily you can move up the tree using addition.  For children who are just starting out learning their numbers you can play the game by counting up the tree. Kids become more aware of number recognition and get practice counting. Love it!

I cut out my palm tree from butcher paper and taped it to my wall. I then covered the trunk in clear packing tape, because it's what I had on hand. It worked out pretty well. I colored and laminated some monkeys, stuck a little tape on the back, and we were on our way.

Baking Cookies

Some days you just have to bake cookies. There's nothing as happy as baking cookies in my humble opinion. So, every so often, ok, like once a week (at least), I let one of the boys pick a type of cookie and we get mixing. Today, one of my sons saw a picture of peanut butter cookies with Hershey's kisses smooshed into them in my cookbook and was emphatic about duplicating them. Lucky for him, I just so happened to have Hershey's kisses on hand. So we whipped them up. But I'd like to say, that I really DO consider this to be a preschool activity, because I truly believe a lot of learning goes on when you bake. Yes, there is a lot of "I like the way that tastes" learning, but while we're doing that I always try to sneak in a lot of math ideas. For example, if we are measuring something, anything, I bring out all the other measuring cups or spoons and we look at how to achieve the same measurement using an alternate method. The kids actually really enjoy this and have learned to ask questions like, "how many of this little spoon will it take to fill up that big spoon?" So we do it and find out. And in this way, while we're doing a little bit of hands on learning about fractions, I justify my need to make cookie dough and eat it all. 

Name Soup

My younger son has spent very little time working on letter recognition, so this activity was mostly for him.  I totally ripped off the idea from The House of Baby Piranha blog. I've gotten a lot of my ideas from her lately.  So...thanks to the author of that blog, whoever she may be :-)

Anyway, what she did was fill up a big tub with water, write letters on old plastic lids, and have the kids use a big spoon to stir up the "soup" and find the letters to their name. She also printed out her kid's name on a piece of paper so she could match up the letters.

It seemed pretty straight forward so I didn't change it up too much. I used my biggest soup pot because I didn't have an empty bin available.  I used quite a variety of lids to add some difficulty in spooning out the letters.  I used shampoo bottle lids and baby food container lids, nutella lids and jelly jar lids.  Metal, plastic and tin.  Some floated and some sunk, some were small and some were large.  It at least made it more challenging for my oldest who is very familiar with letters and how to spell his name.

They had a good time with this and it took little prep-time.  I pulled out lids as I found them for about a week until I had enough to do most of the alphabet, and then I was ready to go. My only advice is, have a lot of towels on hand. Or take this activity outside :-D

Tea Party

Tea parties are not just for girls.  Every so often my boys ask to have one and so we get out the old tea set that my grandmother made for me when I was a little girl.  The thing that makes a tea party a success for a little guy is to have lots of food options.  I like to use a tea party as a tool for learning good manners.  The boys know that if I go to the effort to cut up all those little tea sandwiches or make tiny cakes, then they have to go to the effort of being courteous the whole time.  And speaking in British accents.  Common conversation may go something like this:

Me: Would you care for more tea, sir?
Child: Oh, yes. I'd like some very much please.
Me: Cream? Sugar?
Child: Yes. Just one lump for me please.
Me: And how is your mother doing?
Child: Oh, very well. Thank you for asking. How is your mother?
Me: She is well. Thank you. I think we're enjoying very nice weather today.
Child: I agree, very nice weather indeed. Would you please pass the apple slices?

It's a fun time.  We eat plenty, mind our manners, take turns, practice polite small talk, and I try to throw in a little cultural or geographical information about England (or other places around the world) while I'm at it.  Usually our tea parties turn into some extended pretend play in which we might leave the table to fly to India in our airplane that the kids have made out of all the dining room chairs and the pillows from my couch-or some such thing.  But that's all well and fine with me.

Ice Day

Last week I got together some plans for a string of activities about ice.  It turned out today was a good day to embark on this venture since my kids were sick and stuck indoors.  So, we made a day of it -- an Ice Day.

The first thing we did was talk about how ice melts.  I gave the kids ice cubes and let them tell me about how they experienced them through their 5 senses (aka, what they looked like, smelled like, tasted like, etc).  I had prepared 3 "environments" for the ice cubes to hang out in: a swimming pool (bowl filled with water), a salt sandbox (bowl filled with salt), and an ice skating rink (small cookie sheet filled with water and frozen solid).  We made a chart to predict which environment the kids thought the ice cubes would last the longest in and which they would melt the quickest in.  They both predicted the ice would melt fastest in the "swimming pool" and last longest in the "ice skating rink," but neither knew what to think about the salt.  Then we put an ice cube in each environment and set the timer for 10 minutes, in which time we would come back to check on the progress of our ice cube friends.


I mostly took this idea from the Gryphon House website.  This site is wonderful!  I have only just begun to explore it, but I am, so far, very much in love with all their ideas.  If you check out the site, you'll see that I didn't follow the plan exactly, but made a few modifications based on what I had on hand and what I thought my kids could handle/would be interested in.


Anyway, while we were waiting for our ice to melt, we decided to take the idea a little further and test 3 more environments.  We wrapped up an ice cube each in saran wrap, aluminum foil and baby socks.  We made our chart and predictions again and left them on the counter to wait it out with the other ice cubes.

We needed something else to fill the time, so we went ahead with another activity that I got from the House of Baby Piranha blog. I thought it looked like a good idea to focus on some dexterity for the kiddos. Here's how I did it. The night before, I filled up my cupcake pan with water like an ice cube tray. I added some food coloring to all the cups and popped it into the freezer. When we were ready to do this activity I soaked the bottom of the cupcake pan in hot water and...voila: round, colored ice cubes. I brought out 2 mixing bowls and put all the colored, roundy ice cubes in one bowl. The object was for the boys to move the ice cubes from one bowl to the other using only metal tongs. It was great fun! We laughed and laughed. The color in the ice cubes just made it more interesting, but you could use plain water too. The boys enjoyed doing this so much they each wanted to take 3 or 4 turns. Anyway, it was easy to use up all the 10 minutes (and beyond) on this activity.

When we went back to check on our "environments," we found that our predictions had come true and we spent the next few minutes talking about that. It was pretty natural for the boys to grasp the ideas I was presenting them with. They even understood about the salt pretty quickly. But when we got to the aluminum foil, saran wrap and socks--they became a little more confused. The idea of an insulator was too abstract for them to grasp, I suppose. Anyway, I compared the insulator to a winter coat that the ice cube was wearing and tried to put the idea on a level the boys could connect with more personally. They kind of got it, but I was satisfied that they were at least thinking about it.

After our more cranial workout, we decided to spend some time on a physical workout.  On to ice skating! We moved all the furniture out of our dining room, donned our slipperiest socks and commenced with whirls, jumps, glides, spins, and even a few falls. I'm a big fan of make-believe and the boys are big fans of anything active, so this was a win-win for us.

Then it was on to something crafty: making structures out of sugar cubes--you know, like ice cubes. Sort of. Only yummier. My oldest made this awesome castle, and the youngest made a variety of "guys" that were really just a couple of sugar cubes stacked together. But hey, to each his own. They both ate at least 3 sugar cubes that I knew of and allowed, and about a million more that they pilfered.

Finally, we took our colored, roundy ice cubes and put 2 together, of different colors, in ziplock bags to see how the colors combine as they melt. Pretty classic stuff here; yellow and blue ice cubes melt to create green, red and blue melt to create purple, and so forth. The boys enjoyed coming back to look at the bags and squish the colors together as the day went on.

We were going to do a magic trick with ice and salt and string. But our sickie-selves made us tired and burn out quickly. So I'll save the magic for another day. It's always good to have something on hand :-)

Shape Monsters

I'm a big fan of pinterest--and I get a lot of my ideas for preschool there.  This is one of those ideas.

I was feeling in the need of doing a crafty-sort of activity with the kids--I like it best when we have a lot of variety.  My younger son is not yet overly adept at shape recognition AND happens to be interested in anything bearing the title of "monster."  So I thought this activity would be a winner.  It was pretty good, I'll say, but I'm not sure I'd call it a winner. Since the activity, I don't think my son has become any better equipped to distinguish one shape from another.  Furthermore, the activity posed a lot of work for me that I'm not sure really paid off all that well, neither in the form of pure enjoyment nor in educational value. So...there you have it.

Anyway, here is the site that I got this idea from: Shape Monsters.  If you go to the site, you'll see that the author's daughter created a really cute little monster.  I didn't make the time to cut out all the shapes the night before like she did and honestly, it probably would have been a better idea to do so.  Instead, in my lameness, I just asked the kids what they wanted and cut the shapes out as we went along.  Here are our cute-in-their-own-way monsters:

I guess we did learn one thing from this activity. The prefix "octo" came into discussion because both sons wanted to put 8 of something on their monsters.  One monster received 8 eyes and was given the name of "Octomonster Man."  Very appropriate and creative. The other monster received 8 legs and 8 feet and was deemed, "Octoped."  As opposed, of course, to Octopus, which was an option. We spent quite a great deal of time trying to think of all the octo-words we could remember.  Since octogon was about the only other octo-word we could come up with I was worried that the discussion would prove a bit of a let down.  But my kids were fine with taking about octogons as long as I cut one out for each of them.

In defense of this activity, my sons did get to spend time using the fine motor skills it takes to glue on all those little legs and eyeballs...so...that's a plus.

Penguin Stories

I found this free printable from The Mailbox website, of penguins in various attitudes and decided we would use them to make up our own story books.

So we cut construction paper into four equal parts and I explained to the kids what we were doing. They got to color the penguins, cut out the penguins, chose 2 to go on each page, glue 2 onto each page, draw word bubbles for each penguin on each page, and then dictate a story to me using only the dialogue between the two penguins. It was awesome! I was so impressed with both my kiddos; they totally got it and wrote really fun stories! I love it when kids tell stories because it always showcases their personalities.

For example, one of my sons, who is obsessed with all things superhero, was instantly drawn to the idea of having a good guy penguin and a bad guy penguin. My other son, who is more versed in the ways of sociality, made up a story about how the 2 penguins meet and became friends. We all loved this activity--and the best part is keeping the books for them to read every day.  Or, maybe 20 times a day.  Or 30.  'Cause you know kids love their own creations!

The Great Mitten Race

Instructions

1. Have the kids remove their mittens and place them in a heap in the middle of a big room. Make sure that the mittens are mixed up.
2. Then have the children stand in a circle around the pile (about ten feet away).
3. At your signal, the players should race to locate their own mittens; the first child to find and don the right winter gear and shout "mitten match" wins.

Variations:

You can complicate matters by including hats or boots in the pile, too.

This is the game I got from Family Fun's website for our preschool activity today. I asked the boys if they wanted to have "The Great Mitten Race," a "science experiment," or make "shape monsters" and they picked the race, so they must have been in the mood to move. I thought it was a fun idea, especially considering our recent bout with the snow. So, we tried the game the way it was suggested...but it only took us about 30 seconds and I was left with two little boys staring at me like, "Ok, what do we do next Mom?" I was forced to speedy quick think of a way to successfully tweek the activity to accommodate two active boys -- or face the consequences. Hmm...something that could keep us going, in the burning off energy sort of way, for somewhere in the 15 minute range. Well, this is the result of the tweeking.  First, we added hats and scarves to the arsenal of...mittens...that we had to put on.  Then we got creative.  For our first round I said we had to put mittens on our toes, a scarf around our waist like a belt, and a hat on our knee.  For every subsequent round we each took turns being creative and SILLY. Silly is usually a big hit in our family. Anyway, some of our favorite rounds were:  

1. hats on feet, scarf on head, mittens on ears
2. a mitten in mouth, scarf over shoulder, hat tucked into pants
3. scarf on toes, hat under chin, mittens on head
4. hat, mittens and scarf all on your head

That last one was everyone's MOST favorite round.  For the rest of the day my youngest son walked around the house with a mitten on his head, covered by a hat, all tied on under his chin with a great big scarf.  He said it was his superhero helmet.  I wasn't exactly expecting that result from my creative tweeking, but I was perfectly happy to go with it.  And happy that the game turned out a success.

Four in a Row

I was pretty busy watching extra kids throughout most of yesterday.  But we managed to find a few minutes to play a learning game I downloaded from The Mailbox's website. The game is called, "Four in a Row" and honestly, I thought it was going to be a flop. But I didn't really worry too much about it since I didn't have time to come up with anything better. BUT, let me just say, that this game was a total winner. The kids, both, loved it! Even my younger could do it without much help -- a feat I was not expecting. We liked it so much, in fact, I had to go back and print off 3-4 more game boards so we could play again and again.

Here is the pattern for the game:

Four in a Row Game

The thing I liked about this game was that it was so simple, but actually got the kids thinking and doing real math!  Hooray for a winner!  My kids already asked me if we could play again tomorrow, so I'm off to print a few more game boards :-)

Snowman Sequencing

Yesterday we got snow--the kind that even stuck on the ground!  It does that every so often where we live. But not enough for it to ever become commonplace.  Whenever it snows, all other activities for the day are banished, and there is one main objective: don all winter gear and get outside.

So that's what we did.  In our snow delight, we did not fail tradition and of course had a snow ball fight, made snow angels, and constructed a snowman.  Here he is in all his grandeur:

 I wish I could say that we gave him a name.  But we didn't.


When we came back inside, thoroughly slushed, I remembered an idea for writing about snowmen that I saw on the Growing Kinders blog. So I changed it up a little bit to fit my kids, and we did something similar.  This is how it worked out for me.

My younger son is too little to know how to do very much of this, so I just had him help me as I modeled what the activity looked like for my older son.  I divided a piece of paper up into four equal parts and drew pictures of snowmen in various stages of completion in each section.  Then I made 2 sets of colorful little word-cutouts that said, "First" "Next" "Then" and "Last."  I used green for "First," yellow and orange for the two middle words, and red for "Last."  That way, I could use common stop light types of phrasing as I was explaining sequencing in this manner.

My younger son helped me apply a title to each section of the snowman paper with the labels I had made.  We talked about "First" being like "go," and "Last" being like "stop." At this point, my older son was ready, with crayon in hand, to work on his own snowmen for awhile.  This is what he came up with, which -- I'm pretty sure -- is the cutest thing ever:

When the oldest was done, we worked on cutting the four sections apart, which IS something my younger son can get excited about.  Now we were ready to reassemble our snowmen, once again, so that they would go in order on the page.  Here's my oldest son's final masterpiece:

and here's the younger son's and mine: 

We had a good time working on our snowmen, both 3-D and 2-D. But, as much fun as I'd like to say we had sequencing our snowmen pictures, I'll still have to admit that making the real thing in the front yard took the cake.

Making Butter

Yesterday for our preschool activity, I wanted to make butter with the boys.  I used a couple of different websites as my resources:

Not Just Cute - which is a site I recently found and like well, &
Bright Hub - which is a site I also recently found and would like to spend more time exploring.

So this is what we did.  We filled up glass baby food jars (stage 2 or 3 worked well for us) with heavy whipping cream.  We found that HEAVY whipping cream really does work better.  By "better," what I really mean is "faster." Because, let me tell you, it is difficult to get kids to shake a little jar for anything more than 5 minutes, much less the 30 minutes that it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect on.  So, yes, I got the cream to churn to butter with plain whipping cream (I tried it just to see if it would work), but the heavy whipping cream works way faster.  In the interest of time, we also added marbles to our jars because the extra agitation helps the butter churn more quickly too.

We then went on to sing, "Old MacDonald" about 30 (million) times.  I read some farm-themed books like, Buzz Said the Bee.  We shake danced.  We shaked out rhythms together.  And then, when we still didn't have butter in our little jars, we put them in the fridge and went away to take a break.


Later, when our arms had decided they weren't quite so tired anymore, we came back to shake some more.  This time it only took a few more crucial minutes to get that little ball of butter.  The boys were so interested in seeing the cream start to coagulate, then bunch all up, and finally resemble the butter that they know and love.  I opened the lid periodically so they could see, feel and taste the cream in its various stages.


After achieving butter status, I dumped the little glob out into my hand and explained a little bit about the curds and whey.  We may have recited "Little Miss Muffit" a few times.  But that's only because I'm a total nerd for that sort of stuff (the English teacher coming out in me).  We rinsed off the butter and dug in.  Yum!

We had made some breadsticks and had them on hand to dip into our butter, but that part is totally subjective :-)  Also, adding a bit of salt to the butter makes it taste a little more "normal."  But again, that part is totally subjective.

Surface Tension

Today we did an activity to talk about the surface tension of water.

We got one of each: a penny, a nickel, a dime, and a quarter--and placed them on a paper towel on our table.  Then I filled a dropper up with water and had a cup of it on hand to refill the dropper as needed.  We  made a chart to keep track of our predictions and results.  I talked to the kids about which coin was biggest and which was smallest and which one we thought would be able to hold the most amounts of drops on the top of it.  Then we made predictions for the penny and I had the kids watch and help me count as we dropped the drops of water onto it.  I kept pointing out to them how the water bubbled up like a big balloon on top of the coin.  Then, when too many drops were added onto the coin, the water popped and spilled out, just like a balloon.  Sort of.  Anyway.

We continued to do this for all the coins.  We talked a lot about bigger vs. smaller and how our predictions should reflect that.  The boys wanted to know why the water bubbled up, so I ended up drawing a few pictures and resulting to phrases like "the water has something like a skin on the top of it that holds it in," or "the water is kind of like a balloon-you can fill it up and up and up and the skin over the top will hold, until you fill it up too much and then it pops like a balloon."  We filled the penny up a couple of more times and I had the kids look at it right at eye level, from the side view, so they could really notice how big the "balloon" of water gets and what it looks like when the "balloon" of water finally pops.

We had a good time with this.  It really helped a lot to take the time to draw the extra pictures as I was explaining.

Sock War or Indoor Snowball Fight

Today we did a physical activity that was mostly just for fun.

We gathered up all the socks in the house and rolled them into tight balls (mostly our socks are already rolled into balls, but we wanted them tighter).  Then we divided the sock balls out equally to all of us.  After that it was a free for all, all out, war.  Mostly we all found, or quickly constructed, good bases from which to emerge quickly and fire off a shot or two.  Behind the couch was a good choice, underneath the desk was very strategic, behind the door offered the added benefit of being able to observe the enemy from between the crack.  Every so often, one of us might go kamikaze and run around blasting everyone else with all our socks.  A mission would usually have to be planned to retrieve more ammo.  Loyalties were forged and broken.  Espionage was commonplace.  Treaties were few.  And fun was had all around.  After a half hour or so of warfare, it was time to pick up the socks and gaze, once again, longingly out the window at the snow falling that was STILL NOT sticking on the ground, therefore robbing us of a REAL snowball fight.

Alas, our indoor snowball fight would have to do.