Have Fun Tonight!
I know I posted earlier today… but we really took advantage of our sunny day (65F and mostly Sunny – perfect 🙂 ) and also completed our Handbook of Nature Study Blog Challenge for Autumn Weather this afternoon. We still have to complete our pumpkin study and will hopefully get to that tomorrow. Although we have already carved our decorative ones, I did buy a pie pumpkin special for our Nature Study.
For the Weather Study we spent a lot of time looking at the thermometer. We didn’t have a way to measure the wind speed but we observed the rustling leaves on the trees and sat very still, with our arms outstretched to feel the wind.
The kids took their time on their journal pages. Bug drew a tree that still had many of its leaves on and Fairy focused on one that was already bare.
I had much grander ideas for this week’s Unplugged Challenge Theme Change but we an extremely busy schedule last week, including two parties and out of town company that left us with no time to for anything fancy. Instead, today we took advantage of the glorious sunshine and the kids spent at least an hour raking "COLOR CHANGED" leaves into piles and then of course spent even more time jumping in them and spreading them all over the yard again. Simple joy!
Amongst the leaves, Fairy found a Wooly Bear Caterpillar.
While working on our Wright Brothers project earlier this fall we did a lot of fun activities out of the book Planes, Gliders, Helicopters and Other Flying Machines. One that the kids enjoyed was the Hot Air Balloon experiment we did when we were talking about lighter than air flying.
What you need… small plastic bottle, balloon, heat safe bowl and a kettle/pot. Stretch the balloon over the opening of the empty bottle. Note how it hangs down. Talk about what is in the bottle. This isn’t necessarily apparent to young kids. Even an empty bottle has air in it. Predict what will happen when the air gets hot. Heat water. Test your prediction by placing the bottle in a heat safe bowl filled with hot water (mom should do this for safety reasons). You will have to hold the bottle down… empty bottles like to float… but that is another experiment ;). Watch as the balloon inflates. Talk about why and then predict what will happen when you place it in the freezer.
We ended up going back and forth from hot to cold several times as the kids were fascinated with this experiment. We did this experiment a couple weeks ago but I didn’t get a chance to blog about it so we are using it as our entry for the Unplugged Challenge Theme B.
This week’s Handbook of Nature Study Blog Assignment was Oak Trees. We went on a short walk, it’s been so cold this week, and were lucky to find two different oaks to study. I believe one is an English Oak and the other a Northern Red Oak (feel free to offer other suggests if you think otherwise).
The kids love oak trees. They will spend hours collecting the acorns, which are affectionately known as gnome hats around here.
We did not do a formal journal entry this week. Instead, we played with making leaf rubbings. After a few disappointing results I started taping the leaves to the table and the paper over the leaves for the kids. That helped a bunch and we ended up with some pretty pages.
Just for fun… here is our Oak Tree Study from last year.BTW – the acorns never did sprout. I had meant to look into that… maybe I will get a chance to this fall… and maybe we will try it again.
Fairy celebrated her fifth birthday last week! She gots lots of sewing stuff, as requested and her grandparents indulged her in her request for a REAL pink camera. She had a party earlier in the week with a bunch of her friends and her only request for that was a pinata. Super fun!
For this week’s Unplugged Challenge theme Wheel, we made fuzzy yarn color wheels. We started by reading one of our favorite books, Mouse Paint.
We’ve done a Mouse Paint project in the past, so I wanted to do something different this time around. Since my kiddos are part hamster (they love to shred, cut, rip little bits) we took scraps of yarn and cut them up into little bits to make our color wheel.
After we cut up the yarn into little bits, we sorted them into the color piles.
I then took paper plates (regular card stock with a circle template would work too) and cut out the center circle.
I found the center of the circle and then used a ruler to divide the plate into 6 equal pieces.
The kids covered the plate with a liberal amount of glue and started with placing the primary colors in every other piece. They then went back and filled in the secondary colors.
Our goldenrod was just about spent for the season but we were still able to complete our Goldenrod Nature Study this week. Gammy has tons of goldenrod on the edge of her property. Finding some was not a problem (my eyes are itching just looking at the photos 😉 ).
Gammy sat with us and added a page in her journal too.
Here is Fairy’s journal page.
Bug actually drew several pages of goldenrod. Here is one of his.
For the Unplugged Theme Weather, we read the book It Looked Like Spilt Milk which is all about finding shapes in clouds. Unfortunately it has been sooo cloudy and rainy that we couldn’t look for cloud shapes outside. The sky has been a thick blanket of grey clouds not the fun puffy ones on a blue background. But we had fun with this project.
After we read the book (if was fun having a copy for each kiddo), we ripped up white construction paper in little shapes. Some of the shapes we were trying for, others were just happy accidents.
Once we had a bunch of shapes we glued them onto a large sheet of blue construction paper.
Then we wrote across the top "It Looked Like" and labeled the images with a white pencil.
My mom came up with the idea for these Jack-o-Lantern Buckets. She was planning to make a couple for herself (see hers at Wee Folk Art) and thought that the kids would like to make some to use for trick-or-treating. She assembled all the supplies for us and we enjoyed a craft afternoon at her house last week.
Materials: Plain Paint Bucket (can be bought at the hardware store), Orange Spray Paint, Black Craft Paint, Brushes, Clear Coat Sealer, (optional spray adhesive and paper to make stencil)
Gammy spray painted the buckets orange and let them dry for us.
Then the kiddos drew pictures on a sheet of paper. Pixie went with a smiley face, Fairy a kitty-cat and Bug… well you know Bug… he can’t really follow directions as given. Rather than making a jack-o-lantern face (there was much discussion on this point) he drew "The Flying Dutchman" pirate ship. (Ahh… yeah… I can’t wait to see him actually carve his pumpkin this year… this may be an all night event. Super funny thing is that his bucket kinda looks like a Face if you squint).
For the girls, we cut out the faces they made, used a light coat of spray adhesive on the back side of the paper (please follow the directions on your spray adhesive… I recommend taking it outside) and stuck the paper on the pail as a stencil template. The girls then stenciled their faces with black paint and a stencil brush. We removed the paper carefully… one bucket did need a little bit of touch up.
For Bug’s more detailed design, I traced the outline onto his bucket just by pushing hard with a pencil. It left a light line embedded in the orange paint. (You could also cover the back of the image with pencil lead to leave a darker line when you trace the image). I then traced the outline for him with a fine point black sharpie pen. He painted in the image with the black paint and a fine pointed brush.
After the buckets dried, Gammy covered them with a couple coats of clear sealer.
The kids now have some super, special buckets to use this halloween. This project also tied in nicely for the Unplugged Challege Theme "J" last week.