Fun with Water

Nature Detectives with Mother Goose Time

Mystery in the Water

Water definitely is the most fun of all the components of nature. Water makes mud, it can be manipulated and moved in many different ways, it can be cold or hot, water can be hard ice or liquid and so much more. There are infinite ways to explore water.

With Mother Goose Time, we explored water in different ways with our friends.

The boys started the hot morning with measuring water with our weight scale. They used the small weights and tried to make the balance even by adding or taking away water in the second bucket.

Little Miss had a great time exploring water with pouring water from a watering can into a container and taking a drink.

Since the boys were too busy, I drew a target on the house and had them throw large wet pompoms to try to get them to stick to the target. That was a fun game. The little girls were able to get the pompoms to stick much better, since they gently tossed it. The boys would hurl it as hard as they could and it would just bounce right off.

This art project was difficult for me to watch. I combined 2 different art projects into one and glued the umbrella cutout to a larger white piece of paper. Then made the primary colors in water paints and we used the eyedroppers from MGT to squirt paint onto the umbrella page... like it was raining.

However, the boys made huge puddles on their papers. It was a mess. I was trying so hard to not freak out and clean up the activity right away.

But, I let them squirt or drip water for longer than I had patience for. Then decided that they should absord all that water paint with a paper towel. After wiping away the water, some color was left behind and they did look rather neat.

Little Miss worked on her fine motor skills while practicing sucking up the water with the eyedropper and then squeezing it onto her paper. She had a great time with the boys making a mess.

An Invitation to Create included in the week about water was to make a treasure picture. Treasure is sure to be hiding in water and we had fun talking about the different ways that treasure would end up in the water... Crashes, pirates, airplanes sinking were all ideas that the boys came up with.

MGT included paper that looked like the bottom of the ocean and some plastic jewels.

Mr A covered his paper with all the jewels he could find and some extras. His area of the ocean floor was covered. He said his treasure came from a pirate ship that got blown up.

We love playing with and esploring what water can do. Since its been so hot here at home, it was extra fun to cool off in.

Take Flight ...

Nature Detectives with Mother Goose Time

Week 2 ... Mystery in the Air

We love these manipulatives from Mother Goose Time that we got this month... the Link Strips. Unfortunately half of them have already been lost. Mysteriously misplaced. It's so annoying. But, while they were around, Little Miss had a great time pulling them apart. She's still too little to fit them together properly. I would connect all of the same color and then she would pull them apart.

Meanwhile, Mr A and Mr Z were copying the shape pattern cards. Mr Z likes to make his own creations and ended up with some multi-tools, as he called them. That's how they disappeared, its the multi-tool's fault.

Since many things fly in the air, we made birds using feathers and paperplates. Mr A found the nametags to copy the bird on it. He cut it out and colored it.

Little Miss is always on the table interfering with what the boys are up to... or trying to help.

Little Miss likes gluing like her brother, Mr Z used to. She piles on the glue and layers things on top of it. She had a mountain of feathers on her bird.

 I love her concentration face. Watching glue drizzle is satisfying.

Mr A finished his small bird and wrote his name on his nametag. Mr Z did too. I couldn't get the other kids participate in many MGT activities, it was frustrating that they didn't want to join us in our activities and crafts.. they wanted to play instead which made it difficult for everyone in the end.

Now that we have time this week without friends, we will go back to complete some of the things we didn't get to with them here.

It's funny how you think 3 kids is hard until you have 5 to watch for awhile. Perspective. I'm grateful for my little ones. Even though they are difficult sometimes, I am grateful for my people. I love how they work together. I like that they do have some manners. I like that they're interested in many different things and will explore them. I love their personalities. 

"Are We Still Naturing?"

Nature Detectives with Mother Goose Time

Week 1 .... Mystery in the Trees

We've had friends over a lot lately, so why not do Mother Goose Time with them. I thought it was a good idea and so did my 7 year old, Mr A. But, I didn't think that it would be as hard or frustrating as it was. Doing semi-structured activities with kids that aren't used to it, is tricky.

We had a fun time anyway... I think. And here's what we did while learning about trees.

Nature walks galore with the MGT magnifying glass for investigations.

Exploring different bushes and trees.

While all the kids were running around in a network of bushes and trees, I heard Mr Z yell, " Are we still Naturing right now?" That made me smile... Naturing. Yep, we are always Naturing.

We read the book of the month called Get Close to Nature! A Guessing Book. Only one kid listened... half way through the book. But we did find real mushrooms nearby as we read it.

Sometimes, the book falls apart. But now we can play 'Find the matching pages'.

Mr A found a fallen bird nest. We noticed how this one is made from one material and loosely woven. It is much different than the tight, compact, tiny hummingbird nest in our front yard.

Mr A enjoyed this stick that Little Miss found. He calls them Stick Tweezers and used them to pick a giant mushroom.

He also found these small flowers on a tree that remind me of Sea Stars.

The kids were looking up and down and all around. They dug under a big rock for while to look for worms. They did find a few and relocated to our tomato plants.

Mr A was the only one to make a peanut butter bird feeder. MGT time provided the seeds and pinecones. The others were off playing and climbing trees.

Little Miss helped dump the seeds everywhere though.

Mr A found a huge seed from a tree while on one of our nature walks. He wanted to see what the inside looked like and tried to cut it open with a kitchen knife, but it didn't work very well. Mr A noticed rather quickly that the shell was a very hard and felt like wood. He had his dad help saw it open. He found a large meaty seed in the middle, it reminded me of a macadamia, but bigger.

The Tree Bingo game to help recognize numbers. I was going to make it a bit more challenging for Mr A and have him tell me an addition or subtraction fact to go along with the number that was pulled. But, Little Miss is destructive and gets her hands and feet in the way.
While playing this we talked about the types of things that grow on trees. Since we had yellow, orange and red markers for the game, our trees looked like multi-fruit trees.

Sometimes there are mistakes in the curriculum. It happens. If we were to play black-out for the Tree Bingo game, 2 people would either have an advantage or disadvantage. One of the bingo cards has 2 number 3's and another has a 22. There are no number 22 cards since everything goes up to 20 ... ?

This was an interesting activity that didn't really work out as planned. We were suppose to make a tree with rainbow leaves. We had a rainbow spinner to spin the color to paint. We were suppose to take turns spinning the wheel to end up with a rainbow tree. Everyone had their own tree and it was supposed to work out in my mind. However, after one time around the table, I knew the spinner was not going to work out.
Kids were spinning the same color and waiting for the paintbrush for that color. One kid freaked out and threw a fit because he spun a color other than green for the leaves. So after the spinner idea didn't go as planned, I told them to paint their trees however they'd like.

This is what the pictures of rainbow trees ended up like.

We had a fun few days with trees. We had several discussions about trees and got outside several times to go exploring.

These Shapes are Fish

Using tweezers is always fun and great fine motor practice.
We explored water some more. Its been hot and water makes anyone happy when its hot. I gathered up our foam shapes and tweezers from Mother Goose Time and the shape cards we used a few days ago. The shapes were in a shallow pan of water. Mr A began picking some shapes out with his tweezers. I flipped over a shape card and he found all of that shape and transferred them to another bin of water.

They did this process for each shape card. While they were transferring the foam shapes, Mr A says We have to do it fast. They're fish. The fish will die if they stay out of the water too long. We need to keep them safe and put them back in the water.

Mr Z did a great job at picking out the shapes that were pictured on the card. Even though he doesn't know the name of all of his shapes, he can match them. If he accidentally picked up the wrong one, he knew it wasn't right and fished around for the correct one. I was impressed.

Another MGT activity we did was observe what happens to ice in the sun. We received these story cards to follow. Mr A remembered that he had water already frozen in the freezer, so they found a hot spot in the sun to leave the cups of ice. (We let these sit while we did the foam shapes activity.)

The ice melted quickly while we were busy doing other things. Before we could let the water evaporate over a little bit more time, the boys had the remaining ice dumped out and were smashing it all up with plastic knives and throwing them on the sidewalk. 

So, from playing in water to smashing ice, anything that has to do with water is always fun.