Beginning of our Halloween Week

We began our Halloween week this week a little different...with a Halloween snack!

The kiddos loved them!

Next, we made a paper plate witch:

Such a fun witch!

We also brought out some of the orange playdough:

A great way to start our Halloween week!  Julian kept asking where our sensory bin was...guess that will make an appearance tomorrow ;)

Wrapping up Weather Week

For our last day of weather week, we combined several different weather elements on butcher paper.  We did some rain with some paintbrushes and water:

We did some clouds using cotton balls:

And we made the sun by using yellow pipe cleaners:

We made sure to keep an eye out for the time and, when it was close to the sunset, we ran into the living room to catch the rainbows.  We even stood in front of them so that we could have rainbows on us!

What a great way to end weather week!

Weather Week: Yellow Sun Painting with Q-Tips

Continuing with our weather week, we worked on some yellow suns today:

We painted them with Q-tips!

Julian decided that the Q-tip technique wasn't working fast enough:

So he rubbed his hand all over it instead:

Which turned out very cool!

Weather Week: Rainbows with Cereal

As part of our weather week, we enjoyed making a rainbow out of some cereal I specifically bought for this activity.  Now, we never have cereal like this, so I was hoping the kiddos wouldn't even know to eat it, but of course the first thing they did was ask for a bowl ;)

But the rainbows were pretty! :)

Beginning of our Weather Week Fun

We started out our weather week this Monday and we've been really enjoying it:

We particularly loved making clouds in vases.  Super easy with some colored water (food coloring in water), some droppers or pipettes, and shaving cream on top of water in a vase:

  

Making more clouds in vases today:

Spelling out clouds in cotton balls:

We also made a tornado in a bottle.  We simply used a 2L bottle of water, mixed in a little bit of coloring and a little bit of soap.  Swirl it around until you get a tornado!

We also painted clouds with special cloud puffy paint:

You just need to mix shaving cream and glue:

Our clouds:

Wait for the puffy paint to dry overnight, and you are left with the coolest feeling clouds!  We also read this book about 10 times today!

It's about a sweet little cumulus who thinks she might be too small to do important cloud things until one day she comes across a frog who needs more water for his pond.  :)

Black Paper Plate Snake and Cat

Today we made some black paper plate snakes:

Simply cut a black paper plate (or you can paint a plate black) in a circular motion until you reach the middle:

Attach some googly eyes and a tongue and you're done!
 

These snakes are huge hits around here :)

We then made a black cat also using black paper plates:

You use the same plate for all the parts of the cat:

I didn't get a picture of the final product, but hopefully you can get the idea:

What a super fun black week!

SET: The Magic of a Black Marker

Science Experiment Thursday (SET) included the color of the week

Monkey J loves magic, so he was excited when I told him that a black marker had some magical properties.  We started off using a coffee filter, but it didn't work very well, so we moved on to a paper towel.  For this experiment, you will need:

-Paper Towel
-Bowl of water
-Black Marker (not permanent)

Have your little scientist color on one end of the paper towel with the black marker:

Place the paper towel in the  bowl with the coloring on the top:

You can watch the water "creep up" the towel:

And as it does, the black breaks up into different colors:
 

Monkey J loved to see the different colors emerge:

 Which naturally meant we had to do the same thing with different colored markers:

So how does it work?  Well, surprise!  We are using chromatography again, just like last week, to separate the pigments of the marker.  By placing the ink in water, we are creating a medium for which the pigments can travel.  The rate at which each pigment travels on water varies, so that's why we see the colors that were used to make black appear.  To explain it to Monkey J for now, I simply told him that we mix together different colors to make black ;)

Black Week Activities

We've been having so much fun exploring the color black.  We painted black spiders from egg cartons:

This was before we added the two additional legs (black pipe cleaners) to make it a spider ;)

We did some pipe cleaner colander play:

As well as silhouette painting:

Monkey J really enjoyed drawing his lovey:

We then cut out our hand-prints and footprint from some black glitter paper I had:

Added some googly eyes:

And made some bats!

Black Week

We started off our Black Week with our sensory bin:

I used black beans as the base and found as many black objects as I could...it was tough as not many kid toys are black!

Monkey A loves any bin that involves beans...

I then had Monkey J fill in the letter "B" for black with black construction paper pieces:

He was pretty excited by the results:

I put some black paint, some water, and some cornmeal in a bowl and we painted with it
Cornmeal paint:
-Cornmeal
-Tempura paint
-A touch of water

Seems like we will have an awesome black week!

Harvest Moon

We talked a lot about the harvest moon; the harvest moon actually typically occurs in late September and is called the harvest moon because the farmers are able to work late into the night due to the light from the moon.  But since we are dong Harvest week now, we made our own harvest moons. 

What you will need:
-Black Bingo markers or black water color
-Some water
-Coffee filters

You want to dip the Bingo marker into the water first before blotting the filter.  The filter allows for the most beautiful markings: 

Continue until you fill up your moon:

Let dry:

And you have your harvest moon!