Fireworks printing

We were lucky enough to watch some fireworks from our back room one night which is likely to be the only way we watch them for a while as Tara is extremely sensitive to loud noises, even a police siren passing has her leaping for a cuddle!
The following day we made our own fireworks with an old stocking/pantyhose filled with lentils or soup mix tied up. She dipped it into the pain then printed it on the paper

Makes a great effect and useful for wrapping paper-these will be saved for Christmas! Just rinse the stocking with warm water and let dry. We have reused it may times.

Printing practice

These free printing practice worksheets are fab!
http://www.kidzone.ws/prek_wrksht/dynamic.htm
Started with the most basic straight lines but staying on them was very tricky.

Never give up attitude made it all the way to the end!

Had a go at diagonal lines too

Straw jewlery

Threading is a great lesson to learn and why not make it fun with some coloured straws cut into age appropriate sizes, a length of elastic and make a necklace or bracelet. This was a birthday gift we sent to our 4 yr old cousin.

Self rewarding!

Tara told me it looked like a hexagon bracelet!

ABC Reading Eggs

Have another product rap! I stumbled across "ABC Reading Eggs"
http://www.readingeggs.com/
and thought we would take the 2 week free trial. Its the first real "game" i have introduced Tara to on the computer after reading conflicting advice about computers for under 3's but most preschools these days have them and this is a fantastic educational program

With the use of repetition, funny characters and rewards this program catches the attention and is Australian made so has English accents. It is marketed to 4yrs+ but Tara had no trouble with the single alphabet letters and sounds. Great way to start practising manuevering a mouse and keyboard too!

Golf tees and marbles

This activity involves some plasticine,golf tee's, a hammer and some small marbles. First is it hammer all the tee's into the plasticine as straight as possible.

Next is to balance a marble on top of the tee.Takes great patience and concentration.

Just hope daddy isn't looking for his golf tees anytime soon!

Bath grip bead transferring

Sorry for the shocking photo but this tray is made up of a container of rounded gems/balls/beads, a baby's safety bath grip turned upside down and a pair of tweezers. The idea is to transfer the beads individually over to each suction cap on the grip with the tweezers without dropping them. The rounder the bead the harder it is to get a hold of them and the pressure applied to the tweezers needs to be firm to carry them but not too firm or they will flick off.
I caught Tara in the middle of this activity while i was busy doing something else so usually it should be done at a table.

Depressor stick counting

I found some great tongue depressors at the chemist and they come in handy for so many activities, wooden texture is great for little fingers to feel and so cheap!
This activity involves sticking coloured circles on the sticks and writing in felt tip at the bottom how many stickers are on each one.
Tara then had a bunch of small pom poms she had to place over the matching coloured stickers and count. This helps with the recognition of the number which lately we have been stumbling with since learning to count backwards it all gets a little muddled again.
I chose for the first time to give her the exact number of coloured pom poms so she could self correct but in time just giver her a bowl of assorted colours to increase the difficulty

It was great fun and it still is a favourite she chooses off the shelf herself!

Paper plate fish

We started with our salad spinning plates and i cut out a triangle section from the plate while talking to Tara about the circle plate shape and the triangle shape that would be his tail.
I stapled around the edges of the plate(you can insert dress makers wadding inside for a puffier fish!) and placed the tail on the end and stapled. Tara chose some eyes for each side and tied a string to the top to hold him.


After reading "the rainbow fish" by Marcus Pfister we added some glitter by using glitter pens and a small paint brush. Some more Rainbow fish activities are found at http://www.dltk-teach.com/books/rainbowfish/

Salad spinning plates

I saw this link on the "Teach Preschool" facebook page

http://artexperiencesfortots.wordpress.com/2010/05/26/salad-spinner/

As i know how much Tara loves her paint i thought we would give it a go. First the opening of the poster paints proved a great challenge but i let her do it all herself, controlling myself not to help her. In time, she opened the lid, squeezed a spot onto the paper plate which was placed inside the salad spinner and closed the lid and did this for each colour paint

She then put the lid on the top with some help and with all her might made the salad spinner spin as fast as she could. We played "Faster,Faster,Stop" for about ten minutes!

We took the lid off and .....

We did a few more then hung them up to dry

We looked at the bowl of the salad spinner and found a gorgeous design that the paint had made.

Trying not to be wasteful, we thought of trying to press some paper against the bowl to make a print of it. We tried a few times but the bowl's shape meant the effect just didn't work

So Tara decided to finger paint instead-problem solved!

Check out our "Paper Plate Fish" blog to see how we used our spinning paper plates to make sparkly rainbow fish!

Water doodle

Just thought id give a product a rap! My gorgeous mother gave this to Tara and it is a fantastic activity. The pen opens up and you fill it with water and replace the tip. The pen then is used like a normal pen and the water makes the colour appear on the pages. Great no mess activity that had her attention for hours!

http://cgi.ebay.com.au/Dora-Explorer-WATER-WOW-Doodle-Game-Book-NEW-/120601644923?cmd=ViewItem&pt=AU_Toys_Hobbies_Character_Toys&hash=item1c146b0f7b

Its reusable, just let it dry out and you can "colour" again! Great gift!

Glove cow milking

We had started the Brightly Beaming Resources "letter of the week curriculum" and were up to week 3 letter "C" when we did Cow milking with a plastic glove. We have since done it 3 more times and it is so much fun and a great way to entice your toddler into eating breakfast cereal if they get to milk their own cow straight into a cereal bowl!
We have a wooden farm house and firstly got our cows out to talk about the udder and teats then took the wooden bucket outside and filled it up.
Many other homeschooling sites use plain water but i used 50/50 milk/water so the liquid was more visible.

It was messy,fun and took concentration to get the milk in the tiny bucket. Tara told me "Mum, I'm a great farmer!"

Paper plate butterfly

Tara asked to do some painting in the sunshine as it had been a wet week so all i could find around the house was a toilet roll and paper plate so we created a butterfly.

After painting the roll and plate we spoke about butterfly antennae and how they use them as a nose, Tara pretended her piggy tails were antennae.

We then added coloured matchsticks to the wings and spoke about symmetry so she made sure the colours were symmetrical

Tara then used sticky tape to hold the wings and body together, added the antennae and glued some eyes on

The finished result was flitter fluttering around our house for days!

Block patterns

These block pattern cards come from
http://confessionsofahomeschooler.blogspot.com/2009/12/pattern-block-activity-printables.html
Erica has an amazing website and we look forward to starting her letter of the week curriculum next year. I downloaded these cards and laminated them and Tara matched the wooden shapes to the cards. The wooden shapes are found at
http://www.teachingtoys.com.au/catalogue/product.php/39/12/1247

Cupcake decorating

Cupcake making is always on the cards at our house. We all have a sweet tooth but there is nothing sweeter than seeing my lil munchkin's pure concentration while decorating her cupcake. I just put a small amount of icing and Nemar's brand 100's & 1000's(not as colourful but no artifical colours/flavours)

This is one activity that it is about the process AND the product..YUM!

Dropper water transferring

This is a classic Montessori activity that is always a hit-we couldn't even wait to get out of our PJ's to start it!

I found the glasses at a dollar store, i think they are short black glasses and the dropper is plastic from a chemist. Our plastic trays are from "Sam's warehouse" and are a great size for her to handle. I lined the tray with some non slip material and had a small hand towel aside for her to wipe any spills. Tara chose food colouring in her favourite colour red and i added a few drops to the water. I showed her myself first how to squeeze,release,move then squeeze and she seemed to get it right away

It was interesting to watch her start with her right hand but then change to her left.

As you can see she was very proud of herself when done and of course wanted to keep going so i asked her to use her hands to pour the water back in the glass

Balancing gems

I found this activity on a few homeschool websites and thought we would give it a go! Easy to prepare just a paddlepop stick and some gems. I explained the two sides of the gems being flat and rounded and that the flat surface needed to balance on the stick but she insisted that she could make them balance on the rounded sides too!

She completed it very quickly and wanted to do more so i suggested she make a "T" for Tara and she did

This has been a great activity that she keeps pulling off our shelf to complete alone. I'm sure we will use them to create more letters later on.

Bird watching

We moved into our house a year ago now and have watched the seasonal birds come and go during the year. It has been amazing! I thought bird watching would be a great activity to do together so we firstly made our binoculars by painting

Then threading,

Then we where ready to go!

We spotted plenty of birds..plovers,willy wag tails,minors, grass parrots, magpies, and a few more we had to get daddy to name for us (daddy knows everything animal related!). I had downloaded a bird watching chart which i had planned to do but as with most things whatever we start out doing turns into something else and instead we observed the dam water and spoke about floating and sinking objects

We tested feathers,sticks,leaves, and grass. It was a gorgeous day and its moments like these that i feel blessed to enjoy with my daughter :)