Waterbead Transferring

Transferring is a basic Montessori principle that is important for different ages and stages for different reasons. Mason is 12 months here and just manages to pick up these slippery wet Waterbeads and place them in the bowl on his right.
When placing an activity out to a child encourage them to work left to right as this will start the skills towards reading and writing.

Water Mixing Experiment

Tara had found one of my books "501 science experiments for kids" on the bookshelf and taken interest in it so we searched through until she found something she thought she could do herself and we came across a mixing experiment.
We filled a bowl of water and added a dropper full of a different liquid to see if it would mix or not mix with the water.
Oil...
Milk...

Dish washing liquid..

Was great to see her really surprised by the outcome. We spoke about hypothesis and conclusions. I'm sure this is the start of many more experiments for us!

Straw-water transferring

Water transferring is always a welcomed activity in our house. This time i set up two glasses. One full of coloured water and a drinking draw cut to about 10cm long. I showed Tara how i put the straw into the liquid then placed my finger on the hole at the top, transferred it into the empty glass and let my finger off the hole to release the liquid without spilling a drop. This required concentration and effort to finish the whole activity but it was so interesting she wanted more!

Sensory balloons

For these you need a balloon,funnel,spoon and whatever sensory item you want to put into your balloon. We used Flour, Rice, Birdseed, Polenta and a flour/water mix
Attach your balloon to your funnel and hold it in place while you use a spoon to transfer your sensory mix into the funnel.

The flour/water mix was the trickiest and messiest to transfer but i like most mums had to remind myself to step back and watch her learn from the process

After i tied them off we sat down and investigated them...how they felt on our feet and in our hands. We named them cranky balls and remembered times when we both felt frustrated and we squeezed them as hard as we could to make us feel better

And we weighed them using scales to see which was heaviest.