science
-
Ultimate list of sensory materials
I have a love/hate relationship with the sensory table. I fully appreciate the awesome educational opportunities that sensory play encourages, and I love that children will spend FOREVER exploring these materials. On the other hand, there’s the mess. It doesn’t matter how deep the bucket is, somehow, whatever is on the table will end up on the floor. In the end, the mess is always worth it. Exploration and discovery always win. I like to switch out the materials in the sensory table often Sometimes I change the actual sensory materials, and sometimes a remove the tools and put in a different kind of tool to see how the children…
-
Happy Earth Day!
Do you have big plans for Earth Day? I’ll be honest, this one kind of snuck up on me, I wasn’t thinking that Easter was so late, and then boom! April is almost over! My class is going to spend the morning outside (crossing my fingers for good weather) cleaning up that yard around our school. Once we’ve picked up as much litter as we can find, we”ll graph it using my Earth Day Graph and Write Freebie – yay for freebies! But that’s not the point of this post. I really wanted to share this great quote with you, it puts Earth Day into perspective for me as a…
-
Easter Leftovers
I hope you had a wonderful Easter! I had a great time relaxing with my family, the highlight of my weekend was our amazing weather, I spent much of Sunday soaking up some sunshine on my parents back porch and it was perfect! I don’t know about you, but I have a ton of leftovers, and i’m not talking about ham, mostly, I mean jelly beans. Thank goodness I love them, but that usually means I end up eating the entire bag by myself. My solution to this is to take them to school. My kiddos did a lot of jellybean math last week – patterning, counting, tallying, graphing, but…
-
Science is art
I’ve seen this experiment on Pinterest a million times, I actually remember doing this same experiment in my 8th grade science class. I could tell you a lot of things about that class, but I couldn’t tell you why we did this experiment. The idea is simple, you pour milk in a shallow bowl and drop food coloring into the milk, then use a toothpick dipped in dish soap to swirl the colors. The concept that the experiment teaches is surface tension, and the idea that the soap glides through the milk, swirling the colors without actually mixing them. This was all over my kiddos’ heads, but they loved it…
-
Weather basics – an experiment
This weather experiment is super easy, and I’ve done it with my classes for the last few years, but my kids love a good science experiment, and are super into weather, so I got it out again. It’s pretty basic, you fill a clear container with water and top the water off with shaving cream, the shaving cream is supposed to be a cloud. Then you put a few drops of food coloring (blue is suggested because it is supposed to be like rain, but I usually let the kids choose whatever color they want) on top of the cloud, and eventually the food coloring will saturate the cloud and…
