Making Pudding

Now that I am feeling a little better (and able to go in the kitchen again after 7 weeks of not entering that room), I am trying to cook more with O. Making instant pudding was a quick and easy way to get back into the kitchen with my girl. By the way, O is wearing a bathing suit and bathing suit cover up :) She rarely wears play clothes since bathing suits, leotards, and costumes are so much more fun!

Making a Sink/Float Bottle

O and I had a great time make a sink/float bottle this week. I gathered various objects for the bottle while she was napping, and she was ready to do our project when she woke up!
I filled the bottle about 2/3 full with water, and here are the objects that we put into the bottle. I also had a rubberband, but O insisted that it belonged on the doorknob, not in the bottle. Before she put each object in the bottle, we predicted whether the object would sink or float.




After we put all of the objects in the bottle, we talked about which objects surprised us :) We were surprised by the beads since 1 of them sank, 2 floated, and 1 sank and then rose back to the surface to float. I was also surprised that the bear floated. She loves to roll the bottle across the floor and watch the objects sink or float to the surface.









O went a little overboard with the glitter, and she was excited to use her vacuum to clean up!

1 to 1 Correspondence Activity Kit

I recently checked out this 1 to 1 correspondence activity kit from the library, and we have really enjoyed it. 1 to 1 correspondence is something that we still need to work on. O starts counting well, but then she speeds up and she loses the 1 to 1 correspondence.
The first activity that we did was sorting bears. We did this together since O insisted that we sort all of the bears, and there are more than a hundred.


 
Our favorite part of the kit is the number puzzle. O counts the objects in each set and matches the correct numbers to the set of objects. O got a little off track while counting, but she did fine when I helped her point to the objects.


 

Loving the Rice Pit

 
O was THRILLED to play in her rice pit today! She hasn't played in it in a while since we've had rainy weather lately. She took all of the tools from her lentil tray to the rice pit and played independently for a long time. If you have a screened porch, I highly recommend having a rice pit for hours and hours of fun! Just make sure to keep it covered when it rains because you do NOT want your rice to get wet...it turns into a mess of mildew and yuckiness!

Water Transfer & Color Mixing

I planned on doing a green water transfer for St. Patrick's Day, but then Shannon suggested mixing colors as well, and I realized what a great idea that was! Thanks, Shannon! I love that I am a mommy during this time of great blogs and email :) All of the ideas and support on my online mommy friends makes our lives so much easier and more fun!

First, O squeezed a few drops of food coloring into 3 different glasses. Then she poured water into the glasses. It was fun to watch the water change color as she poured it in, and she said "Ohhh. Beautiful!"

 
Then I showed her how to use the dropper to transfer a little bit of water to each bowl. I was surprised by how well she did with this because we have not done water transferring in a few months.

 
She then added blue water to the yellow water to make green! She was VERY impressed!

 
She kept adding colors until the water turned brown. Then we tried red and blue to make purple.

 
After she was finished experimenting with color mixing, we went outside and picked flowers to try our science experiment again. We put a white flower in each color, and we're hoping they'll change colors :)


     

Another Block House

Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing
O and Guh-guh love building block houses on Thursdays! They used most of her sets of blocks to make this huge house, including her Unit Blocks, Twig blocks, and Rainbow Blocks.(I'm planning to review the rainbow blocks soon. DON'T buy these blocks until you read my review if you want to make an informed decision!) This fancy house has a library, a bed, and a telephone. O was VERY proud, and we left the house (in the middle of our den!) for several days before putting the blocks back in their containers.

Wednesday Morning

O wasn't interested in her Montessori activities this morning, but she did enjoy cleaning the windows!

She then made a hospital bed on our coffee table. She doing a little self-diagnosis in this picture.

It always amazes me how quickly the morning passes! I had SO many things that I wanted to do today with O, and they just didn't happen.

Matching Upper and Lowercase Letters

O asked to match upper and lowercase letters a couple of weeks ago, and she and Guh-guh have been having fun with it ever since! Guh-guh is good at making everything fun and incorporating singing and dancing into almost everything she does with O! What lucky girls O and M are to have such a devoted Guh-guh!

Cotton Ball Collage

The idea for this activity came from Young at Art by Susan Striker. I gave the girls a bowl of cotton balls (I cut the cotton from medicine bottles to make the cotton balls since Guh-guh didn't have any) and a bowl of diluted glue. They dipped the cotton into the glue and made cloud collages on their construction paper.

This was a quick and fun art activity. We talked about the contrasting colors of black and white. Although O has known her colors for quite a while, she still sometimes confuses black and white, which I think is somewhat strange :) We also talked about the different textures of the cotton verses the paper. I'm looking forward to doing a texture collage with O soon!

I Spy!

After several false starts, I finally made an I Spy game board for O! Thanks to Cara for this fun idea! It was easy to make...just cut pictures from magazines and glue them to a piece of construction paper. I wanted O to help me cut out the pictures, and she did the first time (last week). Then I left the pictures at home when we went out of town. So I tried to get O and M to help cut out pictures a second time. O lost interest quickly. Finally, I decided to just do the whole thing without stopping while I watched tv at G & G's house (they have cable, so after O goes to sleep I watch TOO much tv!). O and M had fun playing I Spy on Wednesday afternoon, but O was a little sleepy, and I think she would enjoy it more on a day that she's had a nap :) M had lots of fun, and I think this will be an activity we will do again soon. Maybe next time the girls will help make the game board!