Alphabet Search Lends a Helping Hand

A few weeks ago I was trying to get a few things done before heading out the door and my kids were going a little wild so I quickly put together this little word search for my son and alphabet search for my daughter. It was so easy to put together and it kept them at the table for a few minutes doing something new just long enough for me to gather our things and get ready to go (and still take some photos of them).

I think this would be great while out because you can make endless versions of it on the fly. Just make sure you carry around paper and markers/colored pencils/pens or whatever. You could do this with shapes, numbers, emotion faces, animals, whatever.

The nice thing about doing it yourself is that you can make the letters larger so that it is easier for the younger kids to see and distinguish differences/similarities. It is a great exercise in sight words, learning the alphabet, matching, and concentration.

Scavenger Hunt

With Earth day coming up I starting thinking about what would be a good way to explore the outside and learn a little bit about the Earth. A while back my kids and I went on a scavenger hunt while on a walk at our local lake. We did this as a way to get outside and explore. I created a little book with each page containing a number (starting at one on page one) and something to search for.

Found a pine cone!

When the kids found one of these things we put a sticker on that page so that we could remember what we had found. We did not fill the entire book because we got distracted by the joy of throwing rocks into the lake but we got a good chunk of the way done and enjoyed finding the different things along our walk.

Another pine cone

Something hard

Another something hard

This is a great activity to help with identifying different aspects of our surroundings. You can use things that you are working on with your kid like colors, weight, texture, length, the possibilities are endless. This is a great aide for learning about almost anything. I made up a little scavenger hunt that would work for just about any day but has a couple of things that lend to making a good list for Earth Day like finding litter (why not take a bag to pick some up along the way, and talk about why it is important not to litter) and finding things that need water (such an important limited resource that ALL living things need to survive and one thing that makes Earth so special).

Here is an example of a scavenger hunt list. You can print this out (I hope) and use small stickers to mark off when you find one of the things on the list.

 Most of all have fun getting outside and exploring :)

Pattern Practice with Fruit

Okay who does not love fruit kabobs? I mean really what is not to love, fresh, healthy, pretty, tasty, I could go on and on. Recently we took the chance to make some fruit kabobs out of very simple ingredients and found that this is a wonderful way to work on patterns. 

Recognizing patterns and creating them is a very important skill to learn and it is something that preschools will usually be teaching children. You can make patterns just about anywhere with anything and it can provide a good source of entertainment too. What better way to work on pattern learning than using fruit (a healthy snack) and making a kabob. Not only will kids find this a fun and yummy activity but it will also help develop fine motor control and provide an educational experience. 

For these kabobs you could use any fruits that you have available and be as creative as you would like. We used grapes, apples cut into small chunks, and a pepino which has white and purple skin. We used popsicle sticks instead of skewers and they worked out just fine.  

Some ideas for this activity:

~ make a few skewers with some missing pieces of fruit and then have your child add the missing pieces in the correct order

~ allow the child to make their own pattern (that is what mine did)

~tell the child part of a pattern and have them create the rest on the popsicle stick

~draw out some pattern cards with colors of the fruit and have the children draw a card and create that card. 


What kind of pattern activities do you do with kids? 

St. Patrick's Day Craft

We are not actually very big into St. Patrick's Day. In fact I usually completely forget about it because my brother-in-law's birthday is the same day and I think of it as his birthday instead! However, this year my son has some things going on in school that have to do with it including a leprechaun that is coming to give "luck".

Well this has me thinking more about St. Patrick's Day. I was doing a rainbow craft with the kids anyway so I decided to add a St. Patrick's Day theme to it. 

We started out talking about rainbows and how they occur. We talked a lot about rain splitting the light of the sun and how it is necessary to have both sun and rain to get a rainbow (yeah for science!).  

We also talked about the colors in the rainbow (leaving out indigo we will have to go into that more later). We did all of this talking while were actually doing the craft itself. 

When we were making the pot of "gold" for the end of the rainbow (making it St. Patrick's Day themed) and how some people think that if you can find the end of the rainbow you will find a pot of gold. We talked a little about St. Patrick's Day coming up and how it is a kind of Irish myth that this can happen. I decided to talk this time to talk with them about what is most important to us, and it is not gold. 

Friends, family, and love are more important to us than money/gold because it is something that makes us feel really good, so we talked about that. I feel like really important to talk about this due to how materialistic our surroundings are and this was a great way to fit this talk in with a craft. 

My daughter is a little young to actually get what I was telling her and my son was a bit skeptical but talking about it is so important. Due to love being what we find more important we put hearts at the end of the rainbow. 

Here is the finished craft: 

 What you need:

White paper
Yarn
Hole punch
Scissors
Cotton balls or tissue paper
Paints/markers/crayons 
Egg carton
Pipe cleaner
Glue
Foam Hearts (or some other "gold" for inside the egg carton)

What to do:

1. First you need to prep. I cut out the clouds from two pieces of copy paper holding them together and then punched holes around the outside of the cloud while holding the two pieces of paper together. This helps to keep them lined up and matching in size, shape, and location of the holes. I am sure that older kids (even my sons age) could do this but that is not what we did this time. 

2. We drew lines for each of the colors of the rainbow on a piece of white paper so that the colors would end up in the correct shape. 

3. Paint the colors on the page (or color with crayon/marker). 

 4. While the paint dries cut a long piece of yarn, tape one end up so that it can be more easily threaded through the holes. Tie the other end through a pair of holes on the clouds. Sew the cloud up leaving a few open when you get close to the end. 

5. Stuff cotton balls or tissue paper into the cloud. Finish sewing up the cloud and tie it off. 

6. Glue the cloud to the rainbow (you can cut the rainbow out so there is not any white on the edges of the paper if you like, or use blue paint to make sky behind the cloud). 

 7. Next using one egg carton section create the pot by using green or black to color it. 

8. Glue your "gold" inside the "pot", we used foam hearts. 

9. Punch two holes directly across from each other on the egg carton and one hold at the bottom of the rainbow. Put a pipe cleaner through one hole, then through the hole at the bottom of the rainbow, and then through the second hole on the pot to make a handle. 

10. Hang it up! 

This craft is great for fine motor skills, vocabulary building, learning colors, science awareness, cultural awareness, and talking about the importance of family/friends. 

You can find the dot paints we used at the link below:
                                          

A great rainbow book is this one:
                                                               





Or if you are looking for one that is more science oriented but very kid friendly I recommend this one: 
                                             


One of my absolute favorite children's books for spring and rainbows is this one:
                                             

What kinds of things are you doing with your kids for St. Patrick's Day? What are your family traditions surrounding it?

A Science Museum Outing: OMSI

In Portland, Oregon finding a good indoor activity for the winter is essential. Our family has found that over almost all other places OMSI (the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry) is the best place to go if we are spending our day inside. OMSI has something for every age group, and I do mean every age group, from infants to adults. 


OMSI has been around for as long as I can remember, in fact I can remember going there as a child with my Father. It used to be located by the zoo but moved years ago to increase the space inside. There are two stories of great educational but fun interactive science exhibits showcasing biology, engineering, chemistry, physics and more. We have two main places that we love to go and visit every time we are at OMSI. These are the Science Playground which is designed especially for kids ages 0 to 6 and Turbine Hall. 

Turbine Hall has water rockets, orbit tables, both a physics lab and chemistry lab, a room where you build ball launchers, a few water tables where to create and test out different types of boats (sail or paddle), and more. The Science Playground was recently given a makeover of sorts and now contains a brand new water play area and quite reading tent. It also has a forest discovery area where kids can pretend to be a chip monk dressing up and hiding acorns in a tree, play with puppets, and check out the inside of a cave. There is a sand play area, block building, a shopping and cooking area, and a craft area that also always features either play-doh or gak. There is so much more in this area, I really could go on for pages. 


There is one more permanent exhibit area full of things ranging from live animals like rats, turtles, and snakes, to information about nanotechnology. There is a lot of stuff in this room about the importance of staying healthy and it does a good job of giving hands on ways to help this message sink in while still being fun.


OMSI also has a Submarine tour (you have to be at least 3 to go on), a planetarium featuring a wide variety of shows, the OMNIMAX Theater, a special exhibit that changes every couple of months and a cafeteria that actually has pretty good food.


Our family highly recommends OMSI especially for these dreary winter months.