Nature Scavenger Hunt

Thanks to Pinterest, I have been able to find all sorts of things to do with the girls.  One thing I found was a nature scavenger hunt.  You can find several links if you search pinterest.  Here are some of the pictures that I took before my camera died.  It was a ton of fun!  We were on our hunt for nearly 2 hours! 

Every good scavenger hunt needs a pair of binoculars.  I glued 2 toilet paper rolls together and they decorated them with tissue paper. 

 

Ready to go with the list, bag and binoculars.

Here are our lists.  I tried to put things on it that I knew we would be able to find in our neighborhood.

Reading the list....sideways:)

Ohh, I found a stick-which was later fed to my dog....

Princess Lila checking out the neighborhood

I found something blue!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kool aid paint

 Well, clearly this is really old since it has been extremely dry and hot these days!  There was a day where it rained all day.  The girls started to go nuts from being trapped inside.  It was one of those days where they were fighting about everything.  I remembered that I had bought kool aid-actually generic- to try to paint with. 

First, I dumped several different flavors of the kool-aid into muffin liners.  It was VERY dusty!  I would recommend NOT doing this with the kids.  We kept sneezing.

I gave them each poster board pieces.  I used the poster board because it is thicker.  I figured regular paper would rip easily.  I didn't have watercolor paper.  I would probably work better.

They both then spread the different powders across their papers.

It was pretty messy but on the plus side, the kitchen smelled good for days:)

Once they were happy with the powder, I put the papers outside on the deck in the rain.

They were so excited to go outside in the rain to check out what was going on.  It was raining pretty hard at one point.

This was the beginning.....

A little more wet...

This was the finished product.  We probably could have let it spread a little more but the girls were impatient and they decided  that the pictures were done.  

 

 

 

 

The project turned out pretty cute and provided an hour of entertainment.  Next time, I would use water color paper and make sure that the powder is in a thin layer on the paper.  The piles turned into pretty cool "mountains" on the paper.  The colors would spread more if it was thinner, I think.  Also, I would avoid the grape flavor.  It looked more like black than purple. 

The Napping House

One of our favorite books is the Napping House by Audrey Wood.  If you are not familiar with it, it is a really cute book to get to know.  It is great for sequencing skills and retelling.  I found pictures in one of my old Mailbox magazines from 2002 that correlated with the story.  Here is what we did: 

The first thing that the girls did was color their characters and bed from the story.  After that, they cut them out and taped them to blocks.

This is Lila retelling the story.  The bed is on the bottom and each character gets added one by one.  Each character that gets added is smaller than the one before.  The book uses great adjectives to describe how each character is sleeping.  Once the house is built, the flea makes everyone fall off of the bed:)

The next thing that we did was to create a sequence chain ordering the the characters from smallest to largest.  This was a piece of cake for Lila and it was surprisingly easy for Sophia too.

Phia's finished product!

Lila's finished product!

The last thing that we did was to recall the adjectives used in the book to describe how each character was sleeping.  We then added some additional ones of our own.   I encourage the girls to use different words when we are going to sleep.  Tonight the girls are going to hibernate:)

Mouse Paint-color mixing

It was another gloomy day and I needed to find something to do fast to avoid the bickering in the house.  I searched through my collection of books for inspiration.  I found the book Mouse Paint by Ellen Stoll Walsh.  I decided today was a good day to explore how to mix colors using primary colors.  After reading the book, we created 3 cups of colored water-red, yellow and blue.  We pretended that cotton balls were our white mice and started dipping them into the water.  First they created a red, yellow and blue cotton ball.  I read the book and the girls followed what the mice did in the book.  For example, the red mouse jumps around in a yellow puddle so we dipped the red cotton ball in the yellow cup.  We changed the cotton balls from red, yellow and blue to orange, green and purple.   Lila loved it.  Sophia was more concerned with the mess that it was making on her hands. 

As a follow up activity, I told the girls that they were going to be the mice this time.  I rolled up their pants and let their feet do the mixing.  It was very messy but fun!

Beerless pong-word family addition

Ha!  I bet that got your attention.  We have been working on reading word families these days.  We have decided to start with the -at family.  Lila spends a lot of time bouncing ping pong balls around for the cat to chase.  I thought it would be fun to bounce balls into cups.  Maybe I am missing college these days:)  I wrote a different word on each ping pong ball.  I then set the cups up in the shape of a triangle.  We played 2 different ways:  1) I would say a word (ie bat).  They would have to find the word, read it back to me and then try to bounce it into a cup.  If the ball didn't go in, they had to read the word again before bouncing it again.  2)  They chose the ball that they wanted and had to read the word to me before they could bounce it in a cup.  It was sooooooo much fun!  We played for well over an hour.  Lila pretty much has the -at family down pat!

The other thing that we have been playing is "-at family memory."  I printed off picture cards and words of the -at family.  Lila had to match the word to the correct picture.

The cards came from www.littlebooklane.com