Fizzy Heart Love Potion– A Valentine Sensory STEM Activity

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I love a theme. Almost any theme.

It just helps me to personally be more organized. To focus and narrow down what is truly important, which is having healthy, happy and motivated tiny thinkers. So I really want to emphasize the method to my madness, instead of focusing on my super cute tiny thinkers and their cute activity try to really dig deep and look for the connection. Don’t worry, I’ll outline the connection for you.

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We started our Valentines theme off pretty amazingly. We combined two STEM experiments into one and didn’t make a mess of the entire house in the process. I found this sensible sensory experiment using just baking soda, vinegar, food coloring and glitter–I substituted sprinkles, there is enough glitter embedded in our carpet for eternity I’m sure. You can check out the original post here.

Our version went a little like this:

Step #1: Present children with prepared materials and make them wait to touch so you can capture it for all of eternity (& this post.)

Learning:

• The wonderful life skill of patience.

 

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Step #2: Let them decorate the baking soda in the heart with as much food coloring and sprinkles as they reasonably wish.

Learning:

•  Fine motor skills by using both the dropper and the syringe
• Using their imagination and boosting their creativity by decorating
• Color Recognition
• Hand Eye Coordination

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Step #3: Help them to fill a small dropper with vinegar and squeeze some SLOWLY on top of the decorated baking soda heart. Ask them a few questions like:

• Wow, did you hear that fizzy noise?
• Did you see yours change color?
• Does it smell like anything?(other than awful?)*

*I’m a tad biased and do not like the smell of vinegar.

Learning:

• Hand Eye Coordination
• Fine motor skills
• Accessing Senses: Hearing, Sight and Smell
• Patience, yet again

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Step #4: Let them use their 5 senses to explore. (I advise not tasting any of it, but we all know MG2 took a small taste, not only is he “the Hammer” he is also “the Billy Goat.”)

Learning:

• Creativity
• Ingenuity
• Patience
• Focus
• Hand Eye Coordination
• Fine Motor Skills
• Color Recognition
• Sensory Recognition

The list goes on and on!

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To wrap up our Valentines theme, we used funnels and ice cream scoopers to bottle up their creations for a magic “Love Potion” by simply using the now emptied sprinkle containers. In MG1’s you can really see the separation of the baking soda and the vinegar, MG2 went a tad heavier on the sprinkles so the separation isn’t quite as visible.

Another Mama made her own version of “Love Potion,” using the same ingredients and Kool-Aid instead of food coloring. You can see her version here.

By adding a themed activity we not only get to explore new fun things but I have a standard focal point on what skills they’re getting to actually focusing on. The Fizzy Hearts were also a bonus because of the easy clean up, just make sure to use a baking sheet or pizza pan underneath and it rinses clean!

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MG1 and I also did a little imaginary play with shapes. She loves being a doctor and fixing everything and anyone, so after today she is one step closer to her “Doctorate of Shape Recognition.”

Anyway, I picked up these adorable shape puzzle pairs in the Target $1 Spot last year and we love them, but they’ve been used weekly for months! So today I asked MG1 to come up with a game with them. Of course she chose Doctor.

 

We just separated each pair and jumbled them all around on the table, then Dr. MG1 basically just matched each pair focusing on the shapes’ NAME (ex: “Where’s Mr. Circle’s half? Miss Star’s?). We made sure each “patient” had it’s other half and we pretended to put a band-aid on them. She loved it, I loved it. Winner, winner, who’s cooking dinner? Oh wait, I am.

The rest of the day went something like this.

We worked on a few pages from her new workbook I picked up at Aldi yesterday (for $3.99).

 

We also dabbled in various apps for MG2, some of the apps we used were from Tiny Hands. We love all their FREE versions! Just letting him play for a few minutes every other day has improved his hand eye coordination greatly, as well as helping him to learn his colors and develop is language skills. MG1 asked to write in her erasable alphabet book, which was also purchased from target. You can find them just about anywhere. We love the Dollar Tree ones too. Then we went to our library and picked out new books and played the rest of the day.

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It was a pretty simple day, I know it may seem overwhelming if you’re starting out but trust me if you put just a tiny bit of thought in to it and have your materials set up and ready to go when your kiddos are ready you’d be surprised how easy it actually is.

If you and your little ones try out making a “Love Potion”♥ be sure to share it so we can see how theirs turn out too! ♥

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart.”- Proverbs 3:5

 

Go get fizzy with it!

 

 

Groundhogs love Good “Dirt”

Concepts/Skills Attempted:

• Letter Recognition
• Fine & Gross Motor Skills
• Coding/Sorting
• Shapes & Counting
• Language & Literacy by Reading
• Sharing & Teamwork
• Patience (Mainly Mama)

Warning, it’s late for this Mama. If I do not write this now, I will forget everything in the morning. So let’s just jump right in..

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Did you know that another name for a groundhog, is a “whistlepig?” Yeah, me neither. I’m just going to assume that you know groundhogs live in the ground, because Mini Goof #1 picked up on it automatically. And upon her discovery of this, you will now have the pleasure of experiencing our exploration of mainly the letter “G” and some mud, but we will just call it a Groundhog Day Unit–in January for no reason at all.

Our morning started differently today because good Ole’ Mawmaw is here this week. MG1 has to “guide” Mawmaw through every task we do so it makes for an interesting morning.

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I downloaded these really neat FREE Groundhog printables last year, laminated and reused. (Yay no planning!) You can get them here.

Pretty self explanatory, we did a few of the worksheets in the printable:

• The Oh So Fabulous Groundhog Face Shapes
• The Giant “G” Dot Marker Page
• The Lovely Lacing Groundhog Page
• The Terrific Tracing Groundhog Shape Page

There are many more (more like 40) free printables in the downloadable pack. Go, get them. Remember, they’re right here.

Being the exceptional circus ring-mistress that I am, I was only able to capture two pictures of these wonderful printable activities for your viewing pleasure. It is of MG1, in her Santa-PJ attire, showing off her completed laced groundhog (we used pipe cleaners) and the “wittle, gween tail” that she made for her in the back.

Nice PJ’s Mawmaw

See that “wittle gween tail!”

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We then read a few picks of MG2’s and started to lose focus. So we ditched that whistling pig– actually it was If You Give A Pig a Pancake but anyway– we grabbed our trusty light table.

At first we were using some different shapes and sizes of blocks to cover our Tracing Groundhog Page–this worked wonderfully for all of four minutes. But within those four minutes both MG1 & MG2 worked together to separate the shapes into different colors and continued to count how many were in each one, which turned into MG1 arranging different colors into her version of a straight rainbow. Which THEN turned into MG2’s version of..something?

Before we COMPLETELY lost focus, we switched it up and went to our reliable coding..aka penguin patterns with translucent bingo chips. Yes, bingo chips. I wrote a pattern using the letters “ABAB” on each penguins belly, also introducing “C” somewhere in there, at this point I’m surprised I can even find the dry erase marker, when suddenly…BINGO! MG1 rocked her coding patterns! She was soooo proud of herself! Woo-hoo STEM activities! (*STEM= SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING, MATH–Get with it people.)

Winding up that very scholarly modge-podge of events, we had lunch, the mini goofs napped, Mama Goof got a minute to regroup and off we went to explore the fun part about groundhogs..that they live in the dirt? Sure, we will go with that.

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Honestly we just ran around in mud puddles, had to have a wardrobe change per MG1 and finished our learning chronicle by helping to clean up each others messy mud pie hands. They probably learned more in the mud than in lesson plan but hey at least we tried today.

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“But the Lord stood with me and strengthened me” -2 Timothy 4:17

Hope our day influenced yours positively in some way or another, feel free to comment or follow this blog for more highly articulate hilarity. Any positive pointers are greatly appreciated!

Go to bed ya filthy groundhogs.

 

Penguins, Shmeguins

Brrrr.. January.

What better way to spend these drab winter days than learning new concepts and “cute, fluffy, wittle, itty bitty, baby penguins,” as Mini-Goof numero Uno would say.

Cue the first few weeks of January in The Goof Troop household, including lots of coloring and tons of messes as we explored how penguins protect themselves in arctic conditions. We did this using two separate activities.

First, Mini Goof #1, let’s just call her MG1 for short, colored our positively perfect penguin free printable. You can find it here -> https://pin.it/mojsj6eek35p7k

If you do not have a printer or are out of ink like I normally am, get creative! The whole concept of this activity is to let the child color with a CRAYON, which is waxy and will repel the water when sprayed on the penguin, just as a penguins feathers repels water. They will more than likely just love spraying things or each other, possibly you. MG2 enjoyed spraying the carpet, but hey anything that builds those motor skills, right? We also looked at color recognition with each color MG1 chose along with how many colors she used. Warning you now that MG1 is a counter. She will 1,2,3 you all day long.

Anyways, the second activity we dove into was one involving a litttttttle bit of crisco. Don’t worry you don’t need to thaw out any penguins. If you do have penguins in your freezer, well let’s not even go there. So you get your crisco, at least two plastic gloves and some ice water. MG1 had to have gloves for both hands, so we used three gloves total.

Now on your Crisco hand, first put one glove on your eager little learners’ hand and cover that glove hand with crisco! Don’t let any of the glove have air, smother that thang’!

Okay next step, place a clean glove over your toddlers itty bitty, crisco covered hand. If your little one needs a glove for both hands just put one glove and zero crisco on the opposite hand. Now here is the important part. Have your little penguin dive their hands in the ice water and watch their reaction! You can ask them questions about:

• How cold or warm the water is?
• Which hand gets cold the fastest?
• Time them, see how much longer one hand can stay in than the other.

And that my friends is how you teach a toddler the concept of blubber.

At this point in our penguin expedition we chose to clean up and curl up with a few penguin books they had picked out at our library. I made sure to refer to our activities to see if MG1 understood, and being a smart cookie like her Madre she did.

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Our next group of activities involved both kiddos, MG1 & MG2. We just so happened to have this light table lying around, I’m kidding I ordered it here.-> https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01JPD6QZK/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1517167819&sr=8-3&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=light+tracing+table&dpPl=1&dpID=51Oju4EhRGL&ref=plSrch

*You do NOT have to have the light table to do the activity, it is just the only way I can occupy both kiddos at one time on some days.

We began with a simple letter “P” written on a blank piece of paper and used our penguin erasers from the Target $1 spot, to line our letter with. Once we completed that task, we counted how many penguin erasers it took to make our letter with and then MG1 wanted to build a “penguin road” with them. Yay, engineering!

If you do not have penguin erasers, I am so sorry, but you can again get creative! Maybe let your little one make something that you can replace for the erasers or just practice writing your letters or drawing penguins. Just getting their little noggins thinking is beneficial!

Another fun light activity we attempted to accomplish involved some glass pebbles and a few colorful, reusable ice cubes that magically appeared in our freezer (Thanks, Mom). I think you can purchase them at the Dollar tree, don’t hold me to it, you’re on your own with that one.

Anywho, this was a goal free activity. We grabbed what we thought would be fun and then learned away! MG1 loves sorting the different colors and building different things with them, she even sorted the shades of blue pebble colors with the corresponding ice cube color (Proud Mama Moment)! MG2 loves looking at the colors and even grabbed some play tweezers using them to grab ice cubes and *toss gently* at our pupdogs. Again, we are all about fine motor skills when it comes to MG2, we will get there in the manners department.

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We also learned a new song : https://pin.it/qxnrjgmkztgbkv

And dabbled a little bit in the gross motor movement activities area of expertise, I also like to call a “Break for Mommy’s Patience.” We usually have to have one of these daily. Typically involving some seizure-like dancing, as to removing excess wiggles/frustration from ones body. We all partake, even Head Goof does some days.💃🏻

Butttt, if you aren’t skilled in that department here is a link to some Arctic Animal Movement Cards that we also enjoyed during our Expedition through the Arctic. https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Winter-Arctic-Animals-Movement-Cards-for-Preschool-and-Brain-Break-2570313

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And Finally, God sent snow to the south. And on that day this Mama rested her mind and let her children explore what our gracious Heavenly Father made.

Y’all at that moment when that tiny dusting of snow touched the ground and didn’t melt, I threw that lesson plan out the window and broke out my inner child and PLAYED with my children in the snow! That’s the beauty of homeschool preschool, there aren’t any rules, just have fun exploring with your kids and they’ll learn the rest!

And if all else fails, put a black shirt on, make you a yellow beak, and waddle your little heart out. I’m sure together you & your little one can learn something from THAT experience too! Have fun being penguins! 🐧 ❤️

-Penguin Pecks to You & Yours🐧😘

*There are also tons of resources on YouTube & even Netflix for kiddos to learn about Arctic life. (Using parental advisory puhlease)

Jess Wrote What?

Thank you for joining me!

First things first, I have never blogged before. So don’t expect anything astounding. Secondly, let’s forget the rules and just have some fun with this, okay?

I am married, we don’t do public mushy stuff just know, we are a loving, silly, trying-to-figure-this-parenting-thing-out team and we like each other most days and love each other always (ha, that’s about as much PDA as you’re going to get).

Soooo, I stay at home with my sweet goofs. They are three and one and a half. They are my world. They also make my world chaotic and exhilarating at the same time. Any mama (or papa) knows this. I am not an expert on parenting, teaching, education or anything really except our little family.

With that said, any parent knows the struggles of today’s world. Things like am I a bad parent if I let my kids eat junk food while some parents are all organic? Am I horrible because I want to poop alone once a week and let them get on the iPad for five minutes, only to then forget and it turns into an hour of screen time? Oh my gosh, my kid was being a kid and caught me having a difficult adulting moment and  now knows a couple four letter words that I hope they forget before bedtime and blah, blah, blah. You know those kinds of REAL WORLD ISSUES.

We like to keep it light-hearted and fun in our home. It’s home, it’s a tad messy, but its our happy place. It’s also the first place our children learn! Think about it, they learn to do everything all those cute, tiny, newborn bundles learn how to do at home and then we send them off to school. Why can’t we make home their first safe haven learning environment? Beyond learning how to use the big boy potty and use a fork for food instead of as a hairbrush (Thanks, Ariel).

That’s why I’m starting this blogging journey.

When I first wanted to start homeschooling my oldest, it was easy peasy (She was also one). I had everything on point. I knew her learning style, I found new material while she slept, my house was clean. I got to shower daily…you know all that only child stuff. Then came baby number two, aka “The Hammer”. He rocked my flawless little schedule, he demolished any hope I had of being able to be a successful homeschooling household. But once he was old enough to join in, in his own little way and I was able to realize that God had put homeschooling in my heart, I was able to attempt to find a happy medium of trying to teach two toddlers in a joyful, carefree territory. I’ll let you in on the way I processed things:

Step #1 : Getting my inner Elsa on and LETTING IT GO!

Let the expectations go, the comparisons go, your hair go. I’m kidding, you need to brush monthly. I let go of my insecurities, let go of the guidelines, the milestone markers. Just cling to those babies and let them guide you naturally to how and where they want to learn.

Step #2: The Bear-neccesities, seriously. Don’t buy that.

I am guilty of buying toooo much stuff for homeschooling. Ask my husband. Our hall closet is full. Semi-organized, but full nonetheless. Yes, all that stuff is super cute, yes there are laid out lesson plans and pre-printed worksheets and yes, by all means those are amazingggggggg! But you do not have to have all those things to teach your children successfully–at least during the early years. (Remember I am not an expert, nor have I taught more than two kids above the age of 3.) When I first started looking, I was very overwhelmed by all the stuff! Sheeze!

Step #3: Simplify to Infinity & Beyond.

Kids learn with every part of their bodies. Everything is new to them right now, those little cheese puff covered sponges are ready for anything you’re willing to throw at them. Let them explore with their senses. You can turn anything into a counting or sorting game. That could be your first steps to learning math, bonus if they use those cute, crusty fingers for their fine motor skills! You can build their language skills by just simply talking WITH them about whatever their little heart wants to say. Let them explore outside, or give them an idea of a fun “world” to pretend to be king and queen of for the day. Anything that works for their little minds and hearts will make a Mama happy and make a happy learner.

Step #4: It doesn’t all have to get done today!

Take a breath. Then another. Probably 30 more. It is a lot of work, you will always worry if they completely understand what they’re learning, if they’re ahead or falling behind, if they’re being social enough, there are a ka-freakin-jillion what-ifs. But you got this Mama! And we will get through this exciting, amazing, blessing of a journey together! Let’s teach these sweet little people how fun it is to be themselves and learn, learn, learn! Let’s also teach them to not be bumholes, always a plus.

If you’ve read this far, wow thank you for ignoring your household duties and the dogs (like myself) long enough to read whatever gibberish I just wrote. Ideally, I will try to post what we are doing weekly with our homeschool plans. I use a variety of learning techniques, but I wing it more or less.  Come back, in like a week (you know this took forever to write) and let’s have fun! We’re starting our Valentine Unit this week so I’ll try to post some fun ideas for you and your little lovies to try!

Toodles!

“You will always harvest what you plant.”- Galationis 6:7″