Simple Fun With Pom-poms

We've been playing with our pom-poms a lot lately. A couple of years ago an educational supply store in my city was closing and I took the opportunity to get lots of great stuff for really low prices. One thing I got was a bag that had pounds of pom-poms. That is a lot of pom-poms! We've used them, and used them, and I still have lots left.

The other morning, I grabbed a couple of handfuls of them and an empty egg carton and gave them to my two year old for a little play time.

First he dumped them out and put them back in, with one pom-pom being assigned to each spot - no doubling up.

Then he began sorting them by colour. He did really well at this. After he had them all into piles, I started asking him questions. "How many purple ones?" "Can you find me a small blue and a big blue?" etc. He is really into colours right now, so he loved this part.

And he put them into the egg carton in pairs by their colours.

Then he began playing with their sizes. In this picture he is putting a small one on top of a large one and calling it a 'snowman.' So cute.

Then he lined them up by colour AND size. No, I didn't prompt this. I was so impressed. He had finished off the oranges and was just starting the purples in this picture.

Anyway, it was a super easy little activity that took no prep, and he played with them for fifteen or twenty minutes for sure.

Jelly Bean Math

A bag of jelly beans holds wonderful potential.

We started by looking at our bag and naming off the colours we could see. Then we tried to predict which colour there would be the most of. Our guess was purple.

I made a quick chart on the computer with columns that were labeled in each colour, and printed it off, then we dumped out our bag and started dividing them up. Look what tidy lines he is making!

When we were finished, we could compare the amounts. My guy was really good at interpreting his graph, and as you can see, while our guess of purple was a close second, we had so many orange jelly beans they ran right off the page! We talked about which had the most, the least, and then put them in order from the least to the greatest.

The last activity I did with him was a few simple math questions that I wrote on the back of 3x5" index cards. I would write out the first part of the equation, (in this case 3+5=) and then he would put the appropriate number of jelly beans under each number, then count them all up to find the answer, which I would then write down. This was a great visual way to review some math concepts.

But I have to say, he enjoyed doing the subtraction questions more! And I bet you can think of why!

Letter Of The Week - C

Letter of the Week is proving to be a smash hit around here. The bigger kids want to know what we did for our 'letter activities' when they get home from school and I've had to start reserving some craft materials for them to make their own, and setting some time aside to read them the stories we read that day. Awesome!

Day 1: We made our letter C for our growing Alphabet Binder. I had gotten the materials I thought were appropriate ready and called my son to the table. I had out popcorn kernels to glue one. C for Corn, right? He did not like this one bit. It wasn't corn! It was popcorn, so that clearly belongs to week 'P.' I didn't have another idea so I turned it over to him. "What do you think we could decorate with?"

Without a pause, he quickly said, "C is for CANDY!" Fortunately, with Valentine's Day we had plenty of that stuff around. So our craft began by eating the candies we had so we could glue their wrappers on our letter. I also had a few stickers of candy hearts so he added those too.

Our alphabet book this week was Nascar ABCs where every letter stood for something regarding cars, which I thought was a good fit for C-week. Of course, I'm sure if he'd noticed that it was a Nascar book, he'd have insisted we used it for 'N!'

Day Two: C is for Cowboys:

*We dressed up in Cowboy duds. Yes, me too.

*I taught him the song, "Home on the Range"

*We read The Dirty Cowboy, by Amy Timberlake. This book was very cute. It was about a cowboy who was very, very dirty so he went to wash himself in the stream. After a good scrub, his dog didn't recognize his scent and thought a stranger was trying to steal his master's clothes and a scuffle between them arose. It was really funny.

*We played several rounds of horseshoes.
*We coloured pictures of cowboys
*We rode on many stallions: rocking horses, hobby horses, and bouncy horses.

Day Three: C is for Colours

*This day started by using Crayola Tub Tints in his morning bath. I let him choose two colours so as the tablets dissolved, he could watch them blend together and make a new colour. He chose yellow and blue, so within a few minutes the water was green. Always a hit.

*We read A Colour Of His Own, by Leo Lionni
*We read Red is Best by Kathy Stinson

*We played Twister.

*And we played Red Light, Green Light.

Day Four: C is for Cookie

Since my son is such a fan of the Sesame Street songs, I knew that I really had to do this as one of our days.

*I started out the day by turning on the Youtube video of Cookie Monster singing his famous song.
*We baked chocolate chip cookies together
*We ate chocolate chip cookies together

*My kids like to share the treats we make with their little friends, and nearly every time we bake, they ask if they can please take some to _________(fill in the blank here with any number of names). So on this day, I let him chose a friend to share some cookies with and we put together a little plate of treats and drove them to his house.

*We read If You Give A Mouse A Cookie by Laura Numeroff

*We read Cookies, Bite-Size Life Lessons by Amy Krouse Rosenthal

*When I told him that we were all finished our cookie activities, he said, "But Mom! I know one more thing I could do! I could play my Cookie Monster Wii game!" So funny! But hey, it is a game of numbers, and Counting starts with C, right?

Joy School - Colours

The last unit in our Basics Theme was Colours. It was a very pretty day of Joy School, since everything was covered in bright, happy colours.

Lesson Time: The lesson covered the primary colours, secondary colours, and complimentary colours. We learned that there are even more colours than the usual red, blue, yellow, green, orange, purple, brown and black that they know the words for. Our host mom had made little colour squares and we put them in lines that went together from darkest to lightest. Yes, they were all 'purple' but they had names for the different shade of purple they were: magenta, violet, etc.

She included a memory game in her lesson. On the back of the red cards she had glued a black and white picture of an easily recognisable object. Then we turned all the colour swatches over, and the children chose one red card and one colour swatch.

If you matched the blank picture to the colour it should be, (like this evergreen tree, and a green colour swatch) you got to keep your match.

Singing Time: She had contacted us in advance and asked us to have our children wear one of the primary colours for an activity during singing time.

So wearing their colour, and sitting on their matching dot, we sang Our Primary Colours. When the song said the name of their colour, they stood up. When it was a different colour, they sat back down. Fun and active.

We also sang Colours of the Rainbow.

Story Time: There were lots of good choices for books that were about colors. We read these two:

This book is about a silly animal who can change the colour of his spots at will and wants to live in the zoo so he can show all the people. In the end, he decides that being in the circus would be even better.

This one is told from the perspective of a child who wonders why we don't call berries 'reds' or bananas 'yellows.' Very pretty illustrations.

Science Time: We learned about rainbows, and how when the sun shines through the water droplets in the air, the light makes a rainbow and you can see all the colours. Then she brought out a prism and a flashlight to show us how we could make a rainbow of our very own.

There was also a second half to the science time. She had test tubes filled with water that had been dyed in each of the primary colours. Then we mixed them together to create the secondary colours. The kids got to have a turn guessing what colour they thought different combinations would make, and they had fun with it.

At the end of our experiment with all the pretty results.

Snack Time: Could there be a more fun way to learn your colours than to do it with candy?

After dividing up the candy between the kids, our host would call out a colour, and if they had one of those in their bowls, they held it up for her to check, and then they got to gobble it up!

Art Time: Finger-painting! She gave each child a dab of each primary colour and they could create whatever art they wanted with it. My boy did his best to get only one finger dirty (above).

But other children were much more comfortable in the mess! Just to be clear, yes, the girl in this picture is shrieking, but she is doing it because she is so excited and happy she just can't control herself. Not because she was freaking out about the paint being on her hands!

One last art project: Each child was given a pinch of each colour of plasticine and they could mould it into whatever they chose. Most of them made rainbows.

Wiggle Time: This was so fun! We had just had a big dumping of snow, and so this mom got some squirt bottles from the dollar store and filled them with a solution of water and food colouring. We sent the kids outside and they coloured the snow! They loved this!