I don't post every little thing I do with the kids... but when I have one of my "I'm a super mom moments" like I did this week I want to share it. So when I mentioned my project this week to a friend of mine she really wanted me to post it. And of course I have lots of photos to go along with it!
In D's Pre-PreK homeschooling we work on basics like letters, numbers, parts of speech, and each week we have 2 "special subjects". So our first Special Subject this week was "Hands & Fingers".
We sang "Where is Thumbkin" and talked about what we use our hands and fingers for. Some of her answers were to grab, hold, scratch, dig and point. Then we added some less obvious uses like to feel. Feel if something is soft, sharp, hot. They can warn us when something is dangerous. They let us show affection with high fives, hugs and let us communicate with sign language and we learned a few basic signs (which she once knew from baby signs and didn't remember at all!).
So for Science Project we used vanilla pudding with food coloring.
The purpose was:
1. To investigate how we used our hands to find gummies and candies hiding in the pudding and to see if we could identify which was which by touch alone.
2. See how mixing our basic colors we could find new colors like chartreuse, magenta, etc.
3. And get creative painting (and of course eating) our pudding paint.
To keep things neat I used a cookie sheet. Just take a 4 pack of Snack Pack pudding and scoop it onto the tray and have you or your little one drop a squirt of food coloring onto each pile. We used blue and red for purple, red and yellow for orange... you get the idea. We went for a basic ROYGBV pallet. Now make sure they don't look while you sneak in some gummies and small candy (we used Pez).
Then she started mixing them to make new colors and as she did she found gummies and Pez candies. She had to guess by touch which was which and if she got it right she got to eat it!
She learned that besides smooshing the candy to see which was which (obviously gummies are softer than Pez) she could feel the shape since Pez are ovals. She also found out if you drag the Pez on the tray it makes a scraping sound and the gummies don't.
And an extra bonus was her tongue turning colors. Oddly her fingers didn't get dyed so that was a plus.
She quickly dug out the hidden goodies and then used a paintbrush to see if it was easier to make lines using her fingers or a brush.
Next up we made finger puppets! Seriously... you can come up with soooo many crafts if you have wire cleaners, pom-poms and googly eyes! Now honestly this project was a little hard especially since I learned a while ago when gluing pom-poms a hot glue gun works best so she designed them and laid them out and I glued them together. (And yes, I got burned a few times.) It was a joint effort in assembly but she still loved them!
These ones have a spiral base so you can pop them on your fingers. We will probably be doing more of these at Easter (I'm thinking bunnies and chicks).
These were basically the same concept but instead or wrapping around the finger they turn the hand into a mouth. I think these would be cute in with antlers for Christmas reindeer so I may give that a go in a couple months.
So the end result... another totally awesome subject logged and in the books! Next up is "Feet & Legs" so I'll be trying to figure out something on that for the rest of the week tonight! But considering I'm podophobic my expectations aren't too high.
