Remembrance Day is November 11th. Here are three fun poppy crafts to help get the kids engaged in Remembrance Day:
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Simple Science: Cartesian Diver, learning about buoyancy
Do this fun experiment/ game to learn about buoyancy and air pressure.
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Supplies:
2 hex nuts |
- Snip the pipettes about 2/3 of the way up. You will be using the bulb part.
- Slip the hex nut onto the pipette bulb and screw it onto the base of the bulb to secure it
- Wrap one end of blue wire around stem stump of pipette, curving the other end to make a hook
- Wrap the red wire around end of second pipette, starting at the stem, looping it around top of pipette bulb, and securing back at the stem
5. Fill each pipette about 1/2 full with water by squeezing bulb, putting into water, and releasing bulb.
6. Test the buoyancy of each pipette bulb – fill the red one with enough water to make it sink in a cup of water. It will probably be just over half full with water. Fill the blue pipette so that it floats in a cup of water, just below the surface. Ajust water levels in each pipette to get correct buoyancy.
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To play the game:
Fill a 500 ml bottle with water. Drop the red pipette into the bottle. It should sink to the bottom. Drop the blue pipette into the bottle. It should float almost at the surface. Make sure the bottle is completely full with water, and secure lid. Gently squeeze bottle. When you squeeze the bottle, the floating pipette should dive down. Try to hook the pipette that is sunk, and bring it to the surface!
How it works:
Buoyancy: when your pipette is less dense than the water it is in, the pipette will float. When the pipette is more dense than the water it’s in, it will sink. The combination of nut + water + air in the pipette will be just heavy enough to sink if you add more water, and float if you add less.
Pressure: When you squeeze the bottle, you are increasing the pressure, making the air trapped in your pipette compress, which means more water can creep into the pipette. This makes it makes less buoyant causing it to sink. When you release your squeeze, the air expands, pushing water out of the pipette, making it more buoyant so it floats.
Crafty Ideas: Three Ways to Craft Spring Flowers
- Make a Peony or chrysanthemum with tissue circles or squares. Simply stack 4 to 6 small tissue squares, pinch together in the centre, and secure by wrapping the pinched end with a green chenille stem. Fluff out the tissue once secured.
- Make a tulip from folded paper – use origami (for big kids), or try the simple fold/cut/paste method found here
- Make a daisy from coffee filters or cupcake liners – stack a number of liners together and glue in the centre. Snip around liners to make petals. Add a bright paper circle to centre and secure stem with tape or glue
Craft Time Tips: Fun with the Kids Craft Club
Here are some simple tips to help your kids get started when they get their Kids Craft Club package in the mail!
- Do a quick review of craft suggestions with your child, pointing out pictures and ideas. This will often be a very QUICK review, as they may just want to get started right away!!
- Note: the instructions are just guidelines that show suggestions for the craft supplies. Your child may want to do something completely different, and that’s great!
- Let them open the craft supply package, and dump the contents onto workspace so that they can easily access supplies
- Put a small amount of glue onto a plate or plastic lid, and let them use a sponge, paint brush, or craft stick for spreading glue
- Let your child take the lead – kids are often more interested in process, rather than end product!
- Be nearby, in case your child needs some help
- Ask open ended questions about what they’re working on, such as “tell me about what you’re doing” or “that looks interesting”……they might want to share their thoughts on what they’re doing
- Keep the conversation and their interest flowing by referring to the included ‘fun facts’ sheet and talking about their craft subject matter together
Craft Time Tips: How to make the most of craft time for kids
We recently received this question about time-crunched families and crafts, and thought it worth sharing!
Q. If my family only has time for crafts every so often, which crafts are most worth our time and why?
A. The best thing we can do as parents is to offer our kids a range of craft supplies, projects, and tools to explore. Kids learn new skills and make new connections every time they have a new experience. If you’re short on time, try to focus on a different activity every craft time. For example, one week can be painting, another week can be beading, another week is drawing or modeling with clay.
If your child is confident with a particular activity, such as building or painting, make the supplies for that activity accessible, so that your child can work independently while you are focusing on other tasks. A simple supply of scissors, paper, pencils, glue and crayons will be enough to get them started.
If your child is reluctant to do crafts on their own, encourage him or her by picking up on a theme they’re interested in. Calendar themes are a common interest for every child, so take advantage by suggesting they make birthday cards or decorations for special events. This way, you’ll save a trip to the store to buy a card or decorations.
Crafts don’t need to be complicated for kids to have fun with them. Know your child’s interests and abilities, give them a few supplies and creative control, and watch them learn through hands-on fun!
Simple Science for Kids – St. Patricks Day Fools Gold
Test whether the pennies you find at the end of your rainbow are more valuable than just a cent!
Supplies: paper towel, plastic lid, vinegar, pennies
What to do:
Fold the paper towel into a small square and soak it generously with white vinegar. Place soaked towel on a plastic lid and place the pennies on top of the towel.
Check your pennies regularly over the next few hours to see if the towel or the pennies themselves are changing colour. Is anything turning green?
If your penny turns the paper towel green, or if it turns green itself, then it has a high percentage of COPPER in it. The vinegar helps create a reaction between the copper in the penny, and oxygen in the air, making things turn green!
Tip: to see even more green, dip the pennies entirely into vinegar and then place them on the paper towel to dry. If you’re doing this at preschool or daycare, do it at the start of the day and check results throughout the day.
In the USA, pennies were made with 95% copper until 1982. Then copper became more valuable than the penny itself, so they started making pennies out of mostly zinc.
In Canada, pennies were made with 98% copper until 1996. After that, they started being made out of 98% zinc.
If your penny turned green, it has more copper in it than a penny that doesn’t change colour! It’s copper value is worth more than just 1 cent!
Simple Science for Kids – Spring Break Volcano Eruption
There are sure to be at least one or two eruptions in your household over spring break, so why not make your own!! Here’s a great way to pass the morning with your kids while on spring break. Once the volcano is built, you can make it erupt over and over again – we kept ours around for a few days!
To make your volcano, you will need:
Salt Dough:
- 3 cups flour
- 1 cup salt
- 2 tablespoons oil
- ~ 1 cup water
Volcano form & lava:
- warm water with a few drops red food colouring
- 2 tbsp baking soda
- 1/2 cup to 1 cup vinegar
- large baking sheet with a rimmed edge (could use a 9×13 cake pan instead)
- Clean, empty soup can (10 oz) You could use an empty pop bottle instead, but we liked the can because it was easy for my son to manage building around it and pouring ingredients in the wide opening without any help, and it’s small enough to get a quick ‘eruption’
Mix the salt dough:
Measure Dry ingredients
Add the wet ingredients
Stir to combine, then knead until smooth. You may need to add more flour or water if too wet or too dry
Play Dough ready for modeling our volcano
To make the volcano:
Place clean can in centre of baking sheet. Form dough around can in a cone shape
My guy decided to carve some flow lines into his volcano (from where it had previously erupted, he explained)
Fill can with warm coloured water to ~ 3/4 full
Add 2 tbsp baking soda and stir to mix. Now for the fun part:
ADD VINEGAR!
Watch the lava flow over the volcano! You can add more vinegar once the eruption settles down. We did this over and over again! Might have to dump everything out and start with more baking soda if your volcano no longer erupts.
Book to Read: Play – How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul
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On a recent trip to the Library, I stumbled across the book ‘Play – How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul’ by Stuart Brown, M.D. I was intrigued and picked up the book. In an era when it seems like kids have less and less time to just play, I was curious to read an expert opinion about how important (or not) play really is. |
All of my reading so far, and my instincts and experience with my own kids have reinforced the feeling that free play is essential to early childhood development. This book discusses not only the impact of play during childhood, but its effects throughout childhood and into adulthood. It turns out that many of us adults have simply forgotten how to enjoy guilt-free playtime. And worse; we keep taking free play time away from our kids in favour of more structured activities. The book talks about how play influences our well-being throughout life, including our work, our relationships, and our satisfaction with life in general.
Brown explains the reasons why we play, colouring his scientific analysis with stories of play in the animal kingdom, in children, and in adults. He relates how play impacts brain development, and describes ‘play personalities’ for those of us who have forgotten how to play and need help figuring out what makes us tick.
The book goes into ways we play from infancy into adulthood. Brown discusses the benefits of play in the workplace, including innovation and mastery. He also talks about play in relationships, and what happens when we lose our sense of playfulness.
i enjoyed reading this book. The anecdotes and analysis reinforced my belief in the importance of free play, and the book served as a good reminder to integrate play into my parenting. I feel like I started out with a playful approach to parenting, but as my kids get older, their schedules busier, and my expectations of them higher, I’ve slipped a little. Since reading the book I’ve been making a conscious effort to maintain a playful attitude within my parenting, and I can see the results. Through using a playful approach, I have diffused several conflicts that would have easily gone sour otherwise. The book also served as a good reminder that it’s important – even essential – to make time for my relationship, myself and my interests – in other words, to find more time to just play!
Find more information on Stuart Brown and the National Institute for Play that he founded, or watch his talk on play.
Power Outage Activities: Ten Activities to do with the kids
The power was out at our house this morning, and it stayed that way for several hours. Luckily it went out after I had heated food for the kids lunches, but I had to skip a few other daily-routine tasks, like drying my hair or boiling water in the (electric) kettle to make tea. It got me thinking about the things we do during the day with our kids – some of which rely on power. Here’s a list of power-free activities that you can do during an outage, or if you’re out camping or just want to go “old school” for a day.
1. Make some Music:
You can’t listen to music without power, so make some!! Practice singing, even if you’re tone-deaf. The kids will be quick to join in. Sing kid favourites or teach them some of your favourites. Start harmonizing or sing in rounds – this can be really tricky for kids! Our favourite is ‘Don’t Throw your Junk in My backyard – here’s a classroom full of kids doing a demo! Or make a marching band with ‘instruments’ from pot lids, wooden spoons, and containers full of dried beans or rice.
2. Do Crafts:
Low-tech creative play that we (of course!!) love love love. Pull out the glue, scissors, and craft supplies, and start creating. Don’t forget to check the recycling bin for any hidden crafty gems! If you want to work to a theme, ask kids to build a battery or generator that would give you power, or draw pictures of how power is made. If they’re not interested or too young for that, do crafts that feed off of their current interests or calendar themes (such as winter or spring, for example)
3. Go Outside
Always a good alternative, whether the power is on or not.
4. Water Play
If your windows need cleaning or the floors need wiping, turn the kids onto the task! They’ll be happy to help as long as it feels like part of a game. And if everything is already scrubbed, then get paintbrushes out and put the kids to work with water on an old tile or chalkboard – they can make water patterns that dry quickly. And of course they can extend the water play by having bath time – but remember that the heat won’t come on as long as the power is out, so they’ll need lots of snuggles to stay warm is their hair is wet afterwards!
5. Do A Play or Skit:
A happy alternative to watching TV is to create a drama (or comedy!) of your own. Be inspired by ‘Jillian Jiggs and the Secret Surprise’, a wonderful book about Jillian putting on a show – it even has a fun script at the end!
6. Build a Fort:
In the living room, with blankets and chairs. This would especially be fun in the dark!
7. Make Wall Shadows:
You might need to close the blinds during the day, but flashlights against a dark wall are always a favourite way to entertain!
8. Make Simple Snacks and Meals:
Cheese sandwiches without the grill, wraps, or anything you’d usually send in a bag lunch. Snack can be apples spread with peanut butter and sprinkled with raisins. Yum!
9. Build Something
Stack blocks or (non-breakable) cups. Try making a tower out of paper (!?), make a marble maze out of toilet paper rolls, build a ‘sculpture’ from playdough, or use popsicle sticks to make a teepee frame or other structure.
10. Read a book, play a game, or do some sports
Anyday, anytime, anywhere.
Simple Science: Colour Mixing Magic
If you’re looking for a simple way to teach kids about primary colours and color mixing, give this simple experiement a try!
Supplies: ice cube trays, food colouring, clear or white cups, stir sticks, water
Set Up (prior to experiment): Put a few drops of red, blue, and yellow food colouring into three separate containers and add water. Pour coloured waters into ice cube containers and freeze.
The Experiment: Pop a coloured cube out of the ice cube tray and into a cup. You can stir the single ice cube to watch it melt if you like. Add another ice cube (of a different colour) and continue stirring so both cubes start melting. How do the colours mix?
Things to talk about: How do the colours mix? Make a colour chart showing how the primary colours make other colours, ie. red + blue, red + yellow, yellow + blue. What happens if you mix two of the secondary colours together? What is your favourite colour and how do you think you can make it, starting with the three primaries?
Other (non-colour) things to talk about: What happens when you stir the ice cubes? Does it make the ice melt faster or slower?
One of our favourite teachers tried this with her class: ” I used one of your Craft Caravan ideas a few weeks ago with my students. It was a great hands on way to teach the magic of primary colours. I made ice cubes with a few drops of colour in each. Thanks for the idea.”