ABCs: Breadstick Initials

This was kind of a combined lesson.

First, I showed Little Boy how making bread works--the yeast makes the bread all puffy, stuff like that.

Then we shaped some of the dough into our initials. Little Boy usually hates sticky stuff on his hands, but he did okay with the bread dough.



Yeah, that's my initial. You didn't think I was going to put Little Boy's initial on the interwebs, did you? Haha.

Oh...and then we ate them. Yu-u-um!

Playtime: Snow Plows

Here's yet another idea I got from The Mailbox.

I taped a little cardboard rectangle to the front end of a couple of Little Boy's trucks, then put the trucks (now snowplows) in a bin with some salt in the bottom. Like so:



Of course, allll the other cars had to join in the fun:




I should probably warn you--all of the cars ended up with salt stuck in their little nooks and crannies, so this actually made a huge mess. But Little Boy loved it.

A Wise Parent

"A wise parent would never miss a chance to gather children together to learn of the doctrine of Jesus Christ. Such moments are so rare in comparison with the efforts of the enemy. For every hour the power of doctrine is introduced into a child's life, there may be hundreds of hours of messages and images denying or ignoring the saving truths."

-Henry B. Eyring

Days of the Week

We sing a little days-of-the-week song sometimes when we do calendar activities during "learning time." (Yeah, we still call it that.)

I didn't know whether the days of the week were sinking into Little Boy's head, so I printed out these Days of the Week cards from TheHeadoftheClass.com to see if he could put them in order by himself. (I love that site. I'll write more about it later.)



And...he had no problem with it. Yay for songs!

Science: Salt Melts Ice

Here's yet another idea that I took from The Mailbox.

I filled a couple of Ziploc bags with water, and (carefully) stuck them in my freezer. The idea was to make ice lumps, and there's really not room in my freezer for two bowls of water, so...Ziploc bags had to do. And only one of them leaked!

The next day, I filled two bowls half-full of water, added a lot of salt, and some food coloring. And I unwrapped the ice lumps.

After explaining to Little Boy about how salt melts ice (at a four-year-old's level, of course), and showing him how to use the dropper-thingy, I let him loose.



I think the food coloring is supposed to make the salt water easier to see than if you used clear water or plain salt.

Little Boy had fun with the dropper, but the melting didn't work as well as I'd hoped. It was still hard to see much melting going on.

The salt water did finally melt a hole through a thin part of one of the ice lumps.



So...I don't really recommend this experiment. Unless you can figure out a way to make it work better...maybe use smaller ice lumps?