Learning to Play and Playing to Learn

This is what part of our school day has looked like for the past several days:

And it's awesome. The Boy loves building with LEGOs, and I love seeing how his creations evolve. He learns so much from those little blocks.

When I try to build with LEGOs, all I get is a headache. The Boy can build for hours because he loves it--that's how his brain works. I'm a firm believer that every child has an interest (or two or ten...) that lights them up, and that as parents and teachers, one of the most important things we can do for a child is to let them pursue that passion.

And yes, we still read and do chores and go outside each day. It's not all LEGOs all the time around here, although I'm sure The Boy would be all for that.

Kindergarten Art: Playdough Bugs!

[This project was inspired by these Play Dough Bug Sculptures.]

We were learning about bugs a couple weeks ago--you know, head, thorax, abdomen, that kind of thing--so I thought we ought to do something buggy for our art project at the end of the week. Thanks to Pinterest, I found something SUPER easy and open-ended.

Here are our materials:

You can use whatever you've got around the house.

And here's one of my first bugs. As we all know, I'm really good at lots of intricate details and stuff.

Not. But at least he's cute, right?

The Boy spent most of his time on this Dangerous Bug:

I would die if I ever saw a bug like this in real life.

We also made some ladybugs, a caterpillar, tons of made-up bugs...we tried a butterfly, too, but it just looked lopsided and weird. Oh, well. I guess that's why God makes bugs, and we don't.

Anyway, we didn't do anything scientific or overly realistic with this. Just fun with odds and ends. It was a good wrap-up for our buggy week.

Easter Art: Do-A-Dot Bunnies

Look, I squeezed in an Easter art project! Be proud of me. 

I saw this on Pinterest a few days ago (originally Kids Activities Blog's Cute Bingo Dauber Easter Craft), and since The Boy loooooves his Do-A-Dot markers, I knew it was a must-do.

Also? It's the easiest art project ever. Just do a bunch of dots, wait a minute for the dots to dry, and draw little bunny faces on the dots with a marker.

The Boy and I each made one. I was surprised that he had the patience to draw a face on each of the bajillion dots he made. Shows what I know. Homeschooling: surprising parents who underestimate their children, one day at a time.

Shamrock Art FAIL

When I saw this cute shamrock art project on Pinterest, I thought it would be super fun and easy. Bell pepper + green paint = St. Patrick's Day awesomeness.

Unfortunately, I can't cut a straight line to save my life our kitchen knives are really dull. We ended up with this:

{A couple of okay shamrocks, but mostly...not.}

The Boy was pretty disappointed. Soooo, we took a page from Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood. (The Boy hates it when I sing the "When Something Seems Bad" song, but I do it anyway.)


And this is what The Boy came up with as a solution:

Painting his own shamrocks! He was pretty happy with that. Crisis averted.

Kid Craft: Footprint Penguin

I got this idea from Pinterest, and it originally came from Little Family Fun. Click through there to see the tutorial.

Although, really...you can probably figure it out from the photo. In which the penguin should look black, not gray. But whatever.

The Boy finished putting his penguin together in about twenty minutes, so this is a good, quick project for a boring winter afternoon. He only needed help with tracing his foot. (Word of advice on the foot tracing: if your kiddo is ticklish, make sure you have a good grip on that foot while you're trying to trace it!)

And on a related note: what the heck is going on with construction paper these days? I got a big pack of Crayola construction paper from Amazon, and it's super flimsy and the colors are faded. I thought it'd be better quality, being Crayola and all.

So, what brand of construction paper should I get next time? Anyone have a suggestion? Because I'm not buying this stuff again.

Kid Craft: Embroidered Valentine Card

Sounds fancy, right? It's really not hard, though.

This photo's been floating around Pinterest lately:

[photo by Red Bird Crafts]

Click on the photo credit link to go through to the tutorial. When I saw it, I thought, "Hey, The Boy could do that. Probably." The only way to know is to try, so we did.

The Boy caught on pretty quickly, and it didn't take very long to finish. The card turned out just like the ones in the tutorial. (Different colors, though.) I'd definitely recommend it, as long as your kid can handle one of those blunt needles. I think it would also be cute as a Valentine's Day decoration.

Valentine's Day is in TWO WEEKS.

Okay, it's a little more than two weeks away. Close enough.

We don't do as many arts and crafts around here as I would like to do. The Boy enjoys them when he's doing them, but he doesn't ask to do them very often--he's usually busy building something. And I honestly forget.

(That's one reason that I recruited Melissa for this blog--she's waaaay better at kids' arts and crafts than I am.)

Anyway, I do make an effort to do art projects when a holiday is coming up. Even then, we keep things simple. This photo is from last year. It's just a printable color-by-number, which The Boy wanted to paint instead of color. (I don't remember where that color-by-number came from, but Education.com has one here.)

Now that Valentine's Day is so close--it ALWAYS sneaks up on me--I've got to get in gear! We'll probably do some of the stuff I have pinned, and I know we'll be doing more coloring sheets. 

I also like Melissa's idea in her last post, where her kids had to earn their art supplies to make Valentine's decorations. Do you readers have any good Valentine's art/craft ideas? Go ahead and share them!

The Story about Ping

Have you read The Story about Ping, by Marjorie Flack? It's really old. I loved it when I was a kid.

So I was really excited to find this worksheet on Homeschool Share: Color Ping's Family. (If that link doesn't work for some reason, go to homeschoolshare.com and search "ping.")

Ping has a huge family. This worksheet that I found has a little duck representing every member of Ping's family, and then instructions like, "Color Ping's uncles orange." Ping has seven uncles, so Little Boy picked seven ducks to color orange. And so on.

So there ya go. Reading, counting, and coloring in one activity.

Dinosaur Bones!

I got this idea from...the internet somewhere.

We learned about dinosaurs a couple weeks ago, and for one of the activities Little Boy and Isaac made "fossils."

We smashed some playdough onto the table to represent mud. The idea was to stick dry pasta--representing dinosaur bones--into the playdough to make a dinosaur shape.

Little Boy started out that way--you can see a head, neck, and arms...and maybe legs...in the photo there. But then he apparently decided that wasn't 3-D enough for him. Oh, well. We weren't really going for accuracy.

Pipecleaners + a Colander =

the best new toy ever, apparently.

Note: Do not try to use as a hat. The poky pipecleaner ends will getcha.

Geography: United States Puzzle

Little Boy got a puzzle of the United States for Christmas. The best kind, with state-shaped pieces.

He had a hard time with it, but knew he would. And I figured that he'd grow into it later this year.

Well...he did.

He looooves it. (I know I talk a lot about Little Boy looooving things. But those are the funnest things to post about. And yes, I just wrote "funnest.")

The day I took this picture, he put that puzzle together five times in a row. Haha, I love that I'm raising such a nerdy kid.

Tracing...Kind Of

So, continuing with scaling back on the writing activities--this is another activity that I've seen in lots of places. I can't really give credit to just one source.

I printed out some BIG letters for Little Boy to "trace"--but since he's kind of over tracing with a pen, we've been using little manipulatives to trace the big letters. So it's also a fine-motor activity, yay!

Anyway, here Little Boy's using Craisins to "trace" an upper-case A. We've also used beads and goldfish crackers. I think we might do marshmallows or chocolate chips next--he likes being able to snack on his schoolwork. And really, who can blame him?

Screen Time

I'm not really big on "screen time" for Little Boy. He gets really grouchy when he's been watching a lot of TV, and it takes a day or two for him to get back to normal.

(He's actually been watching way too much TV lately. Note to self: practice what you blog.)

Anyway, he gets to play the computer sometimes, too. I figure it's good to teach him some computer skills, and I only let him play for 15 - 20 minutes.

So what does Little Boy play when he's on the computer? Well, I'll tell ya: he plays games from PBS Kids.* That's our go-to for computer games for two reasons. 1) He's familiar with the characters. (Ahem. See the note above about too much TV lately.) 2) Most of them have an educational theme.

His favorites are games based on Word World and Sid the Science Kid. Of course, I took a picture when he was playing a not-educational game:

Yeah, the Clifford game isn't my favorite. But he likes it, and we all need some down time, right?

*He plays games from The Head of the Class, too. I swear I'll get around to posting about that site one of these days. Also, this is not a paid advertisement for PBS Kids. We are not cool enough for that kind of thing.

Arts & Crafts: Puzzle!

This one was fun. We made a little puzzle out of one of Little Boy's drawings.

I gave him some cardstock, markers, and stickers, and told him to draw whatever he wanted. So he drew...a ball. I suggested that maybe he'd like to, y'know, color it in. A bunch of white space = not a fun puzzle.

Anyway, then he stuck stickers all over the paper, and I cut it into biggish puzzle pieces. He was really excited about putting it together.

After trying it once, though, he said that it was "too tricky" to get the pieces to fit together. Meaning, the pieces slid around too much. We'll try it again another time, I guess.

Finger-Writing

So, remember this post, when I tried to have Little Boy "write" numbers with cotton balls--and it didn't quite work?

Yeah. So I decided to take a step back with the writing-type activities. I didn't get this one from anywhere in particular; I've seen it lots of places. It's pretty basic. And it was much easier for Little Boy:

That's rice in the tray. You could put pretty much anything in the tray, though--pudding, beans, sand, shaving cream...anyway, I took the magnetic numbers off our front door again, so he could imitate the shapes of the numbers and "write" them in the rice with his finger.

Like I said, this was much easier for him. I've got a couple more activities like this up my sleeve--I hope they'll work as well as this one did.

Play-Doh Balls

We don't play with Play-Doh very often. I kind of forget that we have it. So when we do get it out, it's a big occasion.

Little Boy tends to get into a Play-Doh rut. He'll learn how to do something new with it, and then do it over and over again. I don't really mind that, but sometimes we need to shake things up a little.

This time, I tried to teach Little Boy to roll Play-Doh into a ball. See those little wormy-shaped things? Those are the "balls" Little Boy made.

And then we stacked them up, just for the heck of it. Turns out that the wormy-shaped Play-Doh balls were good for sticking into the little spaces in the Play-Doh pile.

Yarn Art

I got this activity out of some kind of math-for-kids book. Little Boy liked it more than I thought he would.

First, he had to sort a bunch of strands of yarn by length--long, medium and short. He was supposed to put the yarn in the envelopes, but that turned out to be more trouble than it was worth. So he just piled the yarn on top of the envelopes.



And then I gave him a sheet of paper and a bottle of glue and let him go crazy. I didn't give any direction for the gluing--just glue the yarn wherever.

Oh! And this was the first time he's managed to squeeze a bottle of glue and move it around where he wanted it--without having a meltdown because it wasn't working like he wanted it to. So that was a small victory.



It totally looks like modern art. We could sell that for a squillion dollars, I bet.

Marshmallows and Toothpicks

I don't think I stole this idea from anywhere in particular, but I didn't come up with it on my own, either. It's a pretty common project.

And all you need is toothpicks and mini marshmallows. How's that for cheap?

{Had a little too much fun with the photo editing. Heh.}

Anyway, the gist is that you stick the toothpicks into the marshmallows. If your kid is pretty little, you can just leave it at that. As your kids get older, you can have them make shapes and little sculptures.

Little Boy loved it, but he insisted on copying whatever I made. He's really into this building stuff, but creativity isn't one of his strengths right now. Oh, well. I finally stopped building and made him think up some shapes on his own.

I don't have a photo of all the stuff we made, but we used up a whole lotta toothpicks and marshmallows. Not ALL the marshmallows, though. We had to save some for snacking on afterward.

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?

Little Boy's New Obsession

Little Boy loves tracing...everything. I thought he was going to color the worksheet in the photo, but he traced it instead. We have a book full of trace-able shapes and letters, and it's almost his favorite activity ever. His very favorite is the "cutting book," which deserves its own post. Later.



(In case you couldn't tell, the blobby thing he was tracing is a stegosaurus. It just didn't have any spiny-thingies on its back yet.)