Art: Painting in the Rain

Okay, so this one was a little bit of an "oops" on my part.

The idea of this project is to draw a picture with washable markers on heavy paper or cardstock. Then stick it out in the rain for a few minutes, and the colors will run--if you do it right, it turns out really cool.

So I gave Little Boy a piece of cardstock and some markers and told him to draw whatever he wanted.

And now, I want to make a little side note. The picture above is cropped because Little Boy had written his name on the original paper. I don't put Little Boy's real name on my blog, and here's a decent (and scary) explanation of why.

Anyway, I put Little Boy's picture in the rain and...I forgot about it. I only left it out there for twenty minutes or so, but that was way too long.

Oops. Little Boy still thought it was pretty cool, so I guess it wasn't a total bust.

Math? Pre-writing? Both?

Well, here's another one that didn't work out.

Little Boy was supposed to look at a number (we got these magnets at the dollar store, but they look like Melissa & Doug) and then "write" it with cotton balls.

He just couldn't quite do it. Next time, I think I'll print out big numbers, and he can lay the cotton balls right on top. Kinda like tracing.

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?

Alpha Builders and the Tongue Face

Sometimes we try something out during school time that doesn't really click. For example, I really liked the idea of these Alpha Builders that were posted by Confessions of a Homeschooler, so I printed some out (I didn't make mine magnetic, though), and I was pretty excited about them.

Little Boy didn't really "get" them.

So I put them away for a couple months. When I got them back out, he did a lot better. So we practiced forming some letters, and then I handed the Alpha Builders over to him to see what he'd do with them...



...yeah. He organized them. Have I mentioned that Little Boy is sometimes a little bit...different from other little boys?

Ha, I love this kid.

Anyway, check out this picture of the face Little Boy makes when he concentrates:



The tongue face. He's done that since he was a tiny little thing. It makes me laugh every time.