Halloween sorting/transferring activity

I found these cute pom-poms in sparkly Halloween colors and thought they’d make a really cute Montessori sorting/transferring activity.

Painted lady butterfly

Nature is wonderful, beautiful and completely amazing…

Check out my other blog, The Exploration Station for two great close-up shots of a Painted Lady Butterfly.

They Might Be Giants – teaching science through music

If you have young kids and want them to see some science concepts explained in a fun way, check out TMBG’s Here Comes Science dvd. We just got the 2 disc cd/dvd set from Amazon.com and the girls love it.

As for me, having come from a career in the biotech field, I think this is just amazing stuff. It’s fun, it’s got great, catchy tunes, and it’s very educational. I think TMBG did an AMAZING job of this.

Here’s a few selections from the dvd -

Fun with pattern blocks

I love it when the girls decide for themselves to pull out the math manipulatives to play with and come up with cute little designs. It’s unusual that all three of them decide to play with the same thing at the same time, but on Friday, they all decided to play with the same thing.

And for a while, it worked out fine…until of course they started to run out of pieces and started whining that so and so wouldn’t share [yes, despite what it looks like here, my kids don't always get along ]. Fortunately two of them went on to do something else and then my 6 year old decided to make a really…long…caterpillar.

Fall Nature Walk

Hop on over to The Exploration Station to see our fall nature walk.

Pumpkin life cycle sequencing cards

Here’s a free printable pumpkin life cycle sequencing card set from Montessori for Everyone. I printed them out on cardstock and laminated them with self-stick laminating sheets.

This is my 4.5 year old putting the cards in order.

I put the pumpkin life cycle cards, along with a set of oak tree life cycle sequencing cards from this wonderful little website called Pre-Kinders on our nature table.

Fall Nature Table

I’m entering this tree exploration and fall nature table post to Growing and Learning by Leaps and Bounds blog Tree Hugging Tots Mr. Linky round-up. This week’s theme is Trees.

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It was a nice day out today – better than we’ve had in weeks, so I decided to get the girls outside and collect some bits for our nature table.  We went to the local farm stand for some Indian corn and squash, to a local oak tree for some acorns.  

When we got home, I put together our fall nature table, knowing that it’s not going to stay this way (my middle daughter has already started exploring and adding her own touches). I love the Waldorf nature tables I’ve seen around the blogworld. These nature tables are hands-on displays of seasonal items found in nature or handmade toys or books to read.

These are a mix of real and fabric pumpkins, squash and gourds and one wooden red apple.

I love the Indian multicolored corn.

I will be turning these two peg people into fall gnomes.  These are the huge acorns we collected today.

The winter gnomes were helping with the harvest. The acorns on this tray are some I collected on our trip to Wisconsin Dells in September.

In fact, here’s a great snap of a squirrel with an acorn in its mouth I took on that trip.

And my littlest exploring the nature table and showing me a wooden acorn.

Pumpkin counting and patterns

I found a new link for seasonal math activities called Mathwire.com.

They had this cute halloween themed paged called 10 Pumpkins up on Top. 3 Monsters with pumpkins on their heads.

Last week at Target I found halloween mini erasers in the shapes of black cat faces and pumpkins. I ended up using them with the pumpkin page with my 4.5 year old.

The page comes with it’s own pumpkins printed on the page, but I had my 4.5 year old use the mini-erasers to stack on their head and count out ten erasers for each monster.

Then she ended up counting all of them for a total of 30 pumpkins.

When she was done, we ended up making a pattern out of the cat faces and pumpkins.

You can print these other fall math patterns from mathwire too.

My First Clock Kit

If you have a Tuesday Morning Store by you, you have got to see if they have this cute, educational little clock kit for ages 6-15.

It’s Tuesday Morning price is $2.99. I thought it would be a really fun project to put together and help teach the girls a thing or two about gears and watch mechanics.

It comes with all 33 parts inside the clock

I love my 6 year old’s concentration with her little tongue sticking out of her mouth as she works.

Working hard.

We still have more to go.  We were going to finish it today, except that one in the picture got sick today.  She threw up in school, then had a fever (got as high as 103.2 tonight) and so we have to postpone finishing it (the bell, clock face and hands, and pendulum) until later.

You can click HERE to see an animation of how to put this clock together .

Wisconsin Dells Trip

It’s been a while since I posted any activities for the kids. We haven’t done any super neat projects (not much that’s blog worthy anyway) in a while but we did go on a nice little road trip this past weekend to Wisconsin Dells. We have gone there 4 times out of the past 5 years. We rent a condo with my friend and his wife and children out on Lake Delton and spend a good three days at a time there.

We always stay at Wilderness on the Lake after the main season because rates are cheaper.

Because the kids are older, we decided to see more of the town and find interesting places to visit.

One of the places was the Tommy Bartlett Exploratory Interactive Science Center. I was really amazed at all the neat physics exhibits they had.

We saw a lot of space and physics exhibits like inside an original Core Module of the Russian Space Station Mir:

A real working Tesla Coil:

A Van de Graff Generator (but I really don’t have any good pictures of it).

and A high wire “Sky Cycle”

That’s my husband riding a bike 12 feet off the ground on a tightrope.

The next day, we ended up going to the Storybook Gardens and Timbavati Wildlife Park located within.

We saw a few different animals, and some I’ve never seen before up close, like giraffes.

They had this really cool Little Red Schoolhouse. The girls and dad and I thought it was pretty cool.

Before we were done, we stopped and had a snack at this building that had a beautiful sea mural painted on the inside.

We also took a free water taxi across the lake and played on the beach and explored around the hotel.

Yep, that’s a squirrel with an acorn it’s mouth.

It was a lot of fun, but we always manage to pack in a lot of things in a short amount of time and we are usually exhausted by the time we go home.