Posts containing the following tags:
outdoor activities

Here’s a fun one for summer, and older preschoolers might not even get that messy.  Roll painty balls down the slide!  Of course, if you don’t want your slide to be painty afterward, make sure you cover it with paper.  This paper makes a great background for displaying children’s art inside once it’s dry. In this picture you ...

Here you are, the LAST POST (for now) about vinegar and baking soda.  Enjoy! We don’t advocate violence here, but we had trouble coming up with a good name for this one that wasn’t weapon-like.  It was either grenade or bomb.  I guess ours were more like bombs since we didn’t throw them, but I think next time we’ll toss ...

You thought I’d end the baking soda and vinegar business with the volcanoes, didn’t you?  At alumni camp this year we did exploding paint.  The concept is a little cooler than the execution, but it was fun to experiment anyway. We put some baking soda and paint in snack-sized sandwich bags and then used a funnel to pour in a little ...

You can’t really do a series on baking soda and vinegar without bringing out the volcanoes.  But since most preschoolers have very little practical experience with volcanoes it doesn’t make sense to do any sort of a unit on the things.  Instead, we try to get the sense of one in the hopes that this knowledge helps them learn about ...

With threes I do a similar setup as I do for the twos, namely on trays.  But instead of squeeze bottles I provide several types of droppers and syringes.  We’re working on our fine motor control as well as investigating how fluids work in addition to our chemistry when we do it this way.  I usually set it out with the droppers ...

Here is a picture of our fabulous, all-weather chime wall. This sucker is expensive but was purchased because of a grant we got. Our music teacher spent some quality personal time writing grant applications and so we are very, very lucky! The kids love the chime wall. We had it inside our large motor room for awhile, but it was pretty loud in ...

My husband thinks this is an urban myth, but it’s totally true.  You CAN make a geyser by dropping Mentos into a Diet Coke bottle.  This picture is from our alumni camp.  What you can’t appreciate are the chants of, “Men-tos!  Men-tos!” from the kids watching. The activity is simple enough.  Put a 2 liter bottle of ...

Dot painters come by various names: bingo markers, do-a-dots, and dotters, among others. They are simple but can help kids explore a new tool for painting. Adults usually restrict themselves to dotting with dot painters. But young children don’t have this preconception about what they’re for. They typically drag them like brushes across the ...

We often think of the sensory table as holding objects that the children manipulate but are unchanging without the children present.  If you’ve got a 2-year-old in your life you know they are fascinated by running water.  One option is to let them play in the sink.  But sometimes that’s not desirable or you’re looking for ...

As I’ve said, we like to go outside whenever possible.  We sometimes leave our classroom door open so kids can wander in and out to the play yard at will.  When we do that we move some of our usual indoor things outside. Here is a crayon setup from earlier in the year.  With the twos I often secure paper down so they don’t have ...