Crafting Stories - Bear on a Bike

Today we read the story Bear on a Bike which is a great book with awesome artwork!  We also made a megaphone.  The idea that my daughter and I had was that the kids could read along and when the story repeats, the kids could use their megaphones to "read along" (aka scream "Bear on a bike as happy as can be, where are you going bear?  Please wait for me!")

The Book:

The Craft:

It may not look like much but these are a lot of fun!

• Take a large piece of paper and let the kids color it.
• Then roll it into a megaphone shape.
• Staple it to secure it.
• Punch a hole at either side and tie a ribbon between the two holes (this is the best - then they can sling it over their shoulder - very cool!)
• Hand it back to the child so that they can finish decorating it with stickers.

Enjoy!

 

Crafting Stories - Paper Bag Princess

This week we read a book about a princess and a dragon!  This craft is easy to pair with any number of princess and dragon books.  But my favorite princess and dragon book is The Paper Bag Princess!

For this book we did two crafts.  The first was a dragon and the second was a crown (for all the princes and princesses!)

 

Dragon Craft

• Take a plastic cup and hot glue on a popsicle stick, two pom-poms and eyes.
• The kids then tape on crepe paper around the cup's opening to look like fire.

 

Crown Craft

• Cut out the shape of a crown.
• Punch a hole at either end and use string for tying it on!

Enjoy!

Science in the Park - Balloons

This week blew up balloons a few different ways!

Experiment 1:

In this experiment, the kids used hot air to blow up a balloon.

How to:

• Take a balloon and stretch it out over a plastic water bottle. 
• Put the bottle in a bowl of very hot water. 
• The hot water will warm up the air in the bottle causing the balloon to inflate a little.

The Science:
The heat causes the air in the bottle to warm up.  Since hot air "expands" (the molecules are moving fast) and it needs more room so it pushes on the balloon inflating thus balloon a little.

Experiment 2:

In this experiment we blew up a balloon using a chemical reaction. 

How to:

• Add about 2 tsp of baking soda to a balloon.  Add it inside of the balloon.
• Pour 1 cup of vinegar into a plastic bottle.
• Stretch the balloon on top of the bottle being careful not to dump the baking soda in.

• Once it's on - lift the balloon up dumping in the baking soda and blowing up the balloon!

The Science:
The baking soda (base) and the vinegar (acid) react to form carbon dioxide and water.  The carbon dioxide that is produced is what blows up the balloon!

Enjoy!

Science in the Park - Exothermic Reactions

This week - we are focusing on exothermic reactions!  These are reactions that produce heat that the kids can feel!

"Elephant Toothpaste" Experiment

This experiment is called "elephant toothpaste" because the foam that is made is supposed to look like toothpaste that would work for an elephant.
Materials:
Yeast
Warm water
Dish detergent
Food Coloring
Plastic water bottle
Hydrogen Peroxide (3% from the grocery store is fine)
Tin trays (to control the mess!)

How to:
Dissolve the yeast in the warm water - about 2 tablespoons of water for every teaspoon of yeast.
Add the peroxide (about a half cup), a squirt of dish detergent, and a few drops of food coloring to the water bottle.
Add the yeast/water mix to the bottle.
The mixture will foam and pour out of the top of the bottle and into the tray.
Ask the kids to touch the bottom of the bottle - it is warm!

The Science:
The hydrogen peroxide naturally breaks down into water but the yeast speeds up this decomposition!  The yeast acts like a catalyst, decomposing the hydrogen peroxide into water and oxygen which is why the reaction is bubbly and foamy!

Hot Ice Experiment

This experiment creates a supercooled liquid that can quickly turn to solid and gives off heat in the process!

Materials
Baking Soda
Vinegar

How to:
Put 4 cups of vinegar in a sauce pan.  Slowly add 4 tablespoons of baking soda (it will fizz).
Heat until boiling and then keep cooking it until most of the water has boiled away and a film is left on the solution.
There will be foam on the sides of the saucepan, scrap this off and save it.
Once about 90% of it has evaporated, remove it from the heat and place it in an ice bath or in the fridge until it cools. 
Once cool, it should be in a liquid state.  Add a little bit of the foam that was scrapped off earlier and the hot ice will crystallize turning into a solid!  In the process it gives off heat!

The Science:
The boiled down vinegar and baking soda mixture is a supercooled sodium actetate solution.  When the solid sodium actetate and the liquid version mix, it causes the liquid to crystallize and give off heat.  This is what is inside the hand warmer packets!

Enjoy!

First Grade Garden Lesson 5 - Concrete Poetry and Butterflies!

This week the topic was concrete poetry in the garden.  Since we were also watching our cabbage white caterpillars turn into butterflies - we talked more about that too.

Group Activity

• Showed the kids (on the ipad) pictures of an egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, and butterfly for the cabbage white and for the monarch butterfly.
• After they had mastered the life cycle of the butterfly - I showed them what they would be doing at their table activity for the life cycle.
• Next, we talked about butterflies.  We talked about how they are symmetrical.  After that I described the activity for making symmetrical butterflies.
• Then we talked about a concrete poem.  A concrete poem uses words to form a shape. 

Table 1:

This table used the worksheet here to describe the life cycle of a butterfly.  They glued on pictures of an egg, a caterpillar, a butterfly, and a chrysalis.  Then they used the words from the word bank to label each picture. 

 

Table 2:

This table made butterflies.  They colored half of a butterfly cut-out using pastels.  Then they folded it in half and rubbed it with a quarter.  This made the butterfly symmetrical!

Table 3:

This table wrote concrete poetry.  They used the worksheet here and wrote words around the outside like in the example.

Garden:

In the garden we measured our plants to plot on a graph.  For the radishes and carrots, we thinned out just half.  With any extra time, we walked to the herb garden and explored it by smelling the plants!

 Enjoy!

Science in the Park - Absorption and Ice Science

This week we talked about 'absorption'.  We first did two experiments to demonstrate how something absorbs a liquid and then built ice castles!

Experiment 1: Celery Experiment

• Add some water and food coloring to a glass (if you plan to send these home with the kids - add it to an old jar).  Red or Blue food coloring will work best. 
• Then take a celery stick and cut an inch or more off the bottom.  It looks really cool if the celery stick has leaves.
• Place the celery stick in the glass (or jar) and wait for a couple hours (check it at 4 hours and 8 and 24 etc).  You should see the color coming up through the leaves. 
• If you break the celery stalk in half, you will see the color in the veins of the stalk (so cool!)

The Science: The celery stalk absorbs the colored water and when you break the stalk open you can see the veins that it traveled through.

Experiment 2: Paper Towel Experiment

• Take a cup (we used yogurt cups) and add some food coloring and water.  Use a primary color.
• Then take another cup and add another primary color food coloring and water.
• Take a paper towel (because we used small cups, we ripped the paper towel in half) and fold it so that it sits partially in the cup with the food coloring and partially in an empty cup. 
• The paper towel will absorb the water and transfer it to the empty cup mixing the two colors in the other cups.  So if you had red and blue in the cups - your middle cup will end up purple!  Don't forget to leave the middle cup empty and to give it 10 minutes or so.

Experiment 3: Ice Castle!

• This was so super cool and the kids just loved it! 
• Freeze a few containers of ice overnight (2 or 3 containers per kid).  I just used whatever Tupperware I had available.
• Give each child a tray to work in, a cup of coarse salt (or regular salt - course just looks neat), and a few cup of food coloring and water. 
• Give them a eye dropper or pipet to use for putting the water on the ice castle. 
• The kids can take the ice blocks and put salt on them to make them stick together. 
• If they add salt to the top of the ice and then pour water over it - it makes holes in the ice.  Then as you drip the colored water on top - you get a really awesome ice castle!

 

 

Enjoy!

 

First Grade Garden Lesson 4 - Math in the Garden

This week we measured and counted in the garden!

Objective

Use math in the garden.

Group Activity

• Define a sundial.  Describe how it uses shadows to tell time.
• Talk about the imported cabbage worm.  We had found some of these worms on our broccoli plants and we put them in a jar.  By this week they had crystallized and one had hatched into a butterfly!  We talked about how the female butterflies have brown on their wings and the male butterflies have black dots on their wings.  At the end of the day we let the butterfly go! 

Garden Activity

At the garden we measured a plant with a ruler and recorded it.  We will draw a graph to record growth.  Each group measured what they planted.

Table 1

This table made a sundial.
They cut out the sundial from http://analemmatic.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/papercraft.pl  This website has a script where you enter your zip code, time zone, and whether or not you have daylights savings time (the rest of the page you can ignore) and it gives you a sundial that you can print out!  It's pretty cool (but I think it only works for the northern hemisphere).
Then cut out the gnomon.  Link for gnomon is here.  Cut it out.  Then cut on the solid line.  This will make two tabs.  Fold each tab a different direction on the dotted line.  This will create tabs to hold the gnomon in place.

On the sundial, cut along the '12' line to the center of the sundial.  Insert the gnomon so that the bottom point of the triangle is at the center of the sundial.
Tape the tabs down to the bottom of the sundial.  See diagram.

Use the sundial to tell time (it wasn't sunny enough for us :-(

 

Table 2 and 3

These tables did scavenger hunts.  One table had to measure objects in the garden.  The other table has to count some of the things in the garden.  See worksheet here for what we did!

Enjoy!

Science in the Park - Sniffing Science

This week we are having some fun with out sense of smell!

Experiment 1: Smelling Cards

How to:

• Hot glue a cotton ball onto an index card.
• Add a scent to each card. We added: vanilla extract, almond extract, orange juice (squeezed from an orange), cloves, cinnamon, and garlic powder.
• We passed around the bottle/jars with the scents in them so that the kids could see if they could match the scent in the cup to the scent on the index card.

Experiment 2: Balloon Sniffing

This experiment demonstrates the ability for olfactory (smell) particles to pass through the rubber that makes up a balloon.

How To:
Demo how cool it is that you can smell through a balloon. Take a candle that has a glass lid (like a Yankee candle or the cheaper version). Ask the kids to smell the candle with the lid on (can't smell much) - then take the lid off - and then you can smell the candle! Now - take a balloon with a scent inside (I added a little bit of vanilla) and show how you can smell the scent right through the balloon. Point out how you could not smell through the glass but you could through the balloon!

Experiment 3: Scratch and Sniff Pictures

Scratch and Sniff is an example of micro-encapsulation. This is when tiny olfactory (smell) particles are encapsulated by another material and the other material has to be disturbed to allow the smell particles to escape for you to smell them.

How to:

• Mix a kool-aid packet with some water to form the consistency of a paint. Mix at about a 1 to 1 ratio (so 1 tsp of kool-aid and 1 tsp of water).
• Paint a picture using the kool-aid paint.
• Wait for it to dry.
• Then scratch and sniff! Very cool!

Enjoy!

First Grade Garden Lesson 3: Poetry

This lesson was to write poetry in the garden.  In addition, we made nature art to go with our poetry.

Objective:

• To look around and be inspired to write a poem.

Group Activity:

• Define "acrostic poem".  It is a poem were the first letter of each line spells out a word that is important to the meaning of the poem.  There are no other rules.  It doesn't have to rhyme or have the same number of words per line - there are no rules.
• Tell a sample acrostic poem:

Shovels and hoes turn the ground.
Our Earth becomes the home for a seed.
It sprouts and grows, higher it goes,
Lifting its face to the sun.

• Look at the things that we will be using for nature art (collected from the park on the way to school).  Discuss how everything we will be using is organic.  Glitter will also be used for the nature art - discuss how that is non-organic.
• Show some of the caterpillars and chrysalis that we found the week before. 

Garden Activity:

• Start off by examining the jars with the caterpillars that we found the week before.  This included a jar with a caterpillar and jar with a chrysalis.
• Ask the kids for observations about the caterpillars.  Ask them why the chrysalis looks pointy.  Ask them to observe how the caterpillar is the same color of the leaf and ask them to talk about why they think that is.
• Then go to the garden.  This week we thinned out the radishes and look for more caterpillars on the broccoli. 
• Then each group had one person who could water their plantings.

Table 1:

• In this table they wrote a poem.  They used the attached worksheet as a guideline. 
• The teacher assisted with this table and she encouraged them to write at least two words per line.

Table 2:

• At this table the kids glued things from nature onto a piece of paper.  Things such as leaves, bark, grass, flower petals.
• There was a sample picture at this table for the kids to look at.

Table 3:

• At this table the kids added glitter to their pictures to make it a little fancy.

Enjoy!

First Grade Garden Lesson 2: Soil

Objective

• Learn what makes up soil.
• Learn what organic and non-organic material is.
• Learn what good soil feels like.

Group Activity:

• Discuss last weeks carrot taste test findings! 
• Go over the worksheet about the parts of a plant (could have done at the end of the previous week).
• Talk about the new topics: soil and organic vs non-organic material

New Topic: Soil

Soil is not just made up of dirt - there are many things in soil.  If you look at it closely you will see rocks, bark, pieces of plants, poop (my soil has plenty of snail poop in it!), and other organic materials.

New Topic: Organic vs Non-organic Material

Organic material is anything that can decompose (or break down over time) into soil.  For example, a tree is organic, animals are organic; some things are not organic such as your computer and plastic toys. 

Garden Activity:

• Talk about what has and has not grown.
• Look at the seed packets to see when we should see sprouts. 
• Water the garden.  One person (alphabetical order) from each group gets to water what their group planted.

Table 1:

Look at the experiments from last week. 
Take the strawberry plants out of the jar and glue them onto thick paper. 

Table 2:

• Mystery Boxes.  Use boxes with soil inside.  Have the kids feel the soil and pick which soil they think plants would do best in.  We used empty tissue boxes.
• In one box put sandbox sand. 
• In another box put a hard, clay soil (easily found in your yard).
• In the third box put potting soil. 
• Also complete worksheet worksheet link

Table 3:

• In this table look at various soil samples.  Each group looked at one type of soil sample.
• Use magnifying glass to get a closer look.
• Have a large paper out for all the kids to write down their findings (bark, rock, dirt, etc).
• One group looked at potting soil.
• One group looked at soil from the lawn.
• One group looked at soil from the strawberry garden.
• One group looked at soil from the regular garden.

Closing:

• Talk about the strawberry plants and how only the ones with sun, soil, and water survived. 
• Talk about the mystery boxes - ask the kids which soil they think is the best for plants to grow in.

First Grade Garden Lesson 1: Planting

The garden lessons are for my daughter's first grade class.  It is structured that we meet at the beginning as a group.  Then we go to the garden area which has a number of picnic tables so that we can split the class of 30 into 4 groups.  One group works in the garden with me (the parent volunteer), two groups work pretty independently at a table, and the last group works at a table with the teacher.  About every 5-7 minutes, the kids switch tables.

Objective:

• learn the parts of a plant
• learn what it takes for a plant to grow
• learn about what we were growing

Group Activity:

• Read The Carrot Seed
• Show what we will be growing: radishes, sugar snap peas, broccoli, carrots
• Discuss the parts of a plant
• Discuss what is needed for a plant to grow (sun, soil, water, love)

Garden Activity:

Plant the seeds!  Read the seed package and have each of the kids plant a few seeds.  Each group gets a type of plant that they can take ownership of growing.

Table 1:

Put together the experiment.  Use 4 jars (per group).  In each of the jars place the following:

1. Soil, a small cup of water, a strawberry plant
2. Soil, strawberry plant (no water)
3. Soil, a small cup of water and a paper bag over the jar (no sun)
4. Small cup of water, strawberry plant (no soil)

Cover the jar with plastic wrap and a rubber band.  The water from the cup will evaporate and condense on the plastic wrap and then drip back down on the plants to water them.

The hypothesis that the kids will easily draw is that only the plant with sun, soil, and water will survive.

Table 2:

Parts of a plant worksheet. 
This is the one that we used.  We talked about all the plant parts as a group and then each child filled out a paper to label the parts. Plant Worksheet Link

Table 3:

This table did a taste test of different types of carrots!  They each tried a green carrot, a purple carrot, and an orange carrot.  Then they marked what their favorite was on a piece of paper.