Mixing Colours and Melting Ice Cubes

This was a great activity because it touched on science, math, colours, patience, colouring in the lines... and it was totally fun!

How To Do It:

1. Add a drop of food colouring to the water in each ice cube, before freezing. (Talia loved getting to add drops of food colouring by herself)

2. Make a paper with math equations for different colour combinations, leaving an empty spot for the answer. (We took this opportunity to talk about what the "+" and "=" signs mean)

3. The next day, fill glasses with ice cubes in different colour combinations & watch to see what colours they make when they melt! (This was fun but took a while, so we added leftover cubes to cups of water for more food colouring fun while we waited)

4. Let your child colour in the answers when it's all finished.

I got this idea from a blog, but I can't remember where now!

Shape Sorting

We have a shape sorting cube from Playskool called the "Form Fitter".

In the past we've just used it for fitting the shapes through the holes, but I recently found a few of the shapes that were missing, and with all of the blogs I've been looking at lately, I think I'm starting to see things a little differently, because I thought of another "educational" way to approach the toy (it's not that original I guess, but for me it was ;)

So, I suggested different ways that Talia could sort the shapes (by colour, by whether they had corners or were round, by how many sides or corners they had, etc.) It went well & Talia was eager to keep doing it!

Shaving Cream Fun!

Today we tried playing with shaving cream! I even enjoyed it- come on, it feels cool! ;)

Here's what we did:

We did this in our little plastic tub, to keep the mess contained.

This is a good opportunity to talk about mixing colours, too.

Things we'll change next time:

I think we'll do it without the tinfoil, but maybe make a design on a piece of tinfoil at the end (apparently, it dries on it nicely... we're still waiting for ours to dry :) The reason I wouldn't use the foil again is that the cream totally sticks to it, so the foil was lifting up all the time, with her hands when she lifted them up.

Another change I would make is not to leave the food colouring on top of the cream when she got to dig in (now her hands are dyed ;)

Christmas Trees

Talia made a couple of Christmas trees today:
I cut out a Christmas Tree shape from a cereal box-type of cardboard, and Talia
- painted it green
- painted the stump pink/red
- realized mixing red with green made brown, and experimented - decorated the tree with stickers and sequins
- made it "rain" sequins
- spent FOREVER cleaning up the sequins
I also made a little green paper cone out of construction paper for her (I got the idea from Ikat, through The Crafty Crow, where you can find a bunch of cute advent ideas here) and let her decorate it
- she loved using pom poms because she saw them days ago & has been waiting for her chance to use them! Here's what Katrina got to do while Talia was painting (I tried letting her at the finger paint at first, but it went in her mouth so fast, I quickly changed the plan & let her at some babyfood instead! :)
I have a feeling that cardboard tree will continue to get more and more decorated as the days go on. I'm also planning to make a larger version of it with her as we get closer to Christmas.