Nature & Science with Kids

Messy Recipes for Hands-on Play

Dancing Popcorn
Fill a small glass about 3/4 full of water.
Add 2 tablespoons of baking soda and mix well.
Add a drop or two of food coloring.
Add 10-15 popcorn kernels.
Then add a few drops of vinegar.
The kernels will start to move in 1 -2 minutes.

Volcanic Eruption
Place an empty baby food jar on a tray. Surround the jar with salt dough to look like a volcano/mountain.
If you want to make this activity, a multi-day experience, the the salt dough dry or bake it in an oven until hard.
Then allow children, to paint or color the mountain, glue bits of twigs or leaves or grass on to make it look like vegetation, and otherwise decorate their volcano.
When you’re ready for an eruption, place a drop of red food coloring and a tablespoon of baking soda in the jar.
Then add vinegar to your volcano to make it erupt.

Catch a Cloud
Have you ever wanted to bottle a cloud? Here’s how!
Pour just a bit of water into a two-liter plastic bottle.
The adult should light a match and drop it into the bottle.
Immediately close the lid.
Squeeze the bottle a few times to watch your cloud form.

Make Butter
Use room temperature whipping cream. Pour some into a baby food jar or other container and let your child shake it for a while. The butter aill forming to a small ball. Pour off the liquid. Let your child taste it to see what’s different about it and milk. Spead the butter on a cracker or piece of bread. You may want a bit of salt.

White Mud
Unravel about 1 1/2 rolls of two-ply toilet paper and put it in a plastic tub.
Add some dish soap.
Slowly warm water, 1 cup at a time, while you and your child mix it all together by hand until you like the consistency.

Ice Cream
Fill a gallon-size ziplock bag half way with ice.
Add 6 tablespoons of rock salt.
Put 1/2 cup of milk or half and half, 2 tablespoons of sugar and 1/2 to 1 teaspoon vanilla flavoring into a small ziplock bag and seal. The ice and rock salt can puncture this bag so it is a good idea to double bag the ice cream mixture into another small ziplock bag.
Put the small bag inside the large bag and seal.
Shake the large bag until you have ice cream (5 – 8 minutes).
Note: The ice cream is going to be more a “soft serve” texture than like commercial ice cream.

Gooey Goop
1 cup cornstarch
a small amount of water

Add water slowly to cornstarch until the goop drips from the spoon.
The mixture will seem hard, but when you pick it up is slides between your fingers.
If it is too thin and liquid, add a little more cornstarch.
Add a bit of food coloring for fun. It might be a fun way to see how colors mix together.
You can use a funnel to put about 1/2 cup of this mixture into a water ballon. Then you’ve just created your very own stress ball for relaxation. Careful with young kids though since the balloon can be a choking hazard.

The internet is full of wonderful, hands-on experiments and activities that help children explore science and nature concepts. Share your favorite activity with us. Leave a comment below.

Tags: early elementary, preschool, sensory activities

Reading Comprehension

For children of all ages, reading or listening comprehension is enhanced by making predictions about the story, talking or thinking out loud about the story during while reading, and summarizing the story.  This is where parents reading with children is so essential.  Parents prompt and support this thinking-while-reading process.

Younger children love the familiar.  Parents quickly learn that they will be reading their child’s favorite book multiple times a day for months.  At our house, we read “The Little Engine That Could” day in and day out when my son was four.  This coincided with his general fascination with trains and his specific fascination with Thomas the Tank Engine.  This is just fine!  Read it again and again.  When children are familiar with a story, they can also pay attention to other pre-literacy skills such as recognizing how text flows.  Also, this allows a parent to mix it up a little bit.  Substitute words with other words that rhyme.  This teaches sound discrimination skills and reinforces listening comprehension skills when they realize that you “messed up.”  At the end of the story, ask your child what might happen next or ask them to make up a new ending.  Preschoolers can act out a story that they hear.  This is a form of summarizing.

For older children, have them read out loud to you.  Oral reading skills develop over time, so be patient and don’t over-correct your child.  This can cause frustration.  But do ask, “Does that make sense?” when the meaning is affected by an error.  This teaches the child to attend to meaning as well as to the phonics of reading.  Usually, my son and I will get a little laugh out of his mistake and he’ll correct the problem.  Older children should also be asked to make predictions about what will happen next.  Often I’ll ask my child to guess what a new vocabulary word means based on what he understands from the story.  Then we’ll keep reading and see if it still makes sense.  As much as possible, I try to get my son to summarize what happens in the stories we read.  Truthfully, he hates this.  So I tend to prompt with, “First, the story started with…”  He fills in the blank from there.  I’ll continue prompting him along with “And then…” or “After that…”  Other times, I’ll tell him that I want him to tell me three or four things about the beginning of the story, the middle of the story and the end of the story.

Obviously, reading comprehension has to also happen as children read silently to themselves.  So be sure to take the opportunity to assess comprehension after your child has been reading independently.  At first, you’ll find that many kids have much better comprehension reading aloud.  During silent reading, many children will skip difficult words or even a line of text and not necessarily slow down and figure it out when the text loses meaning.  This is less likely to happen if the child is interested in the book, but distractions can still happen any time.  So ask questions, have them summarize, have them predict what might happen later, or make up a new ending.  Ask them what characters look like or what the setting looks like.  Visualizing the text requires a child to extract meaning and really comprehend the writing.

We all make mistakes in reading and listening comprehension.  We miss a word or a concept and end up having a good laugh when we realize what was actually intended.  This is typical of most readers. As long as the problem is constant, you likely don’t need to worry much about your child. Just keep practicing reading.

Comprehension problems happen all the time with my daughter and songs.  At four, she’s sure she knows the lyrics and sings them loudly and doesn’t have a clue what it means.  Her version of “Swing, Swing” goes like this:  “Swing, swing from the table sauce; My heart is flushed by a former love; Can you tell me buy; And can anyway to carry on again.” Share your funny story about reading or listening miscomprehension!  We can all use a laugh!  Leave us a comment below.

Tags: early elementary, reading comprehension

Rote Counting

Rote counting is learned largely through repetition and drill-type practice. So the key to this is keeping kids interested! Frankly, this type of practice is boring for all of us. Have empathy for your child and you’ll greatly improve your success.

First, make sure you’re practicing in short sessions. I rarely set aside a block of time to work on counting. Instead, I find little pieces of time throughout the day and suggest we practice counting while we’re waiting for something else. It’s a form of distraction, and it usually has a fairly clear endpoint. Short, frequent, and consistent practice is the best way. A few happy practice times throughout the day is better than one longer miserable practice session. So do it while you’re waiting for things: the toast to pop up, the dentist to be ready for you, your friend to come over, the crosswalk signal to change, etc.

Second, break up the task into parts. Start with solidifying numbers 1-10. Then work on numbers 1-20. The teen numbers are tricky. Most preschoolers and some kindergartners are still getting a handle on them and often skip one or more or say them out of order. Some children always skip a particular number. One way to address this is to slow way down as you approach the number that your child skips and emphasize it. If your child isn’t predictable in this way, simply count slowly until she starts to build speed and confidence in the sequence. When your child skips a number, do encourage them to try again and slow down. Incorrect practice is not useful.

Next, demonstrate and practice numbers up to 39. This usually goes faster than learning the teens. At this point your child will probably start to recognize the pattern of counting and be able to figure out how to count the 40’s and 50’s etc. The task at that point is to learn the names of the groups of ten. Be generous with providing the next number after 39, 49, 59, etc. You don’t want them thinking thirty-ten and thirty-eleven are numbers. It’s best not to practice mistakes!

Finally, look for ways to add in sensory elements to improve memory. Number songs or rhymes can help young children learn numbers 1-10. Rhymes like “One, two, buckle my shoe” can be helpful. But, even chanting rhythmically will help. If your child is willing to sit down for a more formal activity, pointing to the numbers on a number chart will add in the visual sense and help them with number recognition. Any kind of dancing, marching, or jumping adds a kinesthetic element which will help your child focus and remember better too.

Tags: drill, early elementary, math, preschool

Beads and Patterns

Elementary age children still like to use beads. I have used stringing beads with my older children as a way to teach counting to 100 as well as skip counting by 2’s, 5’s, and 10’s.

I have found that when they are learning to count to 100, it does help to separate the beads into groups of 10 to help children not loose their place. This also helps, because (invariably) they do loose their place, and it’s easier for you to figure out where they are when the beads are in sets of 10. It’s easiest if the groups are sorted by color. Have the children count as they string the beads or have them count how many are on afterward.

Sometimes it’s just fun to string on as many of a variety of beads as fit and then count up how many are on the string or the pipe cleaner. This can also be an estimation activity. Kids can guess how many beads are on their string and then count to find out.

When using beads to teach skip counting, first start with counting by 10’s. There’s only 10 numbers to 100 to memorize in this sequence so it’s easiest. First sort the beads by color into 10 groups of 10. Use little Dixie cups to hold the groups. Then have your child start stringing on the beads. Each time 10 more beads are added on, you can count by 1’s and then by 10’s to reinforce the concept. Memorizing 10, 20, 30, etc. is called rote counting. This is a first step in learning skip counting, but the beads make the idea concrete and help the child understand the meaning of counting by 10’s to 100. Once counting by 10’s is getting fairly well mastered, introduce counting by 5’s in the same way, but start by only counting up to 20 or 30 while the concept is developing.

Go slow and make sure that your child is engaged in the activity. If it’s too complicated or overwhelming for your child, you will quickly realize it when their attention wanders to other things. If this happens it’s ok to stop and just have fun and try again another time.

Younger children can also practice counting the beads that they string. One-to-one correspondence in counting develops through the preschool years. Initially, children are able to count about as many objects as they are old. Around 4-5 years old this starts expanding and children can count larger groups of objects. As this is developing you’ll notice your child skip numbers, double count objects, or easily loose their place. This is normal and resolves as children continue practicing and their brains continue developing. At some point in the late preschool or kindergarten years, kids will have an “ah-hah moment” when they realize that counting is a pattern. They realize that after 20 will come 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29 and often will think that twenty-ten is next followed by twenty-eleven. You will supply the word thirty to them and then they’ll count 31, 32, 33, etc. Giving kids all sorts of opportunities to count develops and solidifies both rote counting and one-to-one correspondence counting. So when playing with beads or Fruit Loops or Cheerios always have kids count the number they have.

Tags: early elementary, fine motor skills, math, preschool

Spelling Word Practice

Word families are groups of words that share the same ending combination of letters (word chunk) and the same ending sound. Early elementary spelling lists are often organized in this way. You can find common word families and examples fairly easily online. Early spelling lists for kids will likely start with word families that can be sounded out such as -at or -an. Later, the lists will progress to more difficult word chunks such as -ight or -ink.

To practice word families with your child, first make sure she understands that there is a pattern in the spelling words. Point out that all the words have the same ending letters. Learn those letters first. I like to compare the words to brothers and sisters that all have the same “last name.” The only difference is the “first name” part and almost always this can be sounded out.

Word families rhyme so this is a natural way to practice the words. Have children write rhyming sentences or make up poetry. You can also read nursery rhymes or rhyming books that incorporate the word families you are working on. Cover up the spelling list words, have your child guess them as you read along, and then spell the words to you.

Children can draw pictures that incorporate as many of the words as they can and then label their pictures.

• a fat cat on a mat with a rat
• a man with a tan can and a pan

If drawing is not interesting to your child, simply making up and writing down sentences using the spelling list can be a good practice.

Have kids use magnets on a fridge to spell the word chunk and then practice the spelling words by adding on the letters for the initial sound. This reinforces the pattern concept of word families. You can also use letter flashcards on the table or floor if you don’t have magnets. Have your child make the card for the word chunk.

Of course, all the other suggestions for studying spelling words still apply. Make sure to study every day for a short time and to incorporate as many senses as you can to increase memory and improve the effectiveness of study time.  And you’ll probably find that your child will need to take at least one practice test during the week with you.  This allows you talk about and practice test-taking strategies like listening carefully, writing slowly and neatly and checking your work.

How does your family study for spelling tests? Share what works for you and leave a comment.

Tags: drill, early elementary, spelling