Rainbow Beans {How To}

I want to start off by saying that I LOVE using kool-aid in my preschool classroom - but not for eating or drinking - only for arts and crafts. In the past, we've made kool-aid dough & paint and dyed silk scarves & noodles for play activities. I find the combination of their vivid colors and fruity smells to be a wonderful sensory addition to our activities. Now on to yesterday's shenanigans:

During yesterday's snowday, my son and I made a batch of Kool-Aid dyed beans for our sensory bin. I hadn't tried dying beans previously and it didn't actually occur to me that it would be all that different, so I didn't bother to research the idea at all... Overall it was a success, but after the fact, I realize that there may have been better methods.

We used the following items:

• 6 one pound bags of navy beans (I bet that any kind of white bean would work)
• 6-8 packs of Kook-Aid (one packet+ for each bag of beans)
• Food coloring 
• Rubbing Alcohol 
• Ziplock bags (use the freezer kind so they don't break!) 

1. We poured one packed of Kool-Aid into each bag (two for purple because I couldn't find grape Kool-Aid), a 'squirt' or two of food coloring (more for brighter beans, less for pastels), about 1 tablespoon of rubbing alcohol & 2 tablespoons of VERY hot water into each bag (my thought is that the hot water helps the Kool-Aid dissolve & the beans soak up the color more quickly). 
2. Seal bags and shake until Kool-Aid is dissolved, then pour 1 pound of beans in each bag. 
3. Reseal & shake again until beans are coated. 
4. We left the beans sit for about 15 minutes, shaking/rotating the bag periodically. 

We did one color at a time - I suggest starting with yellow because it seemed to take the longest to soak in.

The beans almost immediately started soaking up the solution & the skins started to wrinkle a bit - that's when we poured them out onto a cookie sheet covered with paper towels & tinfoil (to minimize cleanup). My thoughts were to stop soaking he beans before the skins totally came off.

I let them sit out in the kitchen for an hour or two so that most of the alcohol could evaporate, then I preheated my oven to 175 degrees and turned it off. Then I put the trays of beans in the oven overnight. CAUTION: do not put the beans directly in the oven because the rubbing alcohol is VERY flammable!

In the morning, they were still a bit damp, so I carefully took the paper towels out from under them, reheated the oven to 175 and let them 'bake' in a warm oven for a couple of hours to fully dry them.

The colors came out somewhere between pastes & brights -- and the coloring was a bit uneven. The wrinkly skins dried back out smooth and they have a nice light fruity scent. Next time, I 'll add more Kool-Aid packs per pound of beans -- maybe 2-3 packs to make the scents & colors more vivid.

Overall, I'm pleased with them and my three-year-old is begging to play with them!  I think we'll play with them at home for a while, then I'll take them to preschool next week for St. Patrick's Day rainbow activities or Jack and the Beanstalk story extension activities this spring!

Fall is here!

I think that fall is officially here - the leaves are beginning to change colors and the temperature has brought cool mornings and pleasantly warm days! This weekend, my toddler and I went on a Leaf Hunt during a walk around our neighborhood. We collected lots of different leaves, sticks, nuts and rocks for a little nature collection. When we got back we sorted through our leaves and picked out our favorites - they were so colorful!

Then I showed my son how to sort them out by color. He was interested for a few minutes, but then saw his yellow dump truck and decided to go dig in the dirt. This is an activity that I do with my preschool students every year, so I was excited (more excited than he was obviously) to share it with my son now that he's a little older!

 

I'm sure that I will be doing this color sorting activity with my preschool students soon. I only need more of the trees near my school to start turning colors and dropping leaves for us to have a wide variety to sort.

Here are some other Fall and Leaf themed activities that we've been working on in my classroom this week:

Scissor Tray: The kids seem to love cutting anything that's not paper!   We just collected leaves from outside and added scissors. Snipping the leaves to little bits was tons of fun and made a huge mess, but it cleaned up pretty easily considering some of the other messes that we end up with in my classroom.

Leaf Rubbings - I always enjoy this fall activity, but have had trouble getting my students to do it. The biggest reasons that we've been tragically unsuccessful with this simple activity are a lack of the fine motor skills required to actually accomplish it. It really requires a lot of fine motor control and coordination from the children to make a leaf rubbing picture. This year, I made lots of changes and we were VERY successful! First we taped the leaves to the table, with the 'vein' side up, using blue painters tape, then we taped the construction paper over top and provided a variety of different crayons, including fat crayons, triangular crayons and some round flat crayons (made in a muffin tin) that seem to easier to hold in the proper position to achieve the 'rubbing' effect rather than the 'scribble' effect.  Another modification that I thought of, but didn't use this year, was to use  contact paper to put the leaves on, cover the area with large butcher paper, and tape it to the table before rubbing with crayons.

Fall Sensory Bin: I switched out our sensory bin for fall themed materials including three 1lb bags of plain popcorn, fabric leaves in different sizes and colors, 'logs,'  and sweet gum seed pods - we call them 'prickly balls' here in my class. The kids love scooping, pouring and digging in the popcorn. I have students who hate the prickly seed pods and pick them out by their stems so that they don't have to accidentally touch them. We've already changed out some of the extras for a storybook extension activity with props from the book "Little Blue Truck" - so it easily turns into a 'farm themed' sensory bin -- more on the farm stuff another time though.

Today we read the book "Leaf Man" by Lois Elhert. Everyone was mesmerized by the illustrations and all of the different leaf shapes and colors. We will probably make some of our own leaf people and animals this week or next.

 
What kind of fall activities are you doing with your kids? I'd love to hear!