Rainbow Water Beads {fun & fail}

A few days ago, my son & I made up a tray of rainbow water beads to play in. Since I only had clear water beads, we attempt to color them - which was met with some success & some failure - but lots of fun too!

First, we tried coloring the beads with Kool-Aid (see our other Kool-Aid endeavors) - the idea of scented & colored water beads was enticing, but didn't work out... We tried to soak a teaspoon of clear water beads in water with two packs of lime Kool-Aid. We ended up with just slightly hydrated, sticky little green orbs ...

They never did get any larger than this... so we threw them out. With an older child... this might have been a great intro into a fun science experiment with the water beads (i.e. what happens to the water beads when we use different liquids to hydrate?) I'm pretty curious myself... so I might just do the experiment with my 3 year old anyway...

Instead of Kool-Aid, we resorted to traditional food coloring gels, hot water and ziplock bags. We hydrated a tablespoon of beads with several cups of water & a generous addition of food coloring for several hours. Then, I rinsed the beads in a colander before pouring them into our pan for play.  Initially they looked beautiful....

And my son had a great time playing in them....

But after a day or two, the colors faded and the whole bin was a drab shade of greenish-grey...

The moral of the story is... if you want rainbow water beads, buy the rainbow water beads that are already colored...  even though our colors faded, the beads were still quite fun!

Exploring Melting...

In class today, we read an old Scholastic reader - from January of last year! The kids usually enjoy reading the 'newspaper' and I love the great photos & easy to understand text....It's perfect for my students!

Today, we used it as an introduction to the concepts: frozen & melting - which the kids have had lots of experience with lately -- with all the wintery mixed-up weather that we've been having!

On the back, there was an activity where the kids were supposed to identify which items were 'frozen' and which items were 'melting.'

They had so much trouble showing that they understood the difference between the two, that we just had to do our own experiment to better understand what frozen & melting really meant!

We went outside & collected bags of snow. Once back inside, the kids came up with places to put the bags of snow - after some prodding & suggestions they came up with the fridge, freezer, next the heater & on the window.

To add another twist, we added some other ingredients to three of the bags: salt, hand sanitizer & flour.

We checked on the baggies several times over the next 2-3 hours & the kids were very excited to find that some of their snow had turned into water - it had melted. We took pictures of our observations to make into a book...

Some of my students were also able to figure out what ingredients made the snow melt faster - the bag with the salt even had 'frost' that formed on the outside of the bag (a neat little chemical reaction to make observations about!)

We ended out the day by reviewing the pictures that we took, discussing our observations & creating a little book about the melting snow!

 

At snack time, we read The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats - and the kids knew exactly what was going to happen to the snowball that Peter put into his pocket ... it MELTED!

Hopefully tomorrow, when I ask them about 'melting,' they remember our experiment and can easily differentiate between 'melting' & 'frozen.'

Cranberry Sensory Play...

I picked up a few bags of cranberries on sale the the other day at the store and wasn't all that sure what I was going to do with them. Aside from cooking them up into some yummy dishes, I was thinking I'd take them to school for the kids to play with for a bit. In my mind, I had planned a counting activity where they'd count them into numbered cups and a fine motor activity where they'd push them onto skewers... but only one of those ideas actually happened... here's how it went....

I did get a counting tray set up. Simple, but new and interesting counting materials. The kids enjoyed this tray and the cranberries... We simply counted them into numbered plastic cups.

When I went to set up my fine motor tray with the skewers, I realized that I left them sitting at home on the counter!! Ugh! So no skewers -- maybe next week.

Then, my students were so interested in the cranberries we started playing with and examining them... we poured them into a large plastic container and added water to the mix. It was a great opportunity to talk about the concepts 'sink' and 'float.' We added a few items from the kitchen to scoop, fill, sort and move the cranberries between...

Then I remembered that I had purchased turkey basters from a discount store a few weeks back, so I pulled those out to add to the water play... and we ended up with a great Thanksgiving Sensory Bin of cranberries, water and kitchen items!

This sensory bin has been hours of fun for my students!

 

This was great out of the ordinary Thanksgiving fun...