Mixing Colors

Here is a fun and simple science activity that will keep your child engaged for hours! Well. maybe not hours but for a long time. Using water, food coloring, and some droppers, you have an easy science experiment.

I have red, blue, and yellow colored water with each of the droppers. They can use the smaller bowls for mixing the different combinations of colors. The larger bowl is where they can dump out the smaller bowls and start over again. I also put a small spoon for mixing and a sponge for clean up.

I was sure that finding out all the different color combinations he could make (orange, purple, and green) would be a hit. However, my son's favorite color to make was brown and grey, using all the colors mixed in one bowl! Oh well, there was still meaningful learning happening within all this fun. We counted the drops we used of each color. What would happen if we put only one drop of red and five drops of blue? How many drops did we put all together? There was also a lot of fine motor development refined by using the droppers. Such a fun activity!

We will definitely do this again...maybe tomorrow...

What We Did Today: Pretzel Sticks

Any learning that is child directed is meaningful. When children are interested in their learning they will retain it. Child directed learning gives the child ownership in their learning and in their success. A great example of child directed learning happened in our house today.

We had pretzel sticks today for a snack and my son dumped his entire bag onto the table. He started playing with the sticks and I (being a mom) said, "We don't play with our food." However, I noticed he was making letters. He had placed one stick vertical with one on top placed horizontally. I asked him what he had made and he named the letter "T." Boy, was I wrong about playing with your food!

After explaining that in most cases playing with our food is unacceptable, especially in public places, I let him continue what he was doing. Our snack time turned into a letter formation lesson! Pretzel sticks are not the greatest tools to make letters with curves (s,b,d,o,etc.), but for these we used several sticks to make the letter big and as curvy as possible. It was not perfect, but it was fun and meaningful!