Happy Preschool Activities - Homeschooling - Bilingual Children - Parenting

Showing posts with label Indoor Activities. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Indoor Activities. Show all posts

Sunday, 30 June 2019

Balloon drums. Science Sound Experiment


This week, we have been doing experiments with sound. We added this to our sound science series.  Balloon drums are super easy to make. We experiment with how tight the balloon is and what different sounds are made.


You will need

Cups
Balloons
Chopsticks
Scissors and Tapes



What we do

  1. Cut the neck of the balloon with scissors. 
  2. Stretch the balloon's body on a cup. 
  3. For safety, tape the side of the balloon to the cup to keep it on.
  4. We use chopsticks as drumsticks, but you can use whatever you can find, pencils, pens, etc.
What we learn

1. When we tap on the drums, the balloon on the drum vibrates. As the result, the air molecules vibrate against each other, sound waves are formed and the sound of the drums can be heard. 
2. We try different sizes of balloon or different tightness of the balloons on the cups. They make different sounds. The tighter the drum skin, the higher pitch it gets. 
3. For further experiment, instead of cups, we can try making drums with different containers (cans, coffee tins, etc). Or we can try using different drumsticks, to see if it make the same sound. 



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Thursday, 16 November 2017

Jelly Beans Rainbow Science Experiment

We have some jelly beans left from a party, so we decided to use them to make rainbows. This is an easy science experiment that you can do with your children. It takes less than five minutes to set up and they have a lot of fun exploring what happens with the jelly beans.

You will need

A bag of jelly bean
A white plate
A cup of warm water


What you do

  1. Arrange Jelly beans on the edge of the plate.
  2. Pour in some warm water.
  3. Wait and observe what happens.
  4. After the colours meet in the center, take the jelly beans out and observe what has happened to the jelly beans. 


What They Learn

  1. Children learn how to use and practise skills in the scientific method which is a techniques for investigating events, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting previous knowledge. They make observations, ask questions, make hypotheses, make an experiment and draw a conclusion. We didn't expect Mr Four to do all those steps in the scientific method but he actually did. He observed when we put jelly beans in the water, made a hypotheses about which colour would appear first, did the experiment, gathered the data and drew conclusions.
  2. Children learn about math in the experiment. There are patterns, colours, and lines. They observed how the colour travels, makes the shapes and creates patterns. Patterns can be found everywhere, it can help predict and can be used to solve problems. When children practise how to look for patterns, they also practise both mathematical and scientific skills. 
  3. We can help children extend their learning by asking open-ended questions. This can encourage meaningful answers using their own knowledge and feelings. During the experiment, we asked Mr Four what would happen if we put water on to the jelly beans? What colour would appear first? Or where did the colour come from? 
Let's watch the video how they did the experiment!


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Saturday, 28 October 2017

Board Game With Preschool Children

A few months ago, we introduced Mr Four to play board games. We started with easy game, like snakes and ladders, then we moved on to harder game like monopoly. Because board games are rich in learning opportunity, the result of playing board games together is incredible. Mr Four has developed many skills in the past few months. Here are some examples. 

Following instructions. Children learn how to play a board game by following the instruction. They have to wait to their turn, roll the dice, pick a card, move the bit around the board, etc. There are rules in the games that they need to follow, the same as in real life. Board games allow children to experience rules, learn rules and negotiate with others when rules need to be modified.


Math skills. Counting the number on the dice, counting when they move their bits, adding numbers, reading numbers on the board, etc. Not every board game requires math, but a vast number of them do. Playing games will give children practice, improving their math skills and probable setting them up for STEM careers down the road.

Social and language skills. When we play games together we have to communicate with others, waiting, taking turns, and enjoying interaction with others. Board games offer opportunities for them to learn these important social skills. In real life, we are living in  a complex society. Board games can help children understand more about the world around them in much more simple ways and  within boundaries. 


Emotional skills. Some children play games very seriously. When Mr Four's piece fall down the snake, he feels very sad. When his piece goes up the ladder, he is very happy. Board games give a lot of opportunities for children to learn how to cope with these up and down feelings. Very young children, like Mr Four, sometime feel it is very important for them to win (and sometime we let them). Later on we try to play with "fair play", children can develop sense of fairness and it is ok if they don't win all the time. 

Family bonding time. What children want most is to be with you and spending time together. They want you to take pleasure in them, play with them, and listen to them. Board game is a perfect solution for this. We spend time together, we talk, we laugh and most of all we have fun!
It's very important to choose the age appropriate board game for children. Very young children tend to have short attention span and limited motor skills. Choose a game with simple rules, easy to understand and play and meet with their interest can give them hours of fun family time. 

What is your favorite board game? Ours is Peppa Pig Monopoly Junior. Let's see how we play it on the video. 

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Monday, 16 October 2017

Two Ingredients Easy Muesli Bar

Cooking is a fun activity that children can learn useful stuff without realizing it. Cooking is a life skill, preparing food for themselves and others. They can learn math and science from cooking in the kitchen. More importantly, cooking encourages healthy eating habits. Today we are cooking Muesli Bar, healthy snacks for the little tummy. The original recipe was found on kidspot.com. The recipe is so easy. Even the children can make them by themselves with little supervision.


Ingredients 

  1. 3 cups high quality muesli 
  2. 1 can (395g) condensed milk 


Method

  1. Preheat oven to 180°C (160°C fan-forced). Line a lamington tray with baking paper.
  2. Combine muesli and condensed milk, stirring well. 
  3. Press into the prepared tray. 
  4. Bake for 20 minutes or until the top has just begun to turn golden. 
  5. Remove from oven and let sit for about 10 minutes. 
  6. Cut into bars and allow to cool completely before storing in an airtight container for up to one week.

What They Learn

Children learn a lot from cooking, here are some examples.
  1. Cooking introduces children to fresh and healthy food which are the foundation for good nutrition. Cooking new recipes helps children to develop a positive connection to all different types of foods and encourage healthy eating habits.
  2. Cooking teaches young children sensory skills. They can knead the dough and feel how soft it is, lick the spoon to taste the tastes, smell the biscuits that just came out of oven, touch it to feel the warmth or listen to the bubbly sound on the stove.  
  3. Cooking builds math skill. For toddler and preschool children, we count how many cups of flour, or how many eggs. Whey they are older, we can work on fractions or multiplication when we double or half the recipe, how many half cups make one cup.  
  4. Cooking is science experimenting. What happens to the dough when you put it in the oven or when you mix flour with milk. Cooking provides an opportunity for kids to get hands-on experience with basic science.
Watch our children cook Muesli Bar

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Sunday, 24 September 2017

Painting with Balloons

Painting is visual art that children can learn and develop their natural imagination, problem solving, sensory and motor skills. Today we are using balloons instead of paint brushes. Let's see how we do it.

You'll Need

Water paints
Different size balloons
Plastic plate
A piece of paper.


What We Do

  1. Put some paint in the plate. We use three main colours, red, blue and yellow  to start of with. 
  2. Put a balloon on the paint, then stamp it on the paper.
  3. Use your imagination and make anything pictures you want.



What They Learn

  1. Painting can be very messy, but that is how they learn. Children develop their sensory skills through their sensory messy plays. They can explore new textures of paint, paper, balloons, etc.
  2. Painting requires motor skills to manipulate painting equipment. They use their fingers to move the balloons around the paper to create what they want. This is how they learn how to take control of their world.
  3. Painting let children express their thoughts, ideas or even their experiences. When Miss Two did her painting, it looks like a blob to me. But she said it was a butterfly. So it was a butterfly!
  4. Children learn about shapes through painting. Pressing balloons on to paper create circle shapes. What can you make from circles. 
  5. Children learn about colour. They learn that if they mix two colours together, they create a new colour. Because we only use there main colours, red, green and blue, Mr Four needs to mix red and blue together to make his favorite purple colour.


Our children had so much fun (making a mess) and couldn't resist to use their fingers to finish their painting! Let's see what they have made!




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Monday, 14 August 2017

Spinning Top: Preschool Activity

Spinning top is a fun way to learn the concepts of motion, symmetry, and balance. Making their own spinning tops helps them to explore how does it work. What happened if you put the pencil to the side or place the cardboard on the top of the pencil. The process can help them develop basic scientific skills, start an hypothesis and test it out. Let's make one together. 

You will need

A Piece of Cardboard
A Circle Object to draw a circle with
A pencil
A pair of Scissors
Crayons to decorate


Let's do it

  1. Draw a circle on a cardboard by tracing the circle object. 
  2. Use the scissor to cut the circle out. Be careful the scissors are sharp.
  3. Decorate.
  4. Make a hole in the middle of the cardboard, put a pencil through the hole. 
  5. Spin!

What do they learn from the spinning top?

  1. Children can improve their fine motor skills. Twirling the stem of the top using the their fingers help them develop pincer grasp and dexterity. These skills can also benefit children with writing skill later. When they write, they need to manipulation and use the pencil with one hand.   
  2. Children can learn physical science by observing the top spin, or wobble. A spinning top is designed to spin rapidly with its rotational inertia. Don't worry, we haven't gone that far with Miss Two and Mr Four yet.
  3. Tops are designed to be symmetry, which is a sense of harmonious and beautiful proportion and balance. Symmetry can be found in many areas, mathematic, physics, chemistry, biology, architecture, visual arts, music, and much more. Learning about symmetry can help them understand 
  1. Making their own spinning tops helps them to explore how does it work. By providing them choices, they can try different way of making it. They can try making it big or small, using short/long/big/small pencil for the stem, or decorate it however they like. They can also try with different designs, what happened if they put the pencil to the side or place the cardboard on the top of the pencil. Then they can observe how their tops spin. Does it work? What are the colour of the tops look like? Mr Four found out that if he put the cardboard too high on the pencil, it didn't spin very well. The process can help them develop basic scientific skills, start a hypothesis and test it out.
Let's watch our children made spinning tops.


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Wednesday, 9 August 2017

Coloured Milk Swirling
Preschool Science Activity

We did an interesting science experiment with in the kitchen, coloured milk swirling. The experiment was very easy. We only needed a few basic ingredients that you can find in the kitchen to do it. We would see some very unusual chemical reactions took place when we mixed milk, food colouring, and a drop of dishwashing liquid. Preschooler might not understand the chemical reactions but they had fun observing and mixing colours. 


You will need

Full cream milk
Food colouring 
Detergent liquid 
A bowl
A Cotton Swab


What you do

  1. Pour some milk in a bowl.
  2. Drop in some food colouring.
  3. Use cotton swab, tip a bit of dishwashing liquid in the middle of the colour drop.
  4. Watch the colour swirl.

How it works

Milk contains water, vitamins, minerals, proteins, and tiny droplets of fat. A basic fact of science, water (polar molecules)  and milk fat (non-polar molecules) do not mix together. Detergent liquid is our emulsifier, the soap molecules in the detergent work as a bridge between polar water molecules and non-polar milk fat molecules. During the bonding time, the food colouring molecules  are bumped everywhere, providing and easy and fun way to observe the invisible chemical reactions. 


Preschoolers might not be able to understand those chemical reaction at the moment. The activity provided them opportunity to observe what happen, manifest curiosity, which are stepping stones to discovery in science and technology. Now it is time to enjoy. Let's watch the experiment with our children.


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Sunday, 30 July 2017

Sorting by Colours
Activity for Toddlers

Miss Two and I are playing this sorting colour game for awhile. She loves the game. She can sit there and play for a long time. There are many many ways of sorting, sort by shape, sort by material, etc. Today we'd like to play sorting colours game. This activity is easy and only takes a few seconds to set up. You can use any colour objects to sort, For example, popsticks, plastic lids, pipe cleaner, small toys etc. Be careful when you choose the toys make sure they are not too small for little ones to choke on. We use wooden colour buttons for our fun. Let's get started.


You will need

Assorted colour wooden buttons.
A piece of paper
Crayons 


What you will do

  1. Draw and colour in circles with matched colour crayon and buttons. The little one can help.
  2. Sort the coloured buttons and match them to the correct colour areas.

When we started playing, Miss Two had no idea how this works. With her brothers help, he guided her how to do it for a couple minutes. After that she could do it all by herself. Sorting games are not only fun activity, children gain more benefits from the game much more than you thought.
  1. Sorting is a basic mathematical method. Sorting activities help them understand that things are alike and different as well as that they can belong and be organized into groups. 
  2. Sorting is something that helps children make sense of their world. They create order in a world that seems out of their control with basic math skills of matching, sorting and classifying. 
  3. Sorting can increase childrens literacy skill by naming the object, shape, colour, etc. Miss Two learnt about colour through this sorting game. 
  4. When playing sorting game together, they can work on communication skills
  5. Sorting help training the brain to create more organized thoughts and ways of retrieving information. This skill can be applied to other areas of their life in the future. 



Watch our children play Sorting by Colours


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Monday, 24 July 2017

Balloon Rocket
Preschool Science Experiment

Balloon rocket is an easy and fun way for children to learn science. For our preschool children, we do not really talk about physic theory behind how it works. However, they did a lot of observation which is a basic skill for a scientist. Mr Four actually came up with how did it work. We talked about the direction that the rocket would go, how to do make it go farther, etc.


I found a lot of balloon rocket projects that attach a balloon to a straw on a piece of string. As preschool children, this method didn't work very well with them. They tend to like just to blow the balloon up and let it go. Sticking an inflated balloon directly to a straw is hard to do. Plus, they can't keep  it blown up and let go as a balloon with sticky tape on tends to blast too easily. So we came up with a solution.  


What you need
  
A balloon
    A long piece of string
   A straw
   Sticky tape
   A pair of scissor


What you do
  1. Tie one end of the string to a heavy fixture in the room such as a chair or door. Thread the other end of the string through the straw and pull it tight. 
  2. Tie the loose end to another fixed object, keeping it tight. 
  3. Attach a balloon to a straw, as shown in the picture above, then attach it to the straw on the string. 
  4. Blow up the balloon.
  5. You’re ready for launch! Let go of the balloon and watch it fly across the room.


For toddlers like Miss Two, she had fun blowing up the balloon and let it go. Blowing up a balloon is a great way to practice mindfulness of breathing, how to center in on their core and use their lung capacity to breathe more powerfully. For preschoolers like Mr Four, observing the balloon go along the string helps them understand more about natural cause and effect. And most important thing is fun. They learn best through play, don't they?



Watch our children playing balloon Rocket.


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