Bunnies and Eggs

Today we used the Mother Goose Time Bonus Days lesson for some Easter fun.   My parents and nephew are in town for the week and got to participate with us.  I loved the little craft where we made Easter bunnies with their handprints.  Miss M loves anything that involves in paint, although it took a little practice to figure out how to hold her fingers to get the ears right.  First, we measured their ears and compared them to each other and a few objects to see what ones were bigger, smaller or the same.  We also talked about how rabbits have really long ears (we could have talked about how they use their ears to stay cool but I didn't think their attention span would allow that).  I added a little yarn cutting activity to help her practice her scissor skills and we used pompoms for the noses instead of drawing them, which gives a  fun 3-D effect.  Overall her cousin and she had a fun time putting these together.  I'll add a photo tomorrow of the finished product.

Next we talked about eggs, which leads into our Focus Topic for the month--science!  We aren't talking about atoms or electron microscopes, just how we help our kiddos learn about the world around (and inside) them.  The easiest way to do this with children in this age-group is by putting out those things they see in their everyday lives, as opposed to setting up complicated and unconnected experiments.

For this activity I took an uncooked egg and one I had hardboiled for egg coloring and we observed their similarities and differences.  Miss M noticed that they were both white and her cousin commented that one of them was sort of speckled.  They were both proclaimed to be smooth but one was warm (having only recently been hardboiled) and the other cold (coming straight from the refrigerator).  We spun them both and noticed that the cold one did not spin very long before rocking to a stop.  We talked about how the it was uncooked and so the insides were still liquid and slowed it down.  My dad helped them crack it into a bowl so we could see how it sloshed around.  He mixed it up and then we popped it into the microwave for one minute after predicting whether or not it would still be liquid when it was done cooking.  Presto chango, it became a solid!  They poked at it and smelled it and voila, we have science.



I used the introduction of eggs to segue into egg coloring, yet another easy and fun science experiment.*  I showed them the water and the vinegar, which they smelled.  I boiled the water and as it steamed in front of them we talked about how water can be a gas, liquid and a solid (they enjoyed playing with an ice cube for a minute).  Obviously, we didn't go into a lot of detail because they are five and two but just the introduction of these concepts associated with actual experience will stick with them until they are prepared to learn in more depth.

We counted drops of food coloring, talked about the colors of the rainbow and how we can make other colors by mixing two together (we did purple).  They each colored on one egg with a crayon to do a color resist technique and colored two solid eggs.  We talked about how the longer you leave the eggs in the colored water, the darker it would get but neither could wait that long (I guess we still need to work on March's virtue--patience).

I look forward to starting our Ocean unit on Monday and finding more ways to bring up science in our every day interactions.

* Side note:  Using a whisk to hold the eggs worked brilliantly.  Thank you, Pinterest.  You've almost redeemed yourself from the homemade starch debacle on Monday.