Number Machine

This week we made this awesome Number Machine!  First found this idea on Imagination Tree blog (love that blog by the way).

This is what ours looks like:

                                      

Alicia decided that her machine is "a house where numbers live" and decorated it with numbers.

                                      

You can do additions with this things, just need to set the number on each pipe and put that number of counters in each, then you have your total coming out in the bottom. Such a fun way to learn math!

                                      

                                         You can use hands or you can you use pincers to put the counters in. 

                                      

                                      

Little brother Mark had a play with it too.  He loved to put the balls in the pipes and see them coming out.

                                                   

                                     

                    

                                          Peak-a-boo!

                    

Accidentally, there was an orange on the table. Can it fit through? 

                     
                                                         

                       

                                                            From thinking to action. Let's experiment!

                      

                Ha-ha! It doesn't fit!  True happiness of self-discovery.

                      

Icy Eggs

We finally did ice painting! It was Easter and we needed to turn it into some kind of eggy activity so we decided to make icy eggs painting (the idea of freezing ice in the balloon came from Growing a Jeweled Rose blog, I think, but can't find exact post to link it). This is what our "final products" looked like:



The activity is quite simple: all you need is ice and some liquid paints, food colouring in our case.

Below are some pictures of the process: Alicia would paint icy egg, then water it down, then paint it again.

The paint was getting inside the cracks in the ice creating interesting colours. This is my favourite one: yellow colour was glowing from inside with blue colour on top. Very pretty!

Another piece of ice ...

Some sensory experience for our baby too (he is 8 months old here)

Lorax play

Alicia brought Lorax book from her school library. She loved the book and we watched "Lorax" movies (both old and new) a few times, actually. Then we decided to make some Truffula trees - I remember seeing this on In Lieu of Preschool blog and I thought she'd like the idea. She loved it! We actually didn't paint the tree fluff - just used some craft wool I got on sale a few months ago. It came in a few different colours.  Alicia glued the fluff to the craft sticks and we stood them up in a box of rice. We also made Barbaloots and Lorax himself from felt and pompoms and Once-ler was one of the HappyLand characters (he actually looked a bit like Once-ler from a movie!).
Alicia loved acting on characters while I was reading that book. (My English is not that great so it was a bit of a challenge for me).