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).

Fruit Market Sensory Bin

Life Cycle of a Frog Sensory Play

 We came upon a frog life cycle set in our local toy library, and, since  Alicia loves frogs,  I thought why not introduce frog life cycles to her. I've read a few blog posts about Montessori-inspired life cycle activities and here is what we created. One piece was missing from the set (a tadpole without legs) so we made it out of brown playdough. We used craft eyes to represent frog spawns and also some green marbles.

Frog theme is very popular with Alicia and we ended up creating a few different activities.

Playdough pond

 I made some blue and green playdough and we got started on the pond. Alicia rolled out playdough on the tray, made some holes for the spawns (there was need to make holes actually, it was totally Alicia's idea :)).

Then we put in some green marbles into the holes to represent the spawns. 

Then we put toy frogs and tadpoles on our pond (life cycle set and also some toy frogs I got from party shop) and made a green hill for the big frog (bath toy). The frog and the hill is from the story that Alicia remembered when we started to build the pond. This story makes Alicia laugh and it was her idea to include it in our play. (In the story a frog (actually, an old toad) sits on a hill and knitting socks while tadpoles are happily swimming in the water, then she yells "Bed time!" and tadpoles are asking if they could play a little longer.)

Alicia liked the pond, so we made it again the other night with some variations. Here she put frogs to sleep :)

Life Cycle of a Frog Sensory Box

We also made this frog sensory box (rice colored in blue, paper lillypad,  leaves from fake flower garland, frogs' food (flies, spiders, grasshoppers and dragon flies), glass marbles and rocks, toys frogs).

Alicia was discovering things inside sensory box for a few days, and, of course, her foot had to get into the rice eventually - lol :)

Discovering the differences: "This tadpole has 4 legs and a tail!" I'm impressed with her observation skills.

Then we set frogs around a "table" to have dinner. Alicia didn't like the idea of frogs eating spiders, mosquitoes and other living things for dinner and suggested we  give them yogurt instead :)

Some other day we made Vodyanoy puppet - a Russian male mermaid character that lives in a swamp. Alicia loves Russian cartoon that has him as one of the characters and the song he sings (here is the link to that song on YouTube). 

Life Cycle of a Frog Sequencing Cards

I made Life Cycle of the Frog sequencing cards (in Russian)  using some images I found on the web. I've also found and printed some ready-made cards and puzzles. 

We looked at some pictures of frogs in the books about animals (Alicia loves looking up animals in encyclopedia).  

Matching sequencing cards with frogs from Life Cycle set. Of course she the other toy froggies had to sit on cards too :)

Pre-reading/ sight reading

Like in most our games, I wrote some words for Alicia to learn (in Russian). Here she's "reading" (she can recognize some words and spell out most of the letters in them).

Frog Craft

I cut the pieces out and get Alicia to put them together (with little help). Then she wanted to do some paper cutting herself.

This frog we made out of paper plate. Alicia painted the plate, then arms and legs and I helped her to put it together.

Waterbeads Frog Pond

We put together another fake frog pond, it is very simple: waterbeads, some river rocks and water!

 Alicia loved "swimming" the frogs and then drying them with a tea towel.

Frogs lining up to wait for their turn for swimming - lol :)

Drawing a tadpole. Alicia is not much into drawing (let alone writing) so we get very excited when we see her drawing something.

Feeding rice to frogs ("Frog like to eat rice, Mama, NOT spiders and flies!" - lol )

Frogs and wooden blocks play

Alicia loves to build with this natural wood set. Here she build a table for frogs and seated frogs on "stools" around it for "tea".

On some other day she built this:

Frogs are having coloured raindrops for lunch. Vodyanoy is laving lunch with bigger frogs - his friends :)