A new twist on the 'volcano'

I think everyone can proably remember to the old 'volcano' experiemnt when they were little. You know the one where you fill a container with baking soda and the pour vinegar into the container and watch it 'explode.' I came across a new way to do this experiment and had to give it a try. Here is what we did:

I filled 4 baby food jars with vinegar, about half way up. I then added food coloring to each jar and put different droppers into the jars.

I then took a 9x13 inch pan and filled it (covered the bottom of it) with baking soda.

After I had everything prepped I called my munchkins over so see what mommy was working on.

David did a little example of how it worked by putting the baking soda into Eli's hand and squirting it with the yellow vinegar. Eli thought it was pretty cool.

We then got to work squirting the vinegar onto the baking soda.

Eli focused on one area and would only squirt there.

Zeke liked to squirt all over.

We did fast, slow, lots of vinegar, and just a little bit of vinegar.

They loved trying out the different kinds of droppers and mixing the colors together.

After all the baking soda was used up I let them take forks and mix it together  and play around with it. This was an awesome experiment for the boys!

Ivory Soap

I seen this on pinterest a while ago so I thought I would try it out with the boys. All you need is a bar of Ivory soap and a microwave safe dish. 

Take your bar of soap and cut it in thirds. Then take one of the thirds and cut that in thirds as well. You do not want to put the whole bar of soap in your microwave! So once you have your three little pieces of soap put them on a plate and microwave for abou 30 seconds.

If you have a clear window in your microwave its fun to watch the soap expand. Our door window has a black meshy kind of thing in it so its hard to see though. But when you open the door after the 30 seconds youwill see this!

Doesn't that look like fun? Be careful because the soap will be very hot, even in the middle where all the hot steam is trapped so don't let the kids touch it yet.

After you take it out of the microwave you can put it onto a cookie sheet and used a fork or knife and break the soap up. It will crumble really easy and makes a great playing agent. My boys got out their loaders and dump trucks and went to work hauling the 'snow' around.

Killing the Winter Blues

ITS SPRING! Or so we are told....screw that! This weather sucks and I am ready to bust out of this house and so are the boys. To help a little with our cabin fever I let the boys play in the garage. We took our sleds and filled one with corn and the othe with a blanket to help make the ground a little more comfortable. The boys loved it....and now we have corn all over our garage but it was a nice little escape while it lasted.

Flour = Silence

 If you need a few moments to just breath I suggest busting out the cook sheets, dumping out some flour on each one and say GO! Okay well that wasn't my orginal intention. I wanted to work on letters with my guys but they really don't like that kind of learning. They are boys, they like to learn and explore and well, make a mess! I got one letter drawn in to the flour before they went and dug out their trucks. And so here is where I introduce 30 minutes of SILENCE!

So worth the mess!

Hop on Pop, Hand hand Finger Thumb

Eli was really wanting a friend over to do Dr. Seuss activities with so I asked Colton to come over one Friday after school to do Dr. Seuss activities with us. We did "Hop on Pop" and "Hand Hand Finger Thumb" together. 

First we read "Hop on Pop." This book is a lot about action and being on, in, under, over etc. So, while I was reading this book I gave each of the boys a plate, a cup and a toy dog. While I was reading the book they would then have to do the action with their items. So if I said Pup IN Cup, they would have to put the pup in their cup. Below it was talking about being small and tall so they make their pile small and tall. 

The next activity we did was from a page in the book where there are Three Fish in a tree. Ahead of time I cut out the pieces of the tree to resemble the tree in the book. I cut out the tree trunk, the orange 'leaves' and three blue fish. I then let the boys each have a glue stick and let them assemble their pieces to look like the picture in the book.

Even though the three fish are IN the tree in the book they wanting one fish to be on the ground.

The next thing we did was some hopping. It didn't turn out quite like I was thinking but the boys loved it anyways. I put different color wash cloths on the floor and they had to toss something on one of the cloths and then jump over that one. They just liked jumping one to the next and didn't care so much about anything else! It was fun and tiring...Zeke took a 3 1/2 hour nap this day...WHOA!

Next we read "Hand Hand Finger Thumb" This has always been one of our boys favorite books to read. The book is pretty much about monkeys drumming on drums. So what we did for this book was make noise makers. I gave the boys a paper plate and some markers and let them decorate the plates. 

Zeke had his finished pretty quick so I went and got the corn kernals out of the garage to fill our shakers with.

Colton did awesome coloring his plate.

Eli, of course, had to color the inside of the his plate, RED, everything is RED with this boy. He didn't care that the red would be inside because he wanted it to be with the corn....oye.

After they were finished coloring the plates I folded them in half and tapes them almost all the way shut. I left a small hole in them for the boys to scoop some corn and pour into the plate. After adding some corn I taped them the rest of the way shut and we had some fun little shakers. I was also going to have them make drums out of oatmeal cans, formula cans etc too but by this point they were pretty over doing crafts and activities and just wanted to play. 

Theres a Wocket in My Pocket - Dr Seuss

The first half of March we had so much fun reading Dr. Seuss books and doing matching crafts and activities with them. This particular day we read the book "Theres a Wocket in my Pocket."

Here is a picture of me getting ready to read our book of the day. *photo credit - Zeke*

So after reading this fun book I gave the boys coloring pictures that I found on the Dr Seuss website. The pictures have the boy that is on the cover, a wocket and another creature from the book. 

Zeke coloring his picture....or should I say he was distracted by the glue stick he found in the marker bucket...

Eli coloring his Wocket

After we were finished coloring we cut out our Wockets.

Zeke just cut...and cut...

Eli is getting better at cutting out his stuff.

We then put our Wockets inside of paper pockets nad hung them on our art wall.

I ahead of time drew out on white paper some different house hold items (fridge, couch, oven and window). If you haven't read "Theres a Wocket in my Pocket" then I should let you know that like all other Dr. Seuss books there is a lot of rhyming going on. So we created some rhyming words that matched the house hold items and then drew a creature to go with that name. 

We had a Widge in our Fridge,

Frouch on our Couch

Poven in our Oven 

Zindow in our Window. 

The boys had a lot of fun coming up with these new names for creatures in each picture.

Fireworks in a Jar

Are your kids bored today? Here is something super easy to do with them and you are bound to have all the needed supplies right in your pantry! SCORE!

Supplies needed:

2 small jars (We used baby food jars)

1 large jar (we used quart size jars)

oil

water

food coloring

forks

To start off the experiment what you will need to do it put about 1/4 cup of oil into each of the two small jars. Then take 3-4 different colors of food coloring and SLOWLY add drops of each color into the oil.  Eli's jar is shown below.

Ezekiels jar is shown below here. We put the drops in two fast and they kind of exploded and mixed together. This will be a negative key factor later on in the project so make sure you add them SLOWLY. 

Next take a picture of your cute kids...see Micah in the back? He was enjoying a snack. Ignore Mr. Booger-face on the left. His nose has been a fountain lately.

I made sure to keep the quart size jars away from the boys until it was time to pour in the oil. Otherwise the boys like to jump the train so to speak and don't wait for instructions. We are working big time on listening skills, especially with these fun science experiments. After you have the food coloring added to the oil take a fork and slowly stir, breaking up the food coloring into little beads. Then fill your quart size jars about 3/4 ths of the way full with warm water. 

Zeke went first. He poured the oil/food coloring mixture into his water first.

But because his food coloring was put in to fast and had spread around in the oil it caused the fireworks to not work. The food coloring just sunk right away out of the oil into the water and spread around in the water resulting in a big dark blob....they still thought it was awesome. :)

Here is Zeke's jar once the food coloring was spread. We then talked about how the water and oil were seperate and do not mix due to different densities...not that they had a clue about what I was saying. 

Next was Eli's turn to mix. He poured the oil/food coloring mix in slower than zeke and the oil stayed at the top and contained the food coloring leaving a cool speckled look to it but wait...

very slowly the food coloring starts to sink to the bottom of the oil and starts touching the water. Once it touches the water it shoots out of the oil like FIREWORKS and looks so awesome and pretty!

As the oil continues to travel from oil to water it spreads though out the rest of the water in the jar.

The boys LOVED this. I did as well. It was so pretty and fun to watch...

and we watched....

and we watched and talked...until the water was pretty much a big blob of darkness.

And because they still had their forks sitting next to them they of course had to mix up their concoctions a little more. (not that it did anything but it was still fun)

After the fireworks were over we started to talk about the oil sitting on top of the water again and they lot interest at that point. But if your looking for something fun to do with your kids on a gloomy day this is a great one to try out.