Kids Coop - Volcano Unit

 
<center> <a href="http://www.tamingthegoblin.com/search/label/kids%20coop"></p> <p> <font color="#808080" face="'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><img src="http://i.imgur.com/FkLk8.jpg" title="Hosted by imgur.com" alt="" /></a></font></p> <p> <font color="#808080" face="'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; white-space: pre-wrap;"></center>

Its time for Kids Coop. Please link up your kids activity posts and check out what others have been up to this week. Don't forget to leave comments if you like what you see. This week I'm linking  the following:

******

(Goblin is 41 months)

Following an episode of the Octonauts called The blobfish brothers in which the Octonauts rescue creatures from an underwater volcao, Goblin started asking questions about volcanos. We've been taking his interest in things as a cue to try and broaden is knowledge and deepen his interest. So we pulled together a few Volcano related activities. 

Hublet and Goblin painted pictures of Volcanos. This is probably the first painting Goblin has done on his own that actually resembles what it is supposed to be so I had a little "proud mummy" moment watching him do this. Hublet's one in the bottom corner is pretty good to: "proud wifey" moment. 

Then we cobbled together a volcano model using home made playdough we had already (hence the odd colours) and a coke can. We filled the coke can with bicarbonate of soda and got Goblin to pour in some white vinegar with red food colouring. He really enjoyed the eruption that occurred. In fact he enjoyed that bit so much that we carried it on with a tray of bicarb and a pipette full of vinegar. 

We also did some pretend play, rescuing dinosaurs from lava flows consisting of pompoms and playsilks. He loved that I could blow the top of the volcano to create a chaotic pompom lava flow.

We tried looking for Volcano clips on youtube but quickly realised that some of them were a bit disturbing for a three year old so instead we watched Professor Brian Cox's Wonders of the Solar System episode 4 which talked at length about the volcanic activity on one of Jupiter's moons called Io. This was awesome because it tied together both Goblin's new found interest in Volcanos and his interest in planets which he's been developing from nursery. The Wonders of the Solar System series goes a little bit over Goblin's head but he spends the time watching it asking us to explain things. So we talked about magma and the fact that the core of the earth is hot, and tectonic plates and lava. As an ignition of educational conversation the Wonders of the Solar System is a brilliant series for small kids.

And now to the linky


I'm sharing this with
 

Kids Co-op Link Up

 

<center> </p> <p class="separator" style="clear: both; "> <a href="http://www.tamingthegoblin.com/search/label/kids%20coop"></p> </p> <p class="separator" style="clear: both; "> <p class="separator" style="clear: both; "> <font color="#808080" face="'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><img src="http://i.imgur.com/FkLk8.jpg" title="Hosted by imgur.com" alt="" /></a></font></p> </p> <p class="separator" style="clear: both; "> <p class="separator" style="clear: both; "> <font color="#808080" face="'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; white-space: pre-wrap;"></center> </p> <p class="separator" style="clear: both; ">

Its Kids Co-op time again, please link up your favourite child orientated posts and check out what everyone else has been up to. Don't forget to leave a comment if you love what you see. This is what I am linking up this week:

******

Paralympic fun 

(Goblin is 34 Months)

The Paralympics take place in London between 29 August and 9 September 2012. As well as the usual athletics, equestrian and swimming genre, the Paralympics offers some new and unusual sports. One of these is Goal Ball, a sport that has me on the edge of my seat with anticipation. This is an amazing sport played by blind and partially sighted athletes. All players are blindfolded so that no amount of sight gives an unfair advantage. The game is a bit like handball (or five aside football played with your hands) but you can't see the ball. Instead the ball has bells in it and the players must identify where the ball is using their hearing. The game is surprisingly fast and the athletes are incredibly skilled.

I love the fact that Goal ball requires the players to use hearing rather than sight. Its a great game for getting kids to practice listening. So Goblin, Hublet and I had a go. At nearly three years old Goblin's catching abilities aren't great so we didn't play proper Goal Ball. Instead I put some bells in a balloon. Goblin refused to wear a blindfold but would wear a scarf draped over his head. I shook the balloon to see if he could identify where the balloon was. Then I'd throw it at him and he had to try and react by attempting a catch. We used a balloon for two reasons, firstly its easy to get the bells in, and secondly when it hit him full in the face it didn't hurt. This brings a whole new element to sensory play. Goblin liked Goal Ball, but mainly he liked throwing the balloon at a blindfolded Hublet.

You can find the Paralympic Goal ball schedule here
And now to the linky

I'm sharing this at
 

Invitations to Learn

(Goblin is 31 months)

Every so often I have a minor freak out that I am not teaching Goblin enough. This week was one of those weeks. Goblin has lots of 'educational' toys on his shelves and I rotate them to try and keep them fresh. But for a couple of months now he has been pretty much ignoring the shelves, opting instead for sensory play with rainbow rice or his trucks. Goblin is still young and I have no desire to push him down an academic route so its only my own insecurities that lead me to have my minor pancis. But all the same I was looking for something that might lead him back to the more stretching toys. 

And then I read about "Invitations to Play" at The Imagination Tree. Its such a simple idea. You take a toy and you set it out in a new way so that the child discovers it as if it were new. 

I tried it with Goblin's snail shells and paint pallet. This game improves pincer grip (essential for hand writing) and encourages one to one correspondence which is a maths skill. He hasn't touched it in months. I laid it out on his table on its own. When he came down from his nap he saw it and started playing with it straight away.

I was so impressed with how this worked, the next day I tried it with his shape puzzle. This time I had barely finished putting the shapes out when Goblin came along and started sorting them and doing the puzzle. He did it over and over again. I was amazed. This puzzle has pretty much never been played with before, no mater how many times I put it on the shelves or get it down and suggest we try it together. 

So "Invitations to play", or should I call them "Invitations to learn" will definitely be a regular feature in our house. Thank you The Imagination Tree 

I will be sharing this on 

Toddler science

(Goblin is 29 months)

This weekend Goblin and I did some science experiments. I'm rather pleased with myself because they both involved a montessori style practical life element without me having to actually plan anything. I was looking for something to distract Goblin. He was about to have a melt down because I had to stop him playing with the garden hose before the grass drowned under a foot of water. Before I turned the tap off for the final time I dashed inside and grabbed some bicarbonate of soda and a jug of vinegar. I presented it to Goblin on the lid of his sandpit. 

I poured some of the bicarbonate of soda into a pot, and gave Goblin the jug (good pouring practice). He poured it in and was instantly excited by the foaming and the hissing noise. 

In fact he was so excited that he wanted to do it again and again. Eventually we ran out of vinegar. But that didn't stop Goblin. 

Ever resourceful, Goblin decided to try and recreate the experiment with water. This was a good learning experience for him, because obviously the water did not create the same effect. 

No matter how much water he added!

Our other experiment was making a non newtonian fluid. Although I have known about this for years I have never actually done it. This again was me trying to create a diversion for Goblin. He found some food colouring in a draw (he's now tall enough to open the top draws - groan!). He was really keen to open them up and pour them into something, and rather than waste them I thought we could add them to cornflour and water. 

Getting the quantities right for our cornflour and water mix took a bit of trial and error. We ended up with two packets of cornflour and two little jugs of water and quite a lot of food colouring - about a bottle and a half before I could stop Goblin. 

And the result was amazing. It is the weirdest stuff. To be honest once Goblin had done all his pouring he wasn't particularly interested in the finished product - especially because stirring it is really difficult because it keeps going hard! I wonder whether his disinterest was partially due to him being too young to realise it shouldn't do what it does. I took a video of it doing its weird stuff for anyone who hasn't seen it. 

I'm sharing this on 

 

Money Box activity

(Goblin is 29 months)

Hublet is all man when it comes to coins. I normally try to avoid using stereotypical descriptions of male and female 'actions' but there is no getting away from the fact that I do not know a single woman who feels the need to empty their pockets and purse of all their coins and leave them lying in piles around the house, and yet it seems a very common and accepted practice among my male friends. I gave up panicking about the choking hazard in every room of the house a long time ago.

Next to Hublet's side of the bed there is a giant jar, and every night without fail Hublet empties his change from his pocket into the jar - including £1 and £2 coins - so there is a lot of money in that jar. We used to have a computer next to the bed, and Goblin would regularly open the jar and stuff the coins into the CD slot of the computer.
A few days ago Goblin discovered an old money box that I had on a shelf. He took it to the coin jar, emptied a bunch of coins onto the bed and started slotting them into the money box.

This is a great activity for fine motor skills and accuracy. It is slightly more advanced than putting spagetti or kebab sticks into a parmesan cheese shaker, because you need to manipulate the coin to the right angle to fit in the slit. And it gives the child an opportunity to handle money. You can talk about the quantity of the coins while the child plays.

I took the moneybox and some of the coins down stairs and put it on Goblin's shelf. It was the first thing he went to the next morning, and he has taken it off the shelf and played with it a lot since then. Its funny how the simple activities often prove the most popular.  

A nice extension for this activity would be to ask your toddler to find specific coins to put in the slot. 

I'm sharing this at