Academics – Page 12 – Butterbees and Bumbleflies

Painted Flower Bouquet

It’s time for another Friday segment of Fun with Art!! We have been doing a lot of fun things lately, but she’s been on a big dry erase/crayon book/scribble on paper mode, so I haven’t had a ton of art ideas to share with you. This idea came from several weeks ago when we were painting and she grabbed a silk flower and wanted to paint it… and for some odd reason, I said ok. What she made turned out beautifully, and you might have seen it if you follow my Facebook page. Here is the one she did:

It was already yellow, and had a large “diamond” in the middle, which she completely covered in paint. So anyway, since she enjoyed it, when we were at Dollar Tree one day, I picked up a bouquet of white silk flowers, thinking she could really get creative with them. This morning we finally pulled out the paints and painted them. I think they turned out absolutely gorgeous!!Here are a few tips/tricks for painting success when it comes to silk flowers:

1. Buy them cheap. The cheaper the better.

2. Use a good acrylic paint because it’ll go on very easily and not make the petals so wet that they stick together. (It also dries relatively quickly.)

3. Carefully pull the flowers off of the stem to paint them.

4. Let them dry individually on a paper plate before putting them back on the stem.

5. Be creative!! Remember that you don’t have to use a million colors to make some beautiful flowers.

6. Paint the stems and leaves too, if you want! Why not?

7. HAVE FUN!!!

8. Please SHARE your painted flower bouquets on my Facebook page! I’d love to see the ones that you create!

These would be a fabulous birthday/Mother’s Day/teacher appreciation gift that can be customized to the recipient’s favorite colors, could be tied with a ribbon and/or placed into a small vase!

Marble Run Fun

STEAM THEME: Engineering, Math (estimating, height/width), Science (gravity concepts)

Yes, I know it’s not STEAM Thursday yet. Yes, I know that it’s been quite a while since I’ve posted. But this Thursday I’ll have a very special post, and I wanted to go ahead and get something – anything – out here b/c I know ya’ll are just dying for some new ideas, right? 🙂

Well, so back when the consignment sale was going on, I picked up a marble run set. Totally on a whim – because it was only $10. And I have never been so happy about a consignment sale find ever. (And I get pretty excited about my consignment sale finds, ya’ll… I mean, seriously, seriously jumping up and down excited. My friend Kim can tell you just how consignment sale happy I am.) But, I digressed. If you don’t have a marble run set, here’s a fabulous one to start with from Amazon (aff link, thanks!)Marble Run 37-Piece Set This is a small portion of the set that I got… from looking online, I think I ended up getting a combination of this 37 piece set and two of the 80 piece sets. (Big score, ya’ll. Big score!)

We have had SO MUCH FUN making a wide variety of marble runs. There are so many ideas that I can’t remember all of what we’ve done to share with you, but I love setting up engineering challenges for Becca. Here’s a few of the conversation/activity starters we have done:
1. How wide can we make it where it all ends up in one finale?
2. How tall can we make one? (She loves to stand on our hearth to reach the top.)
3. Can we build a square tube?
4. Can we build a triangle tube?
5. Can we set up two runs and see which is the fastest? (Tip: For our run races, I write a number in Sharpee on each marble so we can track which ones are the winners. She gets three marbles and I get three marbles. She gets to design her track, and I design mine. I try to keep mine about the same height as hers, but obviously use different pieces, then have her guess which one will win. She always guesses that hers will win. And sometimes she’s right!)
6. Which pieces of the track does the marble roll fastest/slowest down?
7. Estimate how many clear holders we need to fill the spaces between the track pieces? (Fyi: Becca won’t estimate. She was wrong once. So don’t force this subject, but for your kiddos who enjoy estimating, this is a fabulously fun and easy way to estimate with small numbers.)

“The Lego Game”

STEAM Topic: Math / Engineering

Whew. We’ve been busy. More than just a little bit. I’m honestly not real sure where the last month went… I so appreciate those of you who have stuck with me through this, and realized that this is just one more way that I’m real. Sometimes, I just don’t have time to write. BUT! I’m slowly coming back. I’ll have a few posts here and there, and then the goal is to be back to full strength once both kids birthday parties are done. (Party planning for two parties within two weeks of each other is super fun… and also confusing… and will probably result in multiple blog posts over the course of the next several years…)

But one thing that we picked up around a month ago or so was this game idea for a Lego building game. I honestly don’t remember where I saw it – somebody shared it on Facebook. And I didn’t actually take time to read the blog – I just saw the picture and ran with it. So here’s our version of what Becca has just called “The Lego Game.”

You’ll need:
1 die
6 paper plates
a bunch of random Legos, divided onto the six plates
some flat “starter” pieces on which to build

The beauty of this game is that it evolves as you go. It just kills me to see kids that HAVE to have a schematic drawing to build with Legos. Obviously, that requires a certain level of skill, but part of the FUN of Legos is just taking random pieces and seeing what you can make with them! It’s an important part of creativity that kids need to learn, and should be encouraged to enjoy. This game definitely does that.

So here’s how it works – once you have your random pieces assigned to the plates, just take turns rolling the die and selecting a piece from that numbered section. You can build and rebuild your design multiple times throughout the game as it evolves with the new pieces you collect.

We have some super fun accessory pieces that are also included, so you can get (for example) a motorcycle or a piano to add to your design, if you’d like. There are flags, flowers, and a magic wand as well. Along with a ton of regular bricks in a variety of colors.

Every time we play the game, I love seeing what Cody and Becca will come up with – and I always make something new, too. It’s a great way to practice taking turns, and Becca now has the dice memorized and knows immediately how many dots are on it to know which plate to pull her piece from. For quite a while it was a counting game, but now she’s got those dot patterns committed to memory.

You could extend it by rolling two dice – one die would tell you which plate to select from, the other would tell you how many pieces to draw. Or put a colored dot on each side, and you’d have to select a brick of that color. The options are endless!!

We typically set a timer and just play until whenever the timer goes off. It can be a 5 minute game, a 20 minute game, or a 45 minute game.

We have found that Becca does much better with bedtime if she has a focus activity between dinner and bedtime. Sometimes she plays games on her Kindle or watches a video on it. Sometimes we set up marble runs or train tracks. Other times we’ll do a board game or “The Lego Game.” She just needs some sort of directed activity to focus her brain on so that she will be able to calm and get ready for bed. Obviously, every kid is different. This sort of activity right before bed might make it impossible for your child to sleep. Thankfully, you know your child, and I know mine. Hopefully this is a fun activity that you can find an appropriate time to play with your kids!! Bring out their creativity! Find the inner engineer inside each of you!

NOTE! Don’t have a bunch of extra Lego pieces? Visit your local Lego store and shop their brick wall, or check out the Lego website to purchase some sets of randomness! (not an affiliate link, but a good link!)

Nature Photography Art

Today’s Theme: Science, Tech, Art, Math
(yup, 4 for the price of 1… and technically, you could say it’s Engineering too if you use your items collected to build something…!)

With my life as crazy busy as it has been lately, I’m going to be perfectly honest with you that we’ve been doing a lot of super free, unplanned play. Like watching a lot of Sesame Street. And Creative Galaxy. And Super Why. And building train sets. And marble runs. And working puzzles. And coloring in coloring books and on plain paper. Ya know, the ordinary, unexciting activities that make up MOST of our normal lives. Not a whole lot worth blogging about and saying “wow, isn’t this fantastic? Don’t you want to do this with YOUR kids?” HA! But, I know that one of the things my readers comment on the most is how they feel inspired by what I share. And honestly, that is humbling. And it helps hold me to a higher standard for my own kids. And I appreciate that. Maybe it’s something about turning 31 today (really? 31? I remember when 30 seemed ancient… and now 50 doesn’t sound that old…), or maybe it’s just because my life has been so crazy that I’ve had to think about hitting the “reset” button on our school time… but for whatever reason, I came up with a super fun, EASY activity to do with Becca this past week that she absolutely loved. And hopefully your kids will too! (And hopefully I can come up with some more fun ideas very soon! Might be time to pull out my Raising Creative Kids book again and snag some more ideas from Colleen!! Have you gotten her book yet? OMG. You need it. You really do. The link is on the right hand side of this page… or at the bottom if you’re on a mobile device. And yes, it’s an affiliate link, so I make some dough from your purchase – THANK YOU!)

Wow. That might well have been the longest run-on paragraph I’ve ever written here on my blog. Thank ya’ll for sticking with me through that! HA!

And now to the nitty gritty – Nature Photography Art!

Becca LOVES to get out in our yard and explore. We are so blessed to have some amazing land for her to roam around on, and even more blessed that we’re on the edge of Texas Hill Country, so our wildflowers each Spring are just simply incredible. With zero work on our part. God just paints our land every single year for us, and we are so blessed! Cody and I both love to take nature photos – it’s one of the things that we first found that we had in common when we met. So our kids see us take pictures of flowers and trees and butterflies and random rock formations ALL. THE. TIME. And Becca often asks me if she can take the picture. But I hesitate to let her hold my phone outside – especially on a day like the one when we did this activity – because the ground was moist and there are random rocks… ya know, my luck I’d hand her my iPhone 6 Plus and she’d drop it face down into a mud puddle with rocks at the bottom (I know Apple Care is great, but…)! So I came up with this idea to get her involved, let her take nature photos, and yet do it in a structured environment.

I took this photo in our front yard while we were working on collecting our flowers for this project. The butterflies were fluttering EVERYWHERE, and the Indian Blankets are just gorgeous!

Here’s what you’ll need to do this activity:
A bucket or basket of some sort
A source of wildflowers, leaves, grass, or rocks
A sheet of white butcher paper
A good lamp
A magnifying glass
A digital camera of some sort that you are willing to let your child use
Optional extension: A computer with internet for photo editing (I use PicMonkey.com)

So just take your bucket to your source of nature, and collect objects. It can be ANYTHING. Any small piece of nature can be a fabulous source for photography. Keep in mind that live objects such as caterpillars are harder to photograph – especially for kids – because they are a moving target. So encourage your child to select STILL LIFE objects. You can explain that still life is a type of art that depicts objects that are alive, but not moving. Flowers don’t get up and walk away. Nor do rocks or grass. So they work great for this project. Try to pull an entire wildflower plant up – root and all – to examine with your child. If that’s not possible, no worries, but it certainly extended our conversation GREATLY to have a couple full plants. We talked about the parts of the plant while out there in the yard, and also again once we got into the house – a fabulous science lesson. You can totally do this with rocks as well, and get into discussing and sorting the features of the rocks, and create a rock collection box.

Once your basket or bucket is full, head inside and lay out your white butcher paper. Set up your lamp and grab your magnifying glass and camera – the fun is about to begin! Start laying out your objects on the paper. You can talk about their shadows, their colors, examine them close up, and watch the paper closely with your magnifying glass as lots of teeny tiny little bugs will crawl off of the flowers and begin to explore your paper. This is a fabulous time to talk about the features of the camera with your child – especially how to make it focus. If your little one has shaky hands and you’re using a phone for your photos, work as a team – you hold the phone, let your little one select where on the screen to focus, and push the shutter button to snap the picture (that’s what we did).

Try laying your objects out in all different ways – you can get as creative as your child wants. You could spell nature words with your objects, you could spell your child’s name, you could build something with your rocks, or you could just do random grouping nature shots. Encourage your child to try holding the camera closer to an object and farther away to see the difference in the two shots. How does the shadow look on the screen? Can you move your camera to a different location to make the shadow longer or shorter? Etc. The possibilities with this activity are ENDLESS. And totally repeatable!! Just collect different objects each time, and you can do this activity over and over and over.

If you want to extend the activity further in the tech area and your child is really into it, you can easily upload your photos to your computer and check out www.picmonkey.com (totally not an affiliate link, I just love them so much and use their site for everything!). Try making a collage of your photos together, or even play around with their favorite photo to make a sign for their bedroom door, an inspirational saying for their bathroom mirror, or add text to several of the photos to create a book that you can print out and stick in a 3 ring binder for them. You could also do this activity throughout the seasons and use these photos instead of paintings for your 2016 calendar! You could also add some math to this activity by measuring each flower and sorting them by length! The possibilities of where you can go with this activity are truly limitless, and think of the OWNERSHIP your child will have in this project – and the fabulous opportunity to do something one on one with your child. (I know I’m frequently looking for something special I can do with JUST Becca so that she feels special and grown up. We did this while Grayson was napping. If your younger child doesn’t nap anymore, you can easily have them go on the hunt with you and collect their own items in a separate basket, then give them white paper as well and let them play with the objects. They could draw ovals around them with crayons, count their objects, and sort by color, just to give you a few ideas.)

Here are some of the beautiful pieces we came up with together:

I am truly so excited about this activity, and I can’t wait to do it with her again with other objects and different flowers!! I especially loved her root picture (she wasn’t that fond of it, but she loved examining the roots and playing with the shadows!)

I hope that you will try this activity with your kids, and that you’ll SHARE your results on my Facebook page!!! I would love to see what you are doing!!! Check back next week – I’m hoping to get more posts up before then for the start of our next new month!!

Flower Addition

$marvelous math header$

Whew. What a crazy busy month it has been! I’m not really sure how it’s already the end of the month! When I was a kid, April was the longest month of the year after December… since my birthday is the 30th! But as an adult, it seems that the month gets shorter and shorter every year!

Because it’s been so crazy around here, my posts this month have been sporadic at best… so I’ve decided to continue my Marvelous Math mini series through the month of May, because I really do have a lot of wonderful ideas to share with you. I’m not a huge fan of math myself, but Becca certainly is, so I’m learning new ways to make it fun and exciting for her using materials and games that she loves. Today’s flower addition activity is no exception. She loved it, and I’m already thinking I need to make her another set of these.

This idea was born on a rainy day when we were stuck inside, but looking out at the beautiful colors of the wildflowers around our house as they soaked in the moisture… Becca loves adding and subtracting – we do it all day long with food, toys, couch pillows, etc… but it’s usually with smaller numbers, and because it’s verbal, she doesn’t see it written out on paper. So this activity combines what she is used to (adding the “flower” pompoms) with the visual aid of seeing the addition process as well as the vertical math problem in written form.

All you need is THIS FREE PRINTABLE (looks best printed in color/works best on card stock- but not required), a bunch of pompoms and glue, and you are set! I wrote the vertical problems on paper with a marker as we went through and did the activity, and then just cut out around them and taped to the wall next to the sheets. You wouldn’t have to do that, but I feel like the visual of the vertical math problem is helpful to start making those connections that addition can take on many different formats.

If teaching math isn’t something you’re super familiar with, here’s how I talked Becca through this sheet:

First, we only looked at one page at a time (my original idea was to do these on four different days, but she got so excited about it that we ended up doing them all at one sitting!)
We would look at the number at the end, and I reminded her the equal sign means total – our total number of flowers will be 10. SO, let’s figure out how we’re going to make 10.
Then we would count the first addend (the first set of flower stems). Ok, so we need 5 pompoms. She would pick a color and count them out. You could mix your colors, but I liked Becca to use all the same color for the set so that she had the visual of them being alike – this will help when we get further down the road in math and start identifying the type of units we are adding. (If your kids are ready for this topic, you’d of course want both sets to have the same color so that you are adding LIKE objects.)
Then we would count the second added and add them, counting up as we went (so the second set of 5, we started counting at 6, 7, 8, 9, 10). I did glue dots above each flower stem as she counted them and then she would add the pompom to the glue. Obviously, a good practice of fine motor skills would be to have the child handle the glue, but Becca was frustrated with the glue bottle, and our focus wasn’t on fine motor, but on math, so I did the glue so that she wouldn’t loose her focus in her frustration.
Then I would write the vertical math problem – Ok, so 5 flowers + 6 flowers equals 11 flowers. Note that as I did it, I was already identifying the units verbally – so that she’ll start to get that idea. She’s just not ready yet for me to explain the concept and make sure that we are adding like units. Remember that you’re never too early to start planting an idea, they just might not grasp the full concept for a while, and that’s ok!!
For example, she said the word strawberry sort of slowly yesterday, so I asked her how many parts she hears in that word, and did a teensy lesson on syllables right there while I was fixing her dinner. Doesn’t mean she’s fully ready to grasp the concept, but it’s been mentioned and is working in her brain. I’ll bring it up several more times over the course of the next few weeks, and judge when she’s ready for a more in-depth lesson based on her response. As for the units, I’m waiting to hear her verbally adding something and adding unit names to it. Yesterday she was adding Duplos and started to get there – she said, “I have three blocks and two and that’s five!” So she started by naming her units, but isn’t fully there yet. I encouraged her by repeating and saying, “That’s right, you have three blocks and two blocks, which makes five blocks! Good adding!” I’ll know she’s ready to start adding like units when she is regularly verbalizing her units… then we’ll talk about well, ok, so these are red blocks and these are blue blocks. So you have three red blocks plus two blue blocks equals five blocks total. Then, we’ll take the next step forward to discuss the concept of comparing apples to oranges. Remember that it’s easy in our adult minds to make leaps forward that our kids aren’t ready for yet. The term “baby steps” has been coined for a reason. Take it slow and be patient… which is the pot calling the kettle black over here… I struggle with patience regularly!!

Need more tips on teaching your kids math, or more fun math activities? Check out my math page here, and be sure to visit my Facebook page regularly for more tips that I share from other bloggers as well!