STEAM Activities Series – Page 3 – Butterbees and Bumbleflies

STEAM Celery

Today I wanted to share some ideas for you using something that might already be in your fridge!! (Also be sure to visit my post about Bell Pepper shamrocks for another idea of a way to use bell peppers.)

If you’re like us, I buy celery for a specific recipe, and then the rest of it just sorta sits there until I throw it out. We aren’t big fans of eating raw celery like some folks are. (If you are fans of it, please, don’t consider this blasphemous. HA!) So, I saw somewhere (sorry, I don’t still have the original link) about painting with celery, and I thought that looked fun. But I also have done celery science with students in the past, so I thought that would be cool too. So, we tried both things, and I thought I’d share with you these ideas in conjunction with always trying to share a lot of STEAM ideas for you, and give you some ideas to use up what’s already in your kitchen in new and different ways! 🙂

Celery Science is as simple as just cutting some stalks of celery and sticking them in water you have colored with food coloring! It’s a great way to teach about capillary action, and how plants absorb water. If you split the bottoms of the celery stalks, the water climbs faster than if you don’t – so that also makes a great experiment. It’s most fun to watch the leaves change color, so this is a great use of the leafy part of the celery if you aren’t using it in a salad. (Did you know celery leaves add a great flavor and lots of vitamins to your salad without the stringy yuck of the rest of the celery plant? The leaves are also great to chop up like an herb and add to soups and stews!) Be sure that you allow a couple of days for your science project so that your little scientist can watch over time and really see how much gets absorbed into the plant.

Another fabulous use for the other end of your celery is as a stamp for painting! Use a strong rubber band to hold the stalks together for those smaller hands to be able to hold on and grip the stamp. They make beautiful flowers, or cover the whole page using several different colors for some fabulous texture… this would make an awesome background sheet for your 2016 calendar!

Do you have another idea on how to use celery in a creative way? Please share in the comments!!

Tape Resist Name Art

Subject: Art

Typically, I share the art portion of STEAM on Fridays in my “Fun with Art” segment, but honestly, we do so much art around here, that sometimes I just have to take time on Thursdays to share art too! SO… today is all about ART! (And tomorrow will be too, so be sure to check back! 🙂

I’ve seen lots of different examples of tape resist art, but I wanted to do something Becca could really take ownership of… without spending a bunch of money on a canvas, or waiting until they were on sale at Hobby Lobby. Instead, I just put some painter’s tape on some regular pink card stock, pulled out some blue, green, yellow, and purple acrylic paints, and we just had a blast. We both painted on each piece, and of course, true to form, she ended up sticking her hand in the paint cup and painting a couple of the pieces with her fingers. She even ended up with some of the paint in her hair (acrylic paint is interesting in hair… does NOT wash out… but after a few days it was all gone).

We both really enjoyed this activity, and now that it’s done, I want to extend it by getting some frames and putting her name in frames in her bedroom.

An important thing to note if you haven’t ever done a tape resist – use painter’s tape, and be sure to peel it off while the paint on the paper/canvas is still wet. It should peel right off.

Mini Engineering Challenges

Well, here we are – at the second Thursday of the month, and our Mini Engineering Challenges post! (That this time has a touch of Tech mixed in!) Today I have three really fun activities for you, and a few affiliate links to help you (and me) out as you plan to do these activities with your kids!!

First of all, if you don’t have a wooden train set for your preschool/elementary/middle/high children and you/hubby… well, your whole family will love having a train set! Heck, Grayson even loves the train set… (he’s head of the demolition crew after we build something!)

Here’s the set that Santa brought to the kids for Christmas this past year: KidKraft Farm Train Set and then, of course, as we’ve played with it more and more, we’ve needed a few additional things…
Maxim Enterprise Expansion Switch and Crossing Track Pack and the 56 Piece Wooden Train Track Expansion Pack with Tunnel by Orbrium Toys … and of course, we have a few things on our wish lists, too… Maxim Enterprise Over and Under Tunnel, Orbrium® Toys 6 Arches Viaduct Bridge for Wooden Railway Track, and of course a few more connectors… Orbrium Toys Male-Male Female-Female Wooden Train Track Adapters, Set of 8. I think it’s safe to say that we are hooked on the wooden train set. And I love how it’s becoming an activity our entire family can sit around and do on the floor all together. We love to build all kinds of crazy tracks…

But our real engineering challenge lately has been to try to build everyone’s name! They are sometimes more challenging than others, but we’ve really had fun making our names (and our pet’s names) in train tracks! Here are a few of the names we have completed:

Inspired by THIS POST from No Time for Flashcards, I decided it’d be fun to come up with some little Lego Challenges for Becca. We’ve done a few over time, and she has really enjoyed them! It’s super fun to come up with random little challenges for your kids – and see if they can make the item the same way you did! Here’s a couple that she has done. Keep in mind, you could also do this with Duplos for younger kids!! I simply set up the model(s) on a tray, and put the pieces she’ll need to build hers in front of the model. After she’s built her own, she typically likes to take them apart and build random things. This is a fabulous activity to keep her busy when I’m trying to cook dinner or do the dishes. 😉

Another activity that we have loved recently is the “Bridge Constructor Playground (FREE)” App that I downloaded from the Apple Store onto my MacBook. We really enjoy sitting together and trying to figure out the best materials to build a bridge that is strong and the trucks can cross. It has valuable lessons for kids on strength of materials, strength in shapes (triangle posts are stronger than straight up and down posts), and also is a good way to start introducing the concept that everything takes money… you can’t just spend and spend and spend and expect to have enough money for whatever you want! It’s a great game for young kids to play WITH an adult, or for older more tech savvy kids to play on their own. We haven’t made it past the first island yet, but there are multiple levels of play once you reach certain objectives. We haven’t made it past the first stage yet mainly because we both think it’s fun to watch the trucks/cars fall into the water when a bridge breaks… insert embarrassed Mommy grin here… 😉

What engineering/technology activities are you enjoying with your kids? PLEASE SHARE! I’m always looking for new ideas to use with Becca, and I know other readers would be interested to know what you’re doing, as well!

Did you miss last month’s Mini Engineering Challenges? Check them out here!

And, be sure to “like” my Facebook page to see more ideas shared by me and also by other bloggers!

Printable Pattern Blocks

Topic: MATH

This post today is super simple, and it started from a super simple need. I really wanted Becca to have pattern blocks. But I’m also really trying to cut my online spending… so I decided, why buy her pattern blocks when I could make some and laminate them MUCH cheaper… and then they could be whatever colors I wanted and whatever size I wanted… and in whatever quantity I wanted!!

(Be sure to pin this! Thanks!)

SO – HERE’S YOUR LINK FOR THE PRINTABLE

Just select what colors of card stock you want to use, print, laminate, cut, and PLAY!

Don’t want to go to the effort of making your own, and prefer to buy them online?
Here’s a fabulous set from an affiliate link for you. 🙂

Fraction Feathers With the Fuzz

This week’s topic: MATH

Becca is totally in love with Gertrude McFuzz. She has the app on her Kindle Fire HD Kids (find out more about it from my post here and here.) and listens to it/watches it FREQUENTLY. So much so that she pretty much has the entire story memorized, and can take Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories (aff link) and almost read Gertrude line for line. (And honestly, it’s a fabulous moral/life lesson to be engraining in her brain – if you haven’t read it, you really must!)

Another one of her recent fascinations has been fractions. I recently said something like “let me cut that in half for you,” and she said, “what’s half?” And then we had a conversation about something else that was divided into equal pieces… and then she asked about my measuring cups… and then she finally said, “You keep telling me things are fractions. Can we do them?” Hahaha. Seriously. This girl. She LOVES math! So, working from my background knowledge of introducing fractions, and combining that with the way I know her brain works, I came up with this super fun activity that she just absolutely LOVED!

$fraction feathers$

(Get your FREE PRINTABLE HERE!)
Please note – the photos the front cover of my printable are just google search images.
The photo of Gertrude used for the feather pages was snapped by my camera from the book.
Can be printed in color or b/w.

So here’s how it works – print the sheets on card stock – so the glue won’t mess up your paper. Then, get some feathers (Becca knew we were doing Gertrude when we bought the feathers, so she selected the blue/green/yellow pack because Gertrude’s feathers are those colors in the story – you could use any colors). A great way to introduce the concept of fractions is to talk about what the top number and bottom number mean. You don’t have to call them numerator and denominator, but you can if you want to. For Becca, I started with the bottom number. The bottom number is the total number of feathers we need to glue on. Then, the top number tells us how many special feathers we need to pick of the same color.

She didn’t want to mix the colors up, but you could obviously easily have 2/5 be one color, and the other three be other colors, etc. We glued them on to Gertrude, and let the pages dry. Then, we went back and talked about the fractions, and she told me what color feathers matched with the fraction. I wrote the color word on the line for her. Then, we made them into a book just by punching holes and tying ribbon through the holes. You could easily laminate them and put them in a ring binder, but she loves to feel the feathers. I know that it won’t last forever, but it was a super fun project, and every time we read her book, it’s fabulous fraction practice all over again!

Like this activity? Please share it with others! You can also share my Facebook page with others – I share activities like these regularly – not only from my own blog, but also from other bloggers. And, each day at noon, I share a new must-have book to add to your personal library! Coming up this next month, March is all about “real” books – you won’t want to miss these fabulous non-fiction finds for ALL ages of kids!