Discovery Bottles filled with Root Words, Prefixes and Suffixes – Wonder Bottles for Bigger Kids

Letters for Discovery Bottles

Wonder Bottles don’t have to be just for babies. Try creating a series of Discovery Bottles for your first to sixth graders with magnet letters hidden in sand, water with glitter, or snowy white beads.

As they turn the bottles around, they search for the letters contained in the bottle. Try words like wintry, wintertime, wintriest, winterize, wintering, wintered. Write a number on the bottom of each bottle.

Have your children make a list with each words they discover written next to the appropriate number. Older children might like making new Discovery Bottles with surprise words.

Challenge them to find words in a dictionary or in books they are reading, pop the letters into a Discovery Bottle and see how many others can recognize the word.

Discovery Bottles can work wonderfully for homeschooling families with children of different ages and abilities. Have the more advanced children make bottles for the younger ones. Pair up to create new bottles or to help each other discover the words.

Lots more fun, hands-on learning activities for winter or any time can be found at Wintertime Unit Study Activities.

Photo Credit: Fridge magnet-art
By jrsnchzhrs
on Flickr, Creative Commons</p>

Ocean Floor Learning Center for the Lobster Unit Study

Lobster Prey Learning Center: What do Lobsters eat?

Exploring Ocean Life

About midway though our lobster unit study I open the Ocean Floor Learning Center on the classroom rug. I wait until the children have enough knowledge of the lives of lobsters for them to be able to use this knowledge in the center.

Set up an Ocean Floor Learning Center on your classroom rug. Inhabit the ocean floor with plastic lobsters, crabs, fish, shellfish, seaweed and other plants and animals found in a lobster’s habitat. Use a permanent marker to label each animal with it’s name. Create a shelf for storing each of the animals. Label each animal’s spot on the shelf so that the children can practice reading the words as they put them back in order.

Exploring a lobster in the Ocean Floor Learning Center

Children play the parts of animals of their choice as they act out scenes from the everyday lives of lobsters.

Tactile and visual learners will benefit from playing with the animals that the lobster eats. Turn your rug into an ocean floor and let the lobsters find their prey.

How do you measure a snail?

Measuring a Snail

Math is fun, artistic, musical, historical, scientific, active, something to write home about.

Mathematics can be taught using fun, interactive learning materials as part of unit studies and as an everyday part of life.

All children can learn and enjoy math when given the right materials and opportunities. The best games for learning math involve children working together to discover the mathematical principles behind the activity.

Children should be expected to make up their own math games and play those games with others often.

Math can be enhanced by explaining what you have learned to others and by writing down those explanations in math journals.

Exciting ideas for teaching math can be found at I Love Teaching Math.

Photo Credit: He’s too tiny to measure up.
on Flickr, Creative Commons.

Fractals, Googols and Other Mathematical Tales by Theoni Pappas

Fractals, Googols and Other Mathematical Tales by Theoni Pappas

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The beginning of Fractals, Googols and Other Mathematical Tales reminds me of Flatland A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott. It begins with a 3 dimensional cat landing in a 2 dimensional world but Fractals, Googols and Other Mathematical Tales quickly goes on to other mathematical subjects. From Mobius Strips to Fibinocci rabbits, tangram cats, and the invention of the decimal point, this is a fun read aloud that will get you thinking about, experimenting with and enjoying math in a fun, hands-on, creative way. Great book for middle schoolers and especially homeshoolers of that age.

View all my reviews >>

More wonderful ideas for exploring math with teens can be found at The Fun and Games of Pre-Algebra.

ThinkFun Hoppers: Fun, Educational Game – Stocking Stuffer Idea

ThinkFun Hoppers Frog Game

When I was looking for stocking stuffers for my frog loving children the other day I ran across ThinkFun Hoppers.

ThinkFun Hoppers is a fun, educational game that my kids love to play anytime, anywhere and the case is so compact that it can be slipped into a Christmas Stocking. My kids love this game.

I include in my Frog Unit Study. The kids love to play with these little frogs as they hop over eachother from lilypad to lilypad.

ThinkFun Hoppers comes with a lilypad covered pond, a pond full of green frogs and a single red frog. There are cards that can be used to set up scenarios for jumping to eliminate all the green frogs. The cards go from easy to hard. My kids love challenging themselves to try to do all the cards in as short a time as possible.

ThinkFun Hoppers can help children who are beginning to understand addition and subtraction as they add frogs to the pond and subtract them while playing the game.

ThinkFun Hoppers and Multiple Intelligences

Kinesthetic: The movement of the frogs and the action of placing the frogs on the board helps to reinforce their sense of the mathematical concepts of addition and subtraction.

Visual: Cute frogs and appealing lilypads attracts visual learners to the ThinkFun Hoppers game while seeing the actual number of frogs change as they are added or removed helps visual learners.

Auditory: I ask my auditory learners to work with a partner to talk about the number of frogs on the board as they are added or subtracted. Hearing the information aloud reinforces the mathematical concepts for them.

Write the Room

Each morning I gather my little tadpoles around me and start our day by reading a poem or singing a song. One of our favorite frog songs th classic, 5 Green and Speckled Frogs .

Five Green and Speckled Frogs
sat on a speckled log
Eating some most delicious bugs.
Yum, yum!

One jumped into the pool,
where it was nice and cool.
Then there were four green speckled frogs,
Glub glub.

Four green and speckled frogs…
Three green and speckled frogs…
Two green and speckled frogs…
One green and speckled frog…
…Then there were no green speckled frogs!
Glub glub, glub, glub

I have written the words out on large chart paper and had them laminated for durability.

Beside the chart I have an umbrella stand of pointers for the Froglet of the Day to use for pointing to the words while everyone follows along. I used to use a yardstick but recently discovered that there are many more exciting possibilities.

A Parking Garage: A Christmas Present for Children of all Ages

When my son turned three he loved cars, trucks and buses so I showed him how to play the fill and dump game with cars and a garage.

My son loved to play with the Fisher Price Garage making the cars go down the ramp and then chasing after them as they rolled across the floor. Now from reading recent reviews from those who have bought recent versions of the Fisher Price Garage I  discovered that it has drastically changed since my kids were little so, I looked around for a garage that is better constructed.

I was looking for a garage with the features of the old Fisher Price Garage,

1. Durable

2. Could be used with Matchbox Cars

3. Cars could  speed off the end of the ramp and run across the floor.

It seems that Fisher Price no longer makes them but my favorite company, Melissa and Doug, does.

The great thing about the Melissa & Doug Deluxe Parking Garage is that it has all those qualities. It is durable, can be used with Matchbox cars, and the cars go speeding off the ramp and across the floor.

As a toy,  the  educational value of the Parking Garage continues to grow with your child.

When my children were about 5 or 6 we played a game of racing the cars down the ramp and measuring how far each one traveled across the floor. We used Masking Tape to remember how far each car had gone, wrote the color of the car on the tape and ran several trials. Until they knew how to spell the color words, I posted a Car Color Chart.

As my children got even older they started making cars using Legos.  They found that the parking garage was the perfect way to test out their designs. You probably already have plenty of Legos around the house but did you know that you can buy Legos Wheels and Axles to turn all those bricks into cars, trucks and buses?

Now that I have teenagers, they have moved on to LEGO Mindstorms NXT 2.0 where they build, program and test robotic cars. Still they continue to pull out the Parking Garage. They still find it one of the best ways to test out their vehicles.

There are lots of activities for preschoolers related to the transportation theme.

The Busy Toddler and the Oatmeal Box

Recycle an Oatmeal Box

The other day my friend, who works at home, asked me how to keep her two year old busy so I thought I would share these suggestions with you.

When my son was a toddler he loved to play fill and dump games. I gave them an empty Oatmeal Box and some rolled up socks. He would fill the oatmeal box with the rolled up socks and then dump them out with a delighted squeal. The socks would roll all over the floor. He would then toddle all around picking up socks to fill

it up and dump again.

After he got the idea pretty well, I took the top of the box and made a hole in it so that the task became more challenging. Later on I changed the hole to an X cut so that he had to really push to get the balls in. At this point I changed from socks to Tennis Balls because the socks would get stuck.

You can find more recycling ideas at Eat Your Oatmeal, Save the Box

You can find lots more ideas for entertaining young children by checking out my webpages of Hands-on Learning.

Hands-on, High School Geometry

As homeschoolers, we look for fun, creative ways to learn. This year we are studying high school geometry and wanted to share with you some of our favorite resources.

String, Straightedge and Shadow – The Story of Geometry by Julia E. Diggins

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
String, Straightedge and Shadow – The Story of Geometry by Julia E. Diggins is one of the books we are reading in order to learn high school geometry. The conversational style and clear illustrations as well as the historical background help to make geometry come alive. We are using it in conjunction with Patty Paper Geometryby Michael Serraand an online site, Learning Math: Geometry, an online, interactive Geometry Course. We have found many videos on YouTube to reinforce the new vocabulary terms that we are using. Finally, we do the chapter tests in a high school textbook to assure ourselves that we have thoroughly learned the subject before moving on.

This combination of hands-on learning resources makes learning geometry so much fun that we look forward to it each day.

View all my reviews >>

Counting Pumpkins

Too Many Pumpkins by Linda White

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
In the story Too Many Pumpkins by Linda White Rebecca grew up eating so much pumpkin that she never wanted to even see pumpkins again in her life.

One year by accident a pumpkin drops off a truck, the seeds plant themselves and a whole pumpkin patch grows in her yard. Being frugal she must use all the pumpkins so she makes breads, pies, soups and Jack O’Lanterns for all the neighbors.

Not only is this a fun story to read but a wonderful accompaniment to a class learning place value while counting pumpkin seeds.

We used page protectors to cover some of the pages in the book and then used dry erase markers to circle groups of 10 pumpkins to find out how many pumpkins were on each page.

View all my reviews >>