Tagged with 'Learning'

Let's bid farewell to Summer in style by creating tie-dye beach towels with the help of the color wheel, rainbow order, mixing, and pigment strength. Set up the activity in the comfort of your backyard, and don't forget to grab some gloves and plastic coverings if you aren't on grass.

• Spray Tie Dye Kit
• Duct Tape
• Beach or Bath Towels
• Warm Water
• Twisty Droppers
• Color Wheel

This activity works best with the widely available spray tie-dye kits. They dry faster, making the application easier for even the youngest beach-goers.

Grab white beach or bath towels (the fluffier, the more color-absorbent), lots of duct tape, hot water for mixing the tie-dye, and the spray kit.

Lay your towel out on a flat surface, smoothing it out. Spell out your child’s name across the towel using the tape and moving slowly.

Keep the color wheel handy as a guide. It is a great visual tool for classifying spectral wavelengths from red to violet.

Depending on the options available in the tie-dye set you’ve purchased, look at your color wheel and separate your bottles into primary, secondary, and tertiary categories.

Next, put on your gloves on a covered surface or grass and mix the tie-dye with the warm water. What colors are made from primary colors? Working from the color wheel, which colors will look best near each other on the towel?

With those gloves on, let the spraying begin! Be glad you have on gloves! The bottles can get messy fast. If you prefer the traditional route of tie-dying, try using Twisty Droppers! Pigment strength was brought up: how do we intensify the color?

It’s perfectly fine to get spray on the tape. Once the towel is pretty dry, flip it over to spray the backside! Flip back over and allow to dry completely. Wash the towels separately twice, alone in the wash.

I’m sure by now you have heard about how beneficial “STEM activities” are for children, but many of you may be wondering what that means or entails. STEM activities are anything that promotes curiosity and growth in the areas of science, technology, engineering, and math.

Although those topics may sound pretty advanced for a preschooler or young child, there are many easy ways to incorporate a love for these concepts in the early years! Curiosity, creativity, collaboration, and critical thinking are at the heart of STEM! These are traits that the youngest child can be encouraged to explore.

One fun topic that we’ve been interested in lately is coding! I would have never imagined that my three and 5-year-old would be excited about something that I thought was so complex, but boy was I wrong. Their fascination began when we started playing with various imaginative play toys to teach them coding, our favorite being Botley the Coding Robot. They were instantly intrigued by the reactions that resulted from the commands they typed in!

I loved watching their little minds click as they realized that each command change would create a different outcome. To foster their new love for this concept, I began providing additional screen-free activities to help them become better at following patterns and various steps. Here is a fun, holiday-themed coding activity you can easily create for your little one.

Coding Candy Canes!

Pipe cleaners, pony beads, paper, and markers. Cut each pipe cleaner into three pieces and bend them into a candy cane shape. Next, select the colors or beads that you want to use. I recommend 2-3 colors for younger children, but you could use as many as you wish for an older child. Because the activity was for both of my daughters, I chose only red and green.

Lastly, take your paper and draw various candy canes on it, adding colored “bead dots” with your markers in the patterns or order you want your child to mirror.

Provide your child with pipe cleaner candy canes, beads, and paper. Ask them first to sort the beads into different color piles. Then, instruct them to create candy canes that match the ones on the paper. My girls loved this activity, and we hung the finished candy canes around our playroom as festive décor.

So there you have it: an inexpensive, low-prep, and screen-free way to introduce coding to your child! I hope that you found this informative and that it sheds some light on just how fun and easy STEM activities can be.

Halloween is nearly upon us! This fun and spooky holiday are one of the most entertaining nights for kids each year: creative costumes, running around outside after dark with friends, and…trick-or-treating for candy! I have so many childhood memories of Halloween excitement, so I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of sadness when we discovered my two daughters had a dairy allergy a few years back. I didn’t want them to miss out on all the fun or feel left out while going door-to-door with their friends. Luckily, there are still some dairy-free candy options, but most Halloween treats tend to be chocolate. And dairy isn’t the only allergy out there - nuts, gluten, and soy also affect thousands of kids around you.

Thankfully, awareness of this issue has gained traction and popularity over the past few years! Have you ever heard of the Teal Pumpkin Project? It’s a fantastic initiative that focuses on the inclusion of children with special diets who trick-or-treat. 

The concept is simple, and everyone is encouraged to participate: 

• Collect non-food treat options 
• Place a teal pumpkin on your porch to show people that you have available non-food treats. 
• Add your address to the Teal Pumpkin Project Map. 

We found our teal pumpkin and non-food treats in the dollar section of local stores. Some great ideas for treats are Learning Resources Counters, stickers, temporary tattoos, pencils, bookmarks, necklaces, glow sticks/bracelets/wands, bouncy balls, notepads, stencils, bubbles, noisemakers, or playing cards. Many families choose to give out non-food treats AND traditional Halloween candy, and they just have two separate treat bowls. 

I can’t tell you how happy I am that awareness is being raised for children with food allergies! Even if my girls were not allergic to dairy I would still encourage participation in this wonderful project. We are constantly striving to teach our daughters about inclusion and the importance of making everyone feel special and cared about. The Teal Pumpkin Project is an easy way that families can do just that within their local communities everywhere!