Water pollution - the experiment

I wanted to create a sensory bin for E. connected to Earth Day. What makes this difficult is she doesn't like to dirty her hands, so we tried the water pollution idea I saw at Every Star Is Different, as she could use some tools to work with rubbish.

What you need:
- clean water in a tub of any kind
- rubbish (banana skin, orange skin, crust of bread, tea bag, plastic packaging of any kind etc.)
- oil (optional - it makes cleaning up difficult)
- tongs
- strainer
- a bowl to put the rubbish in

What to do:

We talked about the clean water and name every piece of rubbish. We also mentioned natural waters (seas, oceans, rivers and lakes) and that animals live in there.

Then I asked E. to throw all the rubbish in the water. She was quite reluctant at first.

- Why Mommy? It will be dirty.

That was the point. I told her about the scarce drinking water on Earth and also about poor animals which try to survive in the dirty waters.

She also poured the oil in, which was a brave move from my part as everything got oily. The cleaning up lasted forever.

Then she fished out the rubbish from the dirty water.

She tried to clean the oil and the small tea leaves too with a strainer but she didn't managed, of course.

We drew the conclusion: We need to take care of water and keep it clean because we can't drink it  or animals can't live in it if it's dirty. And water is essential for life.

Earth Day Patterning - free printable

Celebrating our Planet on Earth Day (22 April) is a good occasion to have another patterning activity with the well-known symbols like the recycling sign, bins, bottles, newspaper, plants and the globe itself. In the past we did quite a lot of patterning activities on Valentine's Day or on St. Patrick's Day and it has always been a hit with E.

(The link to download the free printable is at the end of this post)

As soon as she saw the prepared material she sat down to work on it. First, we named what she can see in the picture. She could name them all. She didn't understand why there was a tree among the picture cards:

E.: - Why is the tree here?
M.: - Because they make the oxygen for us.
E.: - Yes, and we need air.

She didn't ask about the flower, though.
When she found the water drop picture, she simply stated: - We need water too.

She moved from the easier ABAB pattern...

...to a little bit more difficult AABAAB and ABBABB patterns

We left the most difficult to the end: ABCABC But she enjoyed it very much, although it was hard for her to concentrate this long.

The four sheets were long enough for her. She didn't want to make her own patterns on the empty grid. Maybe at another time. But you can do it :)

Download the Earth Day pattern activity for free on this link. And have fun!

Easter patterns

We've already covered the basic patterns when we were talking about clothes, but decorating Easter eggs has brought the topic up again.

Checked, flowery, stripy, plain, spotty were the words to revise. Much to my surprise E. remembered them.

We did a little painting but E. was not willing to paint patterns, so I followed her lead. It was long time ago when I gave up sticking to a project.

At another occasion I drew Easter eggs on the whiteboard and also the name of their patterns mixed up. She enjoyed matching the words and the patterns. She also mentioned that we can call something spotty polka-dotted as well.

That's all about patterns at Easter. I'll come back with another post on our Easter this year.