Flour and Peas and Sieves oh my!

"Indy" ALWAYS asks to play with the flour when we cook anything involving it. I let him every now and then. When I saw this idea at The Wonder Years I knew I had to try it. I used flour and black eyed peas that we usually use for counting activities. He put the black eyed peas into the flour and stirred it up. Then he used the sieve to fish the peas out. It worked really well. Our sieve wasn't as small or cute as The Wonder Years one but it was small enough for him to handle. He learned to tap the sieve against his other palm to shake the flour out. Of course all the tools were soon abandoned for his hands!

Nuts & Bolts

I introduced this a couple weeks ago and he wasn't too interested. I set it out again last week along with the two short and long labeled baskets. In theory he was to screw a nut on the bolt and put it in the long or short basket. I really thought he'd like this activity being crazy about tools and all. I was wrong. He did about three and then just wanted to dump them out and have them attack each other. Maybe I will try again in a few weeks. Luckily they were only a dollar at the dollar store!

More Practical Life

This idea came from Our Montessori Journey. So easy to set up! Just get a basket of Pom Poms and a hand help dust pan and brush and let the kids go crazy dumping and sweeping. For a kid who has trouble cleaning up after himself and has never sweep anything in his life he really liked it. Sure, he threw the pom poms around the room a few times, but he always picked them up and put them back in the basket. This means he will be cleaning up a lot more of his own spills from now on!

Orange ya glad I didn't say banana?

I had the same idea as Adventures Of A Flake a couple days ago. I wanted to try using a manual juicer with "Indy". Alas, no one I knew had one. So when I finally made it to the store I found a pretty good one for about 3 bucks. We didn't get much juice but he really enjoyed the process. And the tasting. Then we tasted ours compared to the store bought kind. He said he loved both.

Topic: Teeth

This project came from Our Montessori Journey!

What an awesome way to demonstrate why we need to brush our teeth. And why we need to limit our intake of drinks like soda! Our Montessori Journey said they left their egg soaking in soda all night. We only had the patience to let it soak for about an hour and it was already stained brown. Yuck.

So, we then took fluoride toothpaste and a toothbrush and he scrubbed down the egg. It turned white again!

Since we are on the subject here is the chart we use to track his teeth brushing!
I download it from here.