Theme: Rocks
Honey Pot is 3 years and 2 months old
Little M&M is 16 months old
Books
We started our unit with a couple of books from the library. I couldn't find many! We read Stone Soup by Jon J Muth and Milo and the Magical Stones by Marcus Pfister. Both were very cute. We also brought home Let's Go Rock Collecting by Roma Gans, but it wasn't an actual story as we had thought. It is a great resource for learning about the various types of rocks and how they are formed; however, Honey Pot just doesn't have the attention span for such reading just yet!
Rock Painting
I've seen a few versions of this on Pinterest, and had to try it out! First I sent Honey Pot and Little M&M out to the driveway to gather some rocks.
Then we sorted through them a bit. We noted which were big, small, jagged, smooth, etc. and then I asked Honey Pot to choose four small ones for our painting.
We squirt four colors of paint onto a piece of paper inside a foil pan, and Honey Pot placed one rock onto each.
Then it was time to paint! I asked her to tilt the pan back and forth.
It started to look really cool!
Then we put it down to start cleaning up, and Little M&M picked it up and imitated his big sister. He wanted to paint too!
For extra fun during cleanup time, I put some water and soap into a bucket and asked the kids to clean the rocks. They may have had more fun doing this than the actual craft!
Here is the final product. We'll be doing this again! Next time, to avoid those big globs of paint on the paper, we'll put the paint directly onto the rocks instead of the paper. Maybe even line the slide with paper and roll the rocks down!
Rock Hunt
I made Honey Pot a simple scavenger hunt and sent her out into the driveway. I had her search for the biggest rock she could find, the smallest, various colors, edges, etc. She had fun with this!
Little M&M helped too!
Using her magnifying glass to inspect them closely!
Why does this boy always wind up covered in dirt??
Silly girl...
All in all a successful hunt!
We were sure to make observations at the end of our activity too!
Construction Letter Building
We seem to have a couple of themes going on at one time, and this activity overlaps them both. We're finishing up our unit on rocks as well as construction. So, one last time before our driveway is paved, we headed out there to play! It was like one extra large sensory bin!
We did some pretend play, and filled up our trucks with rocks.
Then later we drove them over to the sidewalk, where I had written a few letters with chalk. The kids dumped out their trucks. And I had Honey Pot build letters with them.
Annnnd my camera battery died. So here's just a glimpse of that activity. It turned into a chalk drawing activity after a while anyway!
