Monday - Literacy
Fireworks Scissor Skills
This printable comes from Itsy Bitsy Fun. They had a few fun ones from which to choose! So pleased with how well Honey Pot has come along in her scissor skills. This new pair from Amazon has definitely helped!
ABC Order and Tracing Worksheets
These come from Gift of Curiosity and the Education website, respectively. Both were a hit with Honey Pot!
Tuesday - Math and Cognitive Skills + Craft
Spot the Difference
This comes from the Education website, and it was a fair challenge for Honey Pot. Over the Big Moon has a fun July 4th Pack that has a few more of these!
USA Maze
Honey Pot loves mazes! This cute one comes from Kids Activities Blog.
Shades of Color
Gifts of Curiosity had an interesting printable that would challenge the child to sort the red, white and blue stars from light to dark. This activity would have never occurred to me, and I'm so glad I came across this concept. Honey Pot had some trouble, so we've saved these printables and will keep working on it!
Salt + Watercolors - Fireworks Craft
I've been meaning to try this craft with Honey Pot! The version we followed comes from Crafty Morning. First I drew some firework shapes onto black paper, and went over them with glue. (Honey Pot might have been able to do this part herself, but I thought she'd enjoy the cleaner result of a more practiced hand.) Then I had the kids pour salt over the glue with spoons.
Once they had covered all of the glue with salt, we dumped the excess salt off. Honey Pot and Little M&M then used a pipette to drop small amounts of red and blue water (dyed with food coloring) onto the salt. A little bit goes a long way. And it is fun to watch the color spread along the trail of salt all by itself from just one drop!
In the end it looked something like this; although, Little M&M and Honey Pot went a bit pipette crazy, and soaked most of their papers with water. So this project turned out to be more about the process than the final product! Fun though! We'll do this again.
Wednesday - Social Studies and Skills
USA Study - Pushpin Poking
I printed off a coloring page of the USA, and had Honey Pot poke holes within each state. It provided nice fine motor practice, as well as providing an opportunity for discussion on our country. We talked about the fifty states, and pointed out where we and some of our family members live. I had seen on Pinterest that some people do a similar activity, where the child pokes a flag toothpick into each state on the map, which is atop a piece of Styrofoam. Had I found those toothpicks, I would have done the same!
Weaving - Skills Practice
I came across this weaving idea from JDaniel4'sMom. I love the idea of using a draining mat from the Dollar Tree! Instead of using separate red, white and blue ribbons though, we used just one patriotic ribbon. I knew Honey Pot would lose interest if she had to do it too many times.
After the first row of weaving, I asked if she wanted to do another. She wanted to do just the top and bottom rows, and I didn't push her to go any further. This was a success!
Thursday - Sensory + Music
Soap Foam - Sensory
This idea had been on our summer bucket list, and I was so excited to try it on this hot afternoon. Instead of the rainbow version that I had first seen on Fun at Home with Kids, I made ours red, white and blue of course. Mix 2 TBSP of Dawn Soap with 1/4 cup of water, then mix on high speed for 1-2 minutes. That's it! This was so easy and so much fun. We'll be doing this again! First I mixed up a batch and dumped it into the kids' sensory bucket.
They had so much fun digging their hands in! The water table was filled nearby, so they enjoyed transferring bubbles to the water table and water to the bubble bucket.
And that happened.
And of course, the feet went in.
After a while, the bubbles had started to dissipate so I whipped up a couple more batches of bubbles.
Hose at the ready...
Patriotic Sing-along
We also listened to some patriotic songs today, which I'm ashamed to say the kids had never heard before! Just some of the classics such as This Land is Your Land, God Bless America and My Country 'tis of Thee.
Friday - Science
Firecracker Cookies - Cooking
We put on our aprons and spent some time in the kitchen today baking these Firecracker Cookies from Cookin' Cowgirl. Now, we had significantly fewer sprinkles than the recipe called for...as in, perhaps a quarter of what they used. I don't know why it was so hard to find red and blue sprinkles, especially at this time of year, but I used what I could find. And the cookies came out just fine. Delicious, soft and cakey cookies! Yum!
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
