The Five Senses - part two

Theme: The Five Senses

Age: Honey Pot is 2 years and 4 months old

This is part two of our exploration of the five senses! In part one we covered sound, sight and touch. Check out all of those fun activities in this post! Did you check it out yet? Okay, good. Now we can move on to smell and taste. Let’s go!

Spice Painting

This idea comes from Learn With Play At Home. I had seen it in numerous places, where the children used glue instead of making paint with water; but we wanted something simple, as we’d be throwing it away afterward anyway. So first I took out a few spices of various scents and colors, and poured a small amount into an ice cube tray.

I added a bit of water to each and mixed them together with paintbrushes. Then Honey Pot got right to work! It is imperative that you smell each one before you paint with it!

As Honey Pot painted, we talked about how we smell with our nose and how smell is one of the five senses. She enjoyed the many different scents and kept lowering her head to take a whiff!

Taste Testing

I provided Honey Pot with four different foods from the four main groups: marshmallows for sweet, unsweetened cocoa powder for bitter, pretzel sticks for salty and lemons for sour.

Then I asked her to taste each one. “Mmm. Eat it?” she’d ask after each one. I asked her to just try each one first, and then she could eat the ones she liked. We discussed the words sweet, bitter, salty and sour as she tried them.

When she had finished tasting each of them, I asked her to help me categorize them by description. “Which one was sour?” She handed over the lemons saying, “This one!” Then so on and so forth.

Then she tried her first lemon water!

“Num-my!”

Letter: J

Theme: The Letter J

Honey Pot is 2 years and 4 months old

Leap Frog Fridge Phonics

This is always a great introduction to our letter of the week. I placed the letter J into it, and we listened to Scout’s song about how it sounds. Honey Pot was pretty consistent in naming this letter on her second guess all week. She always called it “I” first! Hey, it’s a start!

J is for Jellybean – Color and Pattern Matching

I quickly created a template of jellybean shapes, using regular printer paper and colored pencils. I made sure to match the ones in a bag I purchased for her from the Dollar Tree. Honey Pot wanted to eat them of course, but I told her that she could only eat the ones she’s sorted. It was good motivation for her to match them all up! The solid colored candies were the easiest for her to do; but this was her first pattern exercise, and she needed more help with the polka dotted ones!

Alphabet Search

I found this neat idea from a website called Tons of Fun. They have free printable alphabet paths for each letter of the alphabet! These contain both upper and lowercase though. Since we won’t be covering lowercase until our second time through the alphabet, I used their general uppercase template, and replaced a few other letters with more J’s. There were about five total for her to find and dot with her marker. She started off pretty well!

But she soon went dot happy toward the end and just wanted to make artwork out of it! I think if we do this again (which I hope to do!) I’ll make my own alphabet path with fewer letters to search through. It seemed like a daunting task for her at this age.

Play-dough Shapes

We like to use our cookie cutters during our letter units!

This time we also took it a step further, and practiced actual play-dough sculpting. We made “snakes” and tried curling them into J’s.

All in all, I think this was a wonderful extension of our usual play-dough letter recognition activities!

J is for Jell-O Painting!

For our last letter unit, we had a lot of fun with our ice painting! I wanted to do something similar this week, so I decided to use Jell-O as paint. First I freehanded a big letter J onto paper, and then I mixed some Jell-O with water, in two different colors, for Honey Pot to color it in.

She enjoyed the new medium!

And of course, we had to use other senses to explore it. It smelled so good!

Here is her finished product. I wasn’t going to put it up on her artwork wall, as I try to keep only the most interesting pieces there…but this just smells so good! I think I’ll keep it around for a while.

Kitten's First Full Moon

Theme: Kitten’s First Full Moon, by Kevin Henkes

Honey Pot is 2 years and 3 months old

We love participating in the Virtual Book Club! And we are so pleased to read that it will continue beyond the summer. This month’s featured author, Kevin Henkes, is my favorite so far. We took out three of his books from the library, and read them throughout the week. I had originally planned a few activities for My Garden, but after seeing Honey Pot choose Kitten's First Full Moon to read so much more than the others, I had to use this one. And I have fallen more in love with it too.

The story is about a little kitten that sees a bowl of milk in the sky, and tries to get to it. She leaps off of steps, climbs trees, etc. in attempt to get a sip…but in reality, the bowl of milk is just the moon. It is such a cute story, and has a happy ending. So here follows our activities for Kitten’s First Full Moon.

Crayon Resist Painting

I had been seeing this fun craft on Pinterest quite a bit. Because Kitten’s First Full Moon is entirely in grayscale, I knew we had to do some type of black and white craft. This fit the bill. First I drew a simple cat face in white crayon, and then I let Honey Pot paint a seemingly blank piece of paper with watered-down black paint. (Looking back, I would have rather traced an actual image from the story, as it would have been super easy and cute!) I told her an image would magically appear! As she painted, it emerged more and more.

We both thoroughly enjoyed this craft, and I intend on doing this one again and again. Love!

Magic Milk Paint

We found this idea at Modern Parents Messy Kids. Please take a look at their magic milk, because ours is soooo poorly photographed. You really can’t see how special this experiment is until you see theirs! Here is a glimpse:

via Modern Parents Messy Kids

As far as ours – first I poured some milk into a small dish, and then we added a few drops of food coloring. I let Honey Pot’s choose the colors. Unfortunately one of them was black. (LoL.) She dipped a toothpick into dish soap, and then into the milk dish. The colors swirled around, away from it.

And as she swirled, the colors mixed and very quickly became black.

A fun experiment, but we’ll have to try it again with brighter colors for sure!

Cat Mask

I printed a mask for Honey Pot from Craft Jr., a website with tons of cute printable animal faces. Originally I had tied a string around it for Honey Pot to wear, but after a short time of play it snapped off. So we improvised and taped it to a Popsicle stick. It was still fun. This was just for a bit of imaginative play. We meowed and pretended to sip milk from a bowl just like kittens do.

Problem Solving

Throughout the story, Kitten makes various attempts to get to the bowl of milk in the sky. I decided to make a fun problem-solving game out of a similar situation. First I took a bowl from her play kitchen set. Then I gave her a kitten from my childhood stuffed animal stash, and told her that she wanted the bowl of milk. I placed the bowl in various situations, where Honey Pot would have to think about how she could get the bowl down. "What could she do?" I would ask her.

First, I put it on top of the door…

So Honey Pot decided to close the door to knock it down.

Then I placed it atop the fan…

And so Honey Pot turned on the fan!

Next, the top of her open closet…

So she closed the closet.

Then the bowl of milk was “just waiting” on top of the bathroom sink faucet…

So she stepped up on her stool to reach it.

And each time the kitten got to her bowl of milk, she had to take a sip of course!

I wedged the bowl into Honey Pot’s blinds, with the cord hanging down in her reach…

And after thinking for a moment, she helped her kitten grab a hold of the cord, to open the blinds and knock it down.

And finally, I hid the bowl at the bottom of a bin of blocks. At first Honey Pot had her kitten try to dig for it. But that didn’t work.

Then after much deliberating, and a bit of help, she decided to dump the whole thing.

“Lucky Kitten!”

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