cotton ball farm

Update :)

It is almost spring and it's a good time to begin looking at plants, seeds and root systems. Two days ago we planted some beans in cotton balls to watch the root systems develop, and they are already sprouting! Later this week I'll add in pictures if they sprout leaves. The tutorial comes from The Imagination Tree, which has lots of great projects. All you need is a jar, some cotton balls and a couple of dried beans. We used a black bean and a black-eyed pea. You don't want the cotton balls to get too wet, so I would suggest measuring out a small amount of water for your child to sprinkle on the cotton balls.

You can find more indoor growing experiments here, including growing carrot tops, avocado stones, growing a cutting and growing sprouts.

snake puppets

Update: we did make these — it's a good template. Here is our snake exploring the wall of a garage...


Mr. printable has some great templates for snake finger puppets, both coloured and not coloured (so you can design your own pattern). We were excited to try this (my son picked this activity), but due to illness, we didn't finish up, so I don't have photos. Hopefully we will later this week. In the meantime, here is a link to the tutorial as well as printable templates. Image from mr. printable.

Also, we did some vegetable printing for Valentines day. I don't have pictures of our finished valentines, we rushed them to school before I had the chance. We let them be pretty wonky and we had fun ·_·

Happy New Year

It's lunar New Year, would you like to make some noise to celebrate?

To make a very basic shaker, here is our set of instructions from Sunny below. If you are stuck inside, rice makes a softer sound :) A cup from a coffee shop with a lid is the easiest. You can tape or staple two paper cups or paper bowls together.

If you'd like to do a fancier noisemaker, you could make this lovely hand drum from pichouline via bloesem kids.

good news

This week we got some great news. We've been awarded a grant from BC Film + Media to develop an app for Windy. We're working with some lovely people, but I think we have to wait to reveal more details.

The other thing that happened this week was that I gave a little talk at my son's school about early literacy and I made a list of some of my favourite authors and illustrators as a reference, as well as a list of some of our favourite vehicle books. Judith gave a talk at the same school a few years ago, it's nice to participate.

Next week we'll have a real activity up, I promise. In the meantime, don't forget about Windy Valentines if you need some little cards for class.