Simple experiments for the Pre-K - 2nd grade classroom

Experiments in the classroom can be awesome for some and scary for others.  I love doing various experiments with my students.  Just like cooking, there is so much you can tie in to make is cross-curricular.  To give you some ideas of what you can do in your room, my boys and I did some experiments together.  Their ages are 8 and 5 and they loved all of the activities we did!!

Density

We explored density by adding 3 liquids to a mason jar.  We used maple syrup, water (we used food coloring to make it blue) and vegetable oil.  The kids took turns adding the liquids (we started with the syrup, then the water, and lastly the oil).  When adding each liquid we predicted what would happen.  We then experimented with density by dropping various items and seeing where they would settle.  This was a huge hit!!  They dropped all kinds of stuff into the jar:  paper clips, chocolate chips, crackers, toothpicks, a penny, animals crackers, and cheese.  It was so neat to see where each item settled.  In the classroom, you could make a prediction sheet for this and have the kids record what they think will happen and what really does happen.

Marshmallow Structures (STEM)

The last activity we did involved using marshmallows and spaghetti noodles.  We used these to build structures.  My husband walked in just as we were starting so he jumped in on the action.  It was neat to see how each kid put the structure together.  The ultimate goal was to have the structure support something, but we never got that far. 

Scented Playdough (Recipe included!)

The first thing we made was peppermint scented playdough.  This was super easy and came out great! The kids helped measure, mix, and add ingredients.  Afterwards, they played with it and it kept well in a plastic bag.   I typed up the recipe for you and you can get it by click here!

With this activity you can talk about what happens as you add each ingredient, why might the water need to be hot, etc.  For ideas on what you can do with the playdough, check out this previous post! 

Slime/Putty

Slime is the new hit thing right now.  We actually made two different kinds.  The first was a kit that B insisted I get from Michael's. ( I am sure by looking at the picture of the box, you can see why B wanted it.  Oh, boys!)  At first, it seemed too gooey, but after sitting overnight it was perfect.  The 2nd was a recipe from a book that we borrowed from the library.  This one did not turn out well. I am not sure if we messed up or the recipe was bad.  It was way too watery!!  Last time we used this recipe from PBS kids and it came out much better.

I have used the slime recipes when talking about solids and liquids.  The kids think it is cool how using the school glue goes to a solid glob.

Cooking in ECSE and K-2 classroom

I love working on cooking skills in the classroom.  I am sure you are wondering.... What can you do with these little ones?  So much!!

Besides teaching basic life skills that our students will need for the rest of their lives, this is also a perfect opportunity to teach new vocabulary (ingredients, slice, mash, stir, etc.).  In addition, you can work on kitchen safety and health skills such as washing hands and proper use of a knife.  My students also use this opportunity to work on social skills as we often share our creations with school staff in the building.



 Here are just a few of the various activities you can do with your students.

Dirt/Sand
This is a great activity to start with because it does not involve anything hot.  Just lots of stirring and mashing!  We use instant pudding, chocolate cookies (usually Oreos or a knock off of Oreos), milk, and gummy worms.  If you have never made dirt before, check out this post for directions and how we did this in a K-2 room.  I have also made dirt with my preschoolers, you can see some of that by clicking here!

During ESY, we like to make sand instead of dirt.  This is an easy spin on the dirt activity using vanilla pudding, vanilla wafers cookies, and a beach umbrella.  You could also add gummy fish aka Sweedish fish.

Making Lemonade
Another simple starter activity is making lemonade.  With this activity, we work on measurement, pouring, and stirring.  If you would like to see more pictures of this activity in action check out this post. 

Kabobs
Making kabobs is a great way to also work on patterns and counting.   I like to use fruit for this activity because it is generally easier to put on sticks and kids usually like it.  I often use bananas and strawberries.  The kids need to peel the banana and cut it up.  I also have them take the stem/leaves off of the strawberries.  Depending on the group we will also cut up the strawberries.  Next, the kids count out how many of each fruit they need and make a pattern on their stick.  To see more of this activity, click here.

I have other posts about cooking that you can find by clicking on the cooking tag on the left  Be sure to follow me on Instagram and Facebook also as I often post pictures, but may not do a blog post!

Baking Unit

The past few weeks we have been knee deep in our baking/cooking unit.  We did A LOT of cooking and cute activities.  I only have pictures of some of the activities now, so I thought I would break this up into two posts. 

One day we made dirt.  I love making dirt with kids. (You can find another blog post on dirt here.)  I lead this activity so of course we made a huge mess.  The kids all took turns either opening the pudding packs, pouring the mix in the bowl, or adding the milk to the bowl.  We then all took turn stirring and while waiting their turns the kids sang a song (This is way we stir the pudding, stir the pudding, stir the pudding.  This is the way we stir the pudding, when we make dirt).

 After that we added the whip cream.  Again, each student took a turn adding a scoop.  Next we crushed up the Oreos.  Each student had their own small bag of Oreos in a Ziploc.  They then used a block to crush up the Oreos.  While they were crushing, I was pudding the pudding into cups.  The kids then added their crushed Oreos to the top and  then some gummy worms.  The final verdict was “ MMM, dirt is good.” (The pictures of the cutie where the face is not covered happens to be my own little boy, B.  He will be 5 tomorrow!!  I am lucky mom to be able to teach him on the days that we join the two preschool classes together. )




We also made Pancakes.  We read the book If You Give A Pig  Pancake.  Then for snack we made pancakes.  We also had strawberries and m&ms to make some special pancakes.  You will notice in these pictures that we remembered to have them put on the adorable aprons that one of our paraprofessionals made.  We made these in much the same way, giving each student a chance to do some part of the recipe. These were another hit!!




 

Dr. Seuss week

Are you celebrating the life of Theodore Geisel this week? We love Dr. Seuss books in our house and at school.  I have already read some books this year and wanted to show you an activity I made to accompany the book 10 Apples up On top.

Last year, I had the kids put an apple on their head and then I took a picture.  They then typed the sentence “I have one apple up on top.”.  This was great for the group I had last year, but with this years crew I knew I needed to do something different.









My preschoolers are working hard on counting, one to one correspondence, and number identification. So I made them a book to count the apples on their heads.  I took a picture of each one of them, cut out the background (that tutorial is coming up soon!), then placed apples on their heads.  It is perfect and the kids love it!!  For the apples I took a picture of an apple we had in our classroom (Ok, really about 15 pictures. I had to have the perfect one) and cut out the background.  Then I just pasted the number I wanted on their heads.  I had pictures to share, but my flash drive is not working.  Hopefully I can update in a little bit with pictures. Yay!! My husband fixed my flash drive!!!

I was trying to figure out how to share this adorable activity with everyone, so I made a version of the book  How many apples up on top? with animals.  You can find it in my TPT store.   If you would like a book with your students in it, send me an email.  I am thinking about offering a custom book in my TPT store, but want to gauge interest.  The price would be $5 or less (up to 25 pictures).


Last year I also made the green eggs with my kids using the vanilla wafer and pudding.  You can find all about that by going to this post.  Anther yummy activity we did was with bananas and strawberries.  We were able to practice fine motor skills, patterning, and communication with that one.  You can find a post all about it here.

We are doing a lot more this week and I will post about those activities later.

Pear man! A Gluten and Casein free "cooking" activity!

As we were finishing up our 5 senses unit, I did this activity to review and also to try some new foods!  We used a half pear for the face.  Next we use mini chocolate chips (gluten & casein free) to add eyes.  To add a nose each student cut a cherry tomato in half (With help of course!).  I found out one of my students really likes tomatoes! 



For the hair we used Chex (because they are gluten free).  The students each had a little baggie and they had to use their hands to crush up the chex.





Then they spread the check on top to add the hair.


And that is it!  Best part, all of my students were able to eat it!

ESY happenings

I am teaching ESY this year for 2 weeks while one of my best friends gets married, then she will take over for the remaining two weeks.   It is great because I get to work with and see in action other teachers who do the same thing as I do, but just at different age levels.  One of our speech pathologists has joined us also.  She uses a lot of switches to help our students communicate.  One problem I have always had was having a male voice on the switch for our male students.  Meghan showed me how to use the male voice from Proloque  for the switch.  How easy is that!



I thought I would share some pictures of the activities that we are doing.


Here Meghan drew circles on teh board and put questions inside.  The kids had to throw a plush baseball(we are doing a baseball theme) at the board and answer the question it hit.  This was a great activities to work on gross motor (throwing) and speech (answering a question).  The kids seemed really like it.  Also if you look really close you can see how Julie adapted our behavior clip chart to fit the theme.  (I will try to get close ups of that this week.)

                     


Another activity we did was making corn dogs using corn muffin mix and cut up hot dogs.  The kids made the mix and then cut up the hot dogs to put in the muffin tins.  Meghan wrote up the recipe for them to follow.
 


Here are the kids mixing and cutting.  Lots of great skills being worked on here!




Are you teaching ESY this summer?  I would love the hear about the activities you are doing.

Dirt!

Our most recent cooking activity was making Dirt! We were just finishing up our Bug unit and the kids thought this was great. I told them that I got the worms out of the garden and one goes "No! She got them from Farm Fresh!" Of course this is also the same little one who when asked what we call the person who cooks food (hoping to get the answer chef), he said "Mom!".




We used:

• instant chocolate pudding
• milk
• Oreos
• gummy worms

First we made the pudding. I have the kids do as much as possible so they all opened up the packaging and if they could not get it, then they needed to ask a friend.  The kids each opened a carton of milk, poured it into the measuring cup, and poured it into the bowl.   Our OT brought in a hand mixer that the kids had to crank.  This was the first time they used it and they did fantastic with it.  I think I may have to hunt for my own this summer.  

While the pudding was in the fridge cooling we crushed the Oreos.   We did this by putting 20 Oreos (we counted out loud) into a plastic freezer bag.  We then used a rubber mallet and each took 5 whacks at the bag.  It was quite funny watching each of the kids "swings".  One even took the mallet over his head.

After we got the Oreos all crushed, we pulled out the pudding.  We put a scoop of pudding in each cup, some crushed Oreos and topped it off with 2 worms.  This was a huge hit!  The kids loved delivering their creation to various members of the school staff and telling them it was dirt. 

 

Making Lemonade

 Sometimes the simplest activities can be the most fun!  This past week for our cooking activity (life skills, measurement  reading) we made lemonade and then delivered it around the building (social skills & communication) and the kids loved it! It was so easy, but we got so much out of it.

We started with gathering the items we would need.

Next the kids tried to open the container of lemonade mix.  This was difficult and I had them ask each other for help before they could ask me. 

We read the directions and decided how much mix we would need.  Then each person took turns pouring the mix into the pitcher. 

Next we read to find out how much water we needed.  We then took turns filling up the measuring cup and pouring the water in. 

Then it was time to mix.

Finally, we were ready to drink up!!

Easter Activities

Yes, I know Easter was 2 weeks ago, but things have been a bit hectic around here (more about that in another post) and I want to share 2 of the activities that we did in my classroom prior to Spring Break.

Can you find the eggs?

The first was an egg hunt.  Now, I had to make it educational, so I put sight words in the eggs to practice reading the words.  Some of my students counted the eggs  or identified the color eggs they found.  There is a lot of room for differentiation in an egg hunt.  The way I made this work was the kids and I read a story about an egg hunt.  Then the fantastic paras who work in my room took them on a walk to find Spring things in the hallway.  While they were gone, I hid the eggs all around the room.  When they came back I gave them each a basket (I forgot to bring baskets, so I quickly ran around the room dumping stuff out of baskets to give them) and set them loose.  I told them that they could only find 15 eggs as a way to try and help my not so quick students to also have an opportunity to find eggs.  The kids really had a blast with this!

 
The next day (which was a half day) we did our weekly cooking project.(I love all of the life skills and fine motor cooking involves!)  I really wanted to use up some of the stuff we had left over from previous cooking projects so we made Trail Mix.  I did pick up some of the ingredients at the store, but the rest was just a mish-mosh of cereals.  We used the white dipping chocolate that was left over from making our supposed to be snow-man pops to make chocolate covered pretzels.  To do this we melted the chocolate in the microwave (the kids each took a turn pressing the buttons) and then stirred in the pretzels   Next we spread the pretzels on a cookie sheet and stuck them in the fridge to harden while we worked on the rest.  






For the trail mix part I gave each student their own plastic bag and let them dump in the various ingredients (Of course they had to help me open the marshmallows and m&ms because I am way to weak to do that on my own, just have to watch out for the student who tried to open the bag with his teeth!)  After we put all of the various ingredients in, we added the pretzels    I made my bag extra big so that we had some ton share with our friends around the building.  We shook the bags to mix everything up.  It was a hit with the kids and adults!!

 Also don't forget today is the last day to enter the Autism Awareness giveaway!!! Click here to hop on over to Teaching Through Turbulence.