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Discovering Acids and Bases with Mad Science
INVENTING CREATIONS USING OBSERVATION AND EXPERIMENTATION
EXPLORING THE SCIENCE THAT IS ALL AROUND US
USING YOUR SENSES TO EXPLORE SCIENCE
Popcorn Snowmen
As the weather continues to get colder and the snow begins to fall, often times we find ourselves frantically looking for new ideas for indoor fun. This recipe/craft is tons of fun and a perfect indoor activity that kids can munch on once they’re done! Have Fun! Send us pictures we can post on the blog!
Put the popcorn in your largest mixing bowl and set aside. Melt the butter or margarine in a nonstick saucepan over medium-low heat. Add all the marshmallows to the pan, stirring continually with a wooden spoon until they’re completely melted. Pour the mixture over the popcorn and stir to coat evenly. As soon as the marshmallow is cool enough to touch, rub a little butter or margarine in your hands and make popcorn balls (about 1 cup of popcorn per ball).
Build and decorate your snowmen on sheets of waxed paper. For each one, stack three popcorn balls atop each other. Push pretzel-stick arms into the sides of the middle popcorn ball. Add raisins for eyes and a candy corn for a nose. Arrange a row of mini jawbreakers into a broad grin. For buttons on the snowman’s chest, use gumdrops or red hots.
If your popcorn balls aren’t sticky enough to hold the decorations, mix up a small batch of stiff white icing by adding water, a few drops at a time, to 1/4 cup confectioners’ sugar and stirring until smooth. Use this to glue the candy in place. For snowmen’s scarves, cut rectangles out of fruit leather and fringe the ends. Makes 5 snowmen.
Ingredients
What you do:
Mix the dry ingredients. Add spices a small amount at a time until the dough smells and looks like you want it too. Mix water and oil together first and then add them to the dry ingredients and stir. In a pot, cook the mixture for two to three minutes, stirring frequently. The dough will start to pull away from the sides of the pot and stick together. When this happens, take the playdough out of the pan and knead the dough until it becomes soft and smooth. Allow the dough to cool and then store it in an airtight container.
After reading the stories about all the different gingerbread friends throughout the month of December, it was time to try our hand at making our own. We measured and mixed the ingredients, stirred and stirred, rolled the dough then cut them out. We knew that the recipe said to cook them for a whole eight minutes, no more no less and NO PEEKING. We put them in the oven, but when we looked to see if they were done…our gingerbread friends were GONE! Our tray was empty. We quickly put our coats on and began searching outside incase they had slipped out while we weren’t looking. They were nowhere to be found! After searching high and low, we finally found them hiding in our classroom. Thank goodness the fox didn’t find them before we did!
This month we are living in Gingerbread Land! This afternoon the children helped to make our very own gingerbread play dough. We gathered around the table and took turns measuring and mixing all of the special ingredients together. After all of the ingredients were poured into our bowl, each child had a turn to knead the dough together with their hands! It was a messy but fun experience! 
sensory table colored pasta
This week our sensory table is full of colorful noodles! The kids have been digging their hands in this colorful pasta and scooping and dumping it! They have been using spoons to scoop the noodles into the bowls and pretend they are making soup! Since all of the noodles are different colors this has been a great way to practice our color recognition as well!
N is for necklace
This afternoon at group time we learned the letter “N”. For our art project today we made necklaces for the letter “N”. Here you can see Rutva, Caroline and Connor working so hard at stringing the beads onto their necklaces. They did a wonderful job working with those fine motor skills to make beautiful necklaces!
As a farewell to Fall and the month of October, the PreK class explored the interesting parts of some of our classroom’s pumpkins. We opened up some of our Science Center’s ghords and pumpkins and learned about each one of their different parts. From the gooey pulp inside and the curving ribbed lines outside, we really enjoyed taking a closer look at the pumpkins. Once we were finished exploring the kids were given lables and their own picture of a pumpkin. Together we takled about all of its parts and put each lable next to its corresponding part. We also have our pumpkins and ghords in the sensory table this week, the children can have one last chance to scoop out the seeds and gooey insides!
taking inventory
the anatomy of a pumpkin
sensory bugs
This week the sensory table is full of dirt and creepy crawly bugs! Most of the kids couldn’t wait to get their hands on the snakes and spiders but a few didn’t mind standing back and watching! The kids have been using their imagination and making the bugs crawl up their arms and slither all around!
Our Thurdsay AM and PM classes had a chance to be chef’s as well to make pumpkin pie in a bag! What a fun experience it was for them as you can see!
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