Five Senses Board

For 3rd grade science, we were studying stimulus/response. This lead to a discussion of how each of our senses help us... which lead to a kindergarten lesson on our five senses. I love it when it all just pulls together like that!

The week prior, I pinned  a texture board on Pinterest which facilitated my idea of a Five Senses Board. 

The far left column is TOUCH.

• feathers
• double-sided sticky tape
• both sides of velcro
• glass beads (flat side is hot glued to poster board)
• pom-poms
• foam shapes

The next column is SIGHT.

• Opaque (cut from a milk jug)
• Clear (cut from a blueberry carton)
• Pennies (dull/shiny)
• Foam pieces (plain, glittery, stripes, dots)
• Assorted colored pipe cleaners
• Sparly stars

The third column is SMELL.

• Vanilla bean 
• Cocoa Nibs (lost their smell the first day)  :(
• Cinnamon sticks
• Cloves
• (Added later: scratch 'n' sniff stickers)

The forth column is TASTE.

• Sour: I put sour gummy candies in... which don't last long!
• Bitter: cocoa powder
• Sweet: sugar (this is sucanat here)
• Salty: chunks of sea salt

Fifth column is HEARING:

• click pen
• rubber band "guitar"
• velcro
• (Later added large jingle bells)

The boys absolutely LOVE this board! Adults even enjoy it! :)  Honestly, it's just hard not to interact with this board once you see it.  It's a lot of fun and I'm so glad I had all this random stuff on hand to pull it together! 

Here's Witt showing off the "Sweet" bag... his favorite, of course.

 Here are the boys huddled around checking it out. Nathan (left) has removed the "Salty" bag that is attached with Velcro and Will is scratching the cinnamon.

Will getting a whiff of cinnamon and Witt (left) pointing out that the Sour bag is empty! LOL!

Eat a Mars Rover

This week we're studying Mars and one of the suggested projects is to make an eatable version of the Sojourner rover. Here's a picture of the actual rover:

And here are the boys' re-creations:


Witt, 3 1/2 years old



Will didn't want to take the time to get his picture taken with his; he just wanted to eat it! :)



Nathan, 5 years old


Here's a back view of Nathan's, too:



If you want to try this, just be warned that you need a thick frosting, similar to that used for a gingerbread house to get it to stick together. Other than than, you might need some earplugs for the amount of noise your children will make after eating them. ;)

Great Backyard Bird Count

We have 7 bird feeders (3 like these) out in our front yard with 4 different types of feed. The birdbath is put together and has fresh water. We are PREPARED for this weekend's Great Backyard Bird Count!! Are you participating?

Oh, AND it covers the Wolf Cub Scout Elective #13! :)

Homemade Compass

The homemade compass instructions in our science book includes a piece of cork. Well, cork is not a common household item at our house so that sent me on an internet search and I finally found one with items we had on hand (because I'm not one of those prepare-a-week-in-advance kinda moms).

First, I took Will outside and using the knowledge that the sun rises in the East, we figured out which was is North.

Then we made a hanging compass and compared it to a compass. It worked! YAY! (I like it so much when an experiment actually works!) The hanging needle is pointing in the N/S direction! YAY! :)

(I included the black piece of paper at the bottom of the cup so the needle could be seen easier in the picture.)

Water Clock

As part of our study on Ancient Egypt, we made a water clock. There are several "how to's" on the web, but we decided to use a make-shift version of this one.

Items we used

2 yogurt containers
Clear Duck tape
thumb tack
permanent marker
ruler
water
stopwatch
food coloring (optional)

I taped two large yogurt containers together and then made tic marks at every inch inside the top cup with a black Sharpie marker. I used a thumb tack to punch a single hole in the bottom of the top cup as well.

We found that it was easier to watch the water level with a little food coloring in it as well.



I had Will make an estimate of how long it would take to get from the first mark to the second one (1 inch apart) and then compared it to the actual time. Then I placed a 1/2 inch mark in between and had him estimate how long he thought that would take. We then compared it to the actual time.

Then I punched a second hole in the bottom of the top cup and had him estimate the time between the inch marks based on his previous results. Then we did it again for the 1/2 inch mark with the two holes.

We calculated how long it would take to empty the top bucket with two holes in it, knowing that it is 5 inches deep. Lastly, we calculated how many times we would have to fill our container to reach one hour's worth of time.

This was a fun, easy experiment!