Ocean Sensory Bin

This week, we finally made the ocean sensory bin with jello that I have been planning forever! There were a few fails on my part though that made it not turn out as planned, but we still had fun anyway and that's all that counts.

First of all, I had to use 8 boxes of jello and it still only turned out to be this much. I waited too long to add the sea animals and therefore it messed up the smoothness of the top (to give it the appearance of water).

Here is one of our sharks. Also, I tried putting these flat plastic glow-in-the-dark fish in, but not realizing that it would be very difficult to get enough light to them to make them glow once the jello set. But it's ok because we decided to take this messy project outside anyway.

He was a little tentative to put his hands in at first.

Then I showed him that he could eat it.

That really got him going and that's pretty much all he wanted to do after that.

We had a fun, messy time.

I finally got him to dig out some of the fish and he started making a pile of them on the bench, so I got him a bowl to collect them in.

Here's little man all jello-ed up!

Here is the aftermath!

Afterwards, we used the jello boxes to build with!

Enjoy and happy jello-ing :)

Storytime Sunday: Pets 2

The first book we "read" this week is a classic from The Berenstain Bears. I say "read" in quotation marks because this book has a LOT of words, so we pretty much turned the pages and told the story instead of reading all the words.

Next, we read The Wildlife ABC.

I love this book for all the great illustrations as well as the rhyming and the fact that each page says something about a different animal without using too many words, so it's great for younger children.

But if the children request to learn more about one of the animals, there is a little bit about each one in the back "Nature Notes" section.

And lastly, we "read" A Ball for Daisy which has no words, so basically we did the same type of telling the story in our own words.

We did a felt board story as well about the day in the life of a dog vs. a day in the life of a squirrel. It compares wild animal and tame animal daily routines so that children will get an idea of how each meets it's needs. Here is the felt board pieces and the stories below it.

This is a page from the book Growing up Wild: Exploring Nature with Young Children by the Council for Environmental Education

We sponge painted sea animals on blue paper that represented water. Children were encouraged to draw in the surroundings that might be found in their animal's environment and describe their drawings.

Happy Reading!