Montessori Plant Magic

MONTESSORI EXPERIMENT
that can be done at home

COLOUR CHANGING FLOWERS 

This experiment is great for teaching children about plants and flowers, as the theme for this month is All About Plants, I though this experiment would be interesting and fun !

I have been doing this experiment for years as a montessori teacher and the children have always loved, so lets try it at home.

Read on to see how you can turn white flowers into rainbow flowers! -

Color Changing Flowers

Materials

• White flowers 
• Food colouring
• Cups or glasses
• Scissors

Method

• You will want to begin with six white flowers, daisies  roses or carnations. 
• Start by trimming the flowers so that they will fit nicely into whatever cups or glasses you are using. 
• Giving the flowers a fresh cut also helps them to absorb the colored water more quickly.  
• Fill your cups with the desired amount of water, and then have kids add several drops of food coloring and a flower to each cup.

• Have kids make observations and hypothesize what will happen to the flowers as they live in the coloured water. 
•  Then, place the flowers in a sunny window.

• It is now time to observe!-

Making Rainbow Flowers

• Have kids observe the flowers over the next few days, recording any changes.  
• In just a few hours you will start to notice a slight change!

• And after a handful of days you may not be able to believe your eyes!

• As the flowers drink in the coloured water they transform into a beautiful rainbow right before your eyes

Flower Experiment Results-

This is what our flowers looked like after 10 days in the water. 

 

So colorful and fun!

 

What Did We Learn By Doing This Experiment Again?

• This experiment takes more time with certain flowers.
• The first time we tried this we used white roses, and those changed colour overnight. I was surprised to discover that the daisies took much longer.
• While the daisies started to change after a few days they were not fully saturated until 14 days after we began the experiment.

 

 

I look forward to revisiting this bit of science with different flowers.  I wonder how the results might change?

 

Extend the Fun

• Try this experiment with other plants and flowers.  
• Will this work with celery?  What about lettuce?

--

Try cutting the stem of a single flower in half and placing the two pieces into different colors of water.  What happens?  

The Science Behind the Fun

• Why do the flowers change colour?
• How does the water travel through the flower?
• How is the water absorbed?

Get the answers to those questions & read more on flower absorption science:

• Flower Science: How Does it Work?
• How Do Flowers Absorb Water?
• Understanding Capillary Action
• How Plants Grow: Lesson for Kids
• How a Flower Absorbs Water

 

 

 

 

Tara GP Pre-school does Playdoh

 

GP Pre-School Homemade Fun activities 🏡

  

Good morning Parents/Guardians, Boys & Girls 👪

I hope you had fun trying out some of our activities last week I have been looking out for ideas that you guys can do at home using items from home. And I have found some really cool ones that you will love.♥️

There’s no real theme this week just a selection of activities that are fun and will interest and engage the children, I’ve picked activities that can be done using the same materials as last week, food colouring being a big part of our materials.

Food colouring is so resourceful and has many uses. Last year we could not get red paint anywhere for our Christmas art activities, so we bought white paint and added red food colouring for red paint, it worked so well.

If you don’t have paints at home but have a variety of food colouring bottles, just buy one bottle of white paint and you can decided what colour you want it to be. Its also excellent for the children to mix it and see the paint change every time they add more.

 My daughter went through a phase of making slime so we had lots of food colouring bottles at home so we used them up making different coloured paint, white paint can be picked up in dealz for €1.50 and turned into many colours.🎨

Children are born explorers that fully engage with there surroundings using there senses, sight👁, sound👂 ,touch 🖐,smell 👃and taste 👅the environment is so stimulating to a young child experiencing many things for the first time everyday.

Its important that we keep young children active both physically and mentally by engaging them in activities that allow them to explore their creativity and imagination Creative activities help to spark 💥 a child’s natural curiosity.

By doing new things with children it helps to develop a sense of wonder and helps them to understand the world around them and how things work. Creative activities help a child to think, make connections and work things out for themselves.

By engaging with adults and family 👨‍👩‍👧‍👧 members while doing these activities it helps children to develop their listening skills, express their feelings, describe their activities and actions, helping to develop their language and communication skills .

This week I found some cool activities using things from around the home 🏡 

1.    

I'   I've included a colour chart in-case you want to try making your own coloured paints, its a great activity for the children to be able to experiment with colours. By doing this activity the children will gain great knowledge around cause and effect how their actions change the colour. Its also a great science activity and great fun too making some new colours, they get to control the depth of the colours by adding more food colouring. 🥣

                                                            Bird 🐦 feeder

     Spring is almost here and nature is starting to come alive again the trees and plants will be waking up and new leaf buds will be coming on the trees, the birds will start building nests and laying eggs 🥚. So I thought we could make them a bird feeder ,because its hard work building a nest and they get hungry.

    

These bird feeders 🦜are made from milk cartons . If you don’t have paints you can cover them in tin foil and colour with markers , twigs can be used as the perch. It will be nice for the children to watch the birds coming to feed in their garden, see how many different types of birds come.

                                                      

  Clothes peg wreath 

I  I seen this activity and thought is looked like a nice easy activity that the children would enjoy ,you can colour the pegs with markers, paint, or dye the pegs with food colouring which looks really cool. 

       Just leave the pegs soaking in warm coloured water for an hour , and you'll have a rainbow 🌈 of pegs to use for your wreath.

     

  

     Cut a circle from a cereal box, the children can colour it if they want to and then arrange the pegs around the circle. They can ad stickers, cut pictures from magazines, pick flowers and leaves to make a spring wreath. 

You could also make a valentines day wreath with red pegs and coloured and cut out hearts 💕 they can have great fun deciding what they want to use. 

 Pegs are great fun to play with you can build and attach many items together with pegs

     

    

 Pegs are great for children's fine motor skills and concentration they use a lot of energy and muscles squeezing the pegs ,hand eye coordination is also used while  directing the pegs where they want them to go. 

Give them pegs and colouring pencils and they will have a great time building

                                                    Home made projector 

    

How simple is this, its just a kitchen roll a torch 🔦  cling film and some markers   the children get to experiment with light they will see how the projection gets bigger the further away they are ,and how small it gets when they are close to the wall.

                                                     💀Treasure Chest💀

      

     

 Children are born explorers and foragers they love to pick up little things they find, uits like their treasure.

 Children will love this and it can be used anywhere a trip to the beach or park or even in the back garden it will keep them busy finding different items to put in each section and best of all its only an egg carton.

     

                                                         Name Tracing

    

 

    Write you child’s name on a piece of paper and put into a sandwich bag ,the children can use a marker to trace their name you can practice shapes too.

    I hope you try some of these activities they are simple using household items .if you do id love to see some photos, we miss you boys and girls so much ❤. 

3.     

 

3.     

 

BW Pre-School Activities

Hello Everyone! This week we will be doing Healthy snacks to make at home!!! 😋

Here I will add 3 simple and creative ideas to make some tasty and healthy food choices to help create some DIY snacks

Firstly hope all the boys and girls had fun with shapes and colours and found some interesting shapes in your nature scavenger hunt? We are looking forward to hearing how the skittles experiment went when we come back to preschool!

Let’s do some more fun learning at home this week, in preschool we love to learn about food and taste different fruits and vegetables and how they are super healthy, and I’m sure you all love to help at home with making lunch or dinner and maybe even making breakfast?

This week it would be great to make some fun food at home and if you can practice some counting and weighing that would be super! 

Why not try and make a really cool Grape Hedgehog?

You will need

A Pear, grapes and a blueberry , and some toothpicks (supervised activity)

Place the toothpicks into the pear and see how many you can count and fit in the pear, then place all the grapes on the toothpicks, and now you have a grape hedgehog!

 

 

 

 

Banana sushi is also another easy and healthy snack to explore and make at home, you can make with Wraps, Banana, and a little Nutella or Peanut butter if suitable.

 Once you have made it count how many sushi pieces you can cut, make sure a grown up is supervising this activity too Talk about the smell, texture and what it tastes like, I’m think this one looks delicious!

Here is a link to the recipe below 👇

https://pin.it/5gUFhPZ

You could also makes some refreshing mini fruit kebabs, you can use any fruit you want and place them on a skewer to create a nice healthy fruit snack. Talk about the names of the fruit and where the fruit comes from, the texture, weight heavy or light? Chop fruit with an adult and count the pieces as you place them on the skewers 👍 Enjoy your healthy snack 😋 and most of all have some fun and remember Play is the highest form of research 👌

https://supervalu.ie/real-food/recipes/kids-fruit-and-marshmallow-kebabs?ref=meal_planner

 

Activity themed story : Oliver's Fruit Salad

A good story to go with this weeks activity is all bout a little boy called Oliver who is really good at helping his Granddad in the garden where Granddad grows his very own fruit. He explores different fruits and even goes shopping with mom to buy some fruit, it’s a lovely story that goes really well with this weeks topics, I’ve attached a you tube video of this lovely little story below 👇

https://youtu.be/jcTprkImlmI

 

I hope you enjoy this weeks activities and enjoy making some tasty snacks and reading all about Oliver's Fruit Salad!

Natasha and The Team