In the Kitchen for Preschoolers - Part 2

Having a kitchen themed week usually involves a lot of culinary arts (aka cooking) but I tried to respect our usual array of activities too (fine motor, literacy, math, science, etc). I am presenting below some of those instead of the recipes we worked on during the week. After all, I'm sure you've got plenty of your own. ;)

Thirsty Celery - Thirsty body - All about Capillaries

A very basic "kitchen" themed science experiment involving a celery branch, water and food coloring. We observed our freshly cut celery branch over one week. Adrian loved that even the leaves turned blue, not just the capillaries! :) Prior to inserting the celery in water, I had shown the capillaries to Adrian and told him the celery would drink water through them just like his body needs water and has a similar way to transport it through his body. The point was proven at the end of the week when the capillaries were blue and the water level had significantly lowered. He was impressed and drinks plenty of water! :)

Salad Spinner Art

I hesitated before bringing out this activity. I may not use it a lot but I actually like my salad spinner and thought it might never look the same after making some art. But then again, since I use washable paints and never had trouble removing leftovers, I decided to give it a shot. I let Adrian choose the paint colors (he chose them all of course!) and we squirted a bit of them all in the middle one at a time and he simply pushed down the spinning button. He had to push it down quickly to make it spin and get the paint flying (maybe I should have thinned the paint a bit?...Something to keep in mind...for next time! :))

Sugar Tray Writing

Adrian loves practicing writing letters next to me in a tray. Being under the theme "kitchen", I made of tray of sugar this week. It's only the third time we practice tracing in such a material but Adrian is already quite good. I may just try to have him trace on paper soon...

Tweezing Corn

We are tweezing itsy bitsy things now in our household. Look at the size of this corn! And it's a tad bit slippery too. I put a dozen only in the bowl thinking it may pose a challenge to Adrian but it did not. I think he just found it a bit boring if anything. I'll need to make things more interesting for the tweezing trays now I guess.

Mystery Bag of Fruits & Discussion

Now this is not JUST your average mystery bag. Yes I had Adrian pick a fruit without looking and describe it and try to guess what it was prior to getting it out of the bag but we also had a chat after we were done. By the way, Adrian knows all these fruits and was informed that only fruits were in the bag before we started the exercise. 

Our bag contained:

-a mango

-an apple

-a banana

-a kiwi

-a clementine

-a grape

-a blueberry

Once all the food was out of the bag, we talked about the size (which is the biggest, smallest fruit), the surface (the clementine was bumpy, the grape was smooth, the kiwi was fuzzy, etc), the stone fruits versus seed fruits, we smelled each one and checked to see which could roll well on the table and which couldn't and tried to explain why, etc.