Airplane Sensory Bin - Water

Last week I posted about our Airplane Sensory bin with blue salt.

This week I cleared out the salt and added blue water.

Sponges replaced the cotton for clouds.

Water play is an attractive activity for many children, especially toddlers.

The sponges were a new sensory experience for some.

They practiced squeezing them under the water and above the water.

They used them to wash the planes.

We pretended the sponges were clouds and wondered:

What happens when clouds fill with moisture?

They make rain!

Changing to water was a fun way to extend our airplane project.

Skittle Rainbow Experiment

Browsing around Pinterest I started to notice several posts from blogs using 

Skittles for colour experiments.

Most of the experiments were focused on water density,

I just wanted to focus on the candies dissolving to dye the water and focus on this question:
Is there enough dye in Skittles to colour celery leaves?

 We started by giving each child a handful of skittles to sort, with 

the warning that they were not to be eaten.

Only one child (under two) popped one in her mouth.

They sorted the colours and counted each.

We passed jars around to collect each of the colours.

We poured water into each jar.  I started with the green. 

The children did the rest of the jars.  We used spoons to give them a good stir while watching what was happening.

Surprise!  The skittles were soon white while the water was green.

 Next we introduced the celery and talked about what would happen if...

 we put the celery in the coloured Skittle water?

 Then we waited.

By the end of the morning only one colour was starting to show

in the celery - purple.

Two days later and the celery had wilted without much colour seeping into the leaves.

But what we noticed the most was the thick layer on top of each colour.

It looked like congealed fat.

Not appetizing.

Propeller Play

We've been busy playing with our aircraft and exploring propellers.

I found these little propeller toys that extends our 

interest in propellers and an understanding of how they work.

 It took trial and error to figure out how to work it.

The boy above is watching his mom use a propeller.

She sent it flying high in the room.

Rolling it between his hands went easily,

but when he tried to make it take off the propeller would either drop to 

the ground or fly back towards his body.

 

Other children tried it, some with a bit of success.

What I noticed is that, for most, it didn't matter if it took off.

They had fun trying.

ABC Matching

                                 This fun idea I found at Kindertips

Airplane Sensory Bin

I found this idea on Facebook and unfortunately didn't save the source.

On the bottom of the bin I taped laminated pictures of our airport

 and our community.

Those were covered with blue coloured salt, white cotton stuffing and plastic planes.

I would recommend offering this sensory bin because the children loved it.

They loved playing with the salt, rubbing it between their hands.

They loved the cotton, covering it with sand then shaking it.

 They loved uncovering the pictures

and covering them up again.

And they loved taking a plane on a flight and landing it.

 There are mountains and a glacier where we live so I made some to add.

After the first morning this is how I found the bin.

Another morning I saw a child using the mountains as containers

for filling and pouring.

Happy flying.