Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Spaghetti and Sensory Bottle Fun

This past week we've been having some fun exploring our senses.  I started off by making a big pot of spaghetti noodles, adding lots of vegetable oil so the noodles didn't stick to each other and then... plastic bugs and snakes!  The boys and I went outside and dove in exploring and talking about what we felt and found.  They thought it was great fun pulling the snakes and bugs out as well as throwing the noodles in the air, on the ground and on each other.  They never tried eating any of it, but towards the end, they thought feeding it to the dogs was hilarious.  





For months now, I've wanted to make the boys some sensory bottles.  I've never gotten past my fear of them getting the lids off and choking until recently when I decided to use larger lid bottles and lots of super glue.  My bottles are not fancy, but the boys have loved playing with them.  

The first one in the picture is our 'beach' bottle; there is sand, sea shells, rocks and plastic bugs and snakes (although I hope I don't see any snakes on the beach this year!).  As the boys roll the bottle around, new things emerge for them to view.  Personally I think I added just a little too much sand, but it still works great.

The second bottle I made was our 'water' bottle.  In it I wanted to show things that both float and sink; beads are floating at the top and plastic sharks and starfish are at the bottom.  I mixed water and corn syrup, food coloring and glitter which allows the glitter to float around more that just pure water and/oil.  I added too much glitter, but it works well and will help the boys see how things 'settle' (if a 13 month old can comprehend that... which I don't put anything past them!). 

Tonight I made a 'magnetic' bottle.  This one is my favorite!  I filled it with salt and then different metal objects such as colored paper clips, bells, and pins that say, hope, love, faith, cherish, etc.  It's fun to see all the metal items 'sticking' to the magnetic and each other.   


So, I also made a 'so close' bottle tonight.  I call it my 'so close' bottle because it didn't turn our like I wanted.  My goal was to show how something can 'float in the middle' of the bottle by using water and baby oil which have different densities.  The problem was I didn't have enough baby oil.  I did my little layer of baby oil and it worked perfect!  So, I thought I'd try vegetable oil.  It worked great and I actually ended up with three layers of different densities and thus different things floating on different levels.  Well, then I shook up the bottle.  Let's just say it's still settling!  Yeah, this bottle won't work well for two 13 month olds who love to shake things.  Looks like I'll have to retry with purely water and baby oil next time to see if that works better.  For now, we'll just stick with our three bottles.  I have several more ideas for these bottles that I'll make for the boys over the next couple of weeks.

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