Our Senses: Part 2 - Sight

Maddie and I are learning about our senses this month. This little experiment is a bit of a scavenger hunt and applies to our sense of sight. (Plus it lets us play with technology!)

For set-up, I took close up photos of 12 things throughout our living/dining room.



Here are four images (clockwise from top left: our couch, a wicker chair, a photo bulletin board, our parquet floors.)

Next I gave Maddie my phone so she could try to match the photos up with the item.



You better believe that my sarcophagus cd case made it in this project!


A pillow made with ribbons from our wedding.



Maddie's book basket.

(If you're not a fan of kids using phones/cameras, you could also print photos.)

Maddie loved this game. She only had trouble with one or two pictures. And at the end, she told the cat, "I am so proud of me."

The nice thing about this was that our discussion of what we see also involved a discussion about how things look like they feel. Visual texture can be a bit hard to grasp, but this popped right into the discussion.

I'm working on another project on the senses. Check back for more next week!

Pumpkiny Goodness

(Yummy.... Pumpkin Raisin Bread with peanut butter and hot tea!)
Ah yes, fall. And to me, fall means only two things. Pumpkin baked goods and doughnuts. So far, I've pinned 5,000 recipes for pumpkin bread/muffins/cookie bars and 5,000 recipes for doughnuts. And another 5,000 recipes for pumpkin doughnuts.
And hey, pumpkin's a vegetable so anything you bake with it is instantly healthy. Right?
I'm sharing my recipe for pumpkin bread for you here. It's amazingly good and easy too. I usually make one loaf for insta-eating and two dozen muffins that I freeze (so I can grab one on my way to work).
Alex's Pumpkin Raisin Bread:
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease your bread (or muffin) pans. Mix all dry ingredients first and then add wet ingredients:
3 cups white sugar
2 teaspoons cinnamon
3 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
4 eggs
28 ounces (2 small cans) of solid pack pumpkin
3/4 cup applesauce
2 cups raisins (stir in at end)
Fill loaf pans 2/3 of the way full and muffin tins 3/4 full. Bread should bake for 1 hour and muffins about 30-35 minutes.
I love this bread with a little bit of peanut butter or cream cheese.
***Note to self, do not ask husband to turn off oven when timer goes off when he is in the middle of waiting for Drew Brees to break a record.
***Note to readers, this bread even tastes pretty good when it's overcooked! Still moist!
***Note to Natalie, sorry I said "moist", but it fit.

Making Spiders

The other day my mom surprised me with this little kit:


I think she got it from Jo-Ann's. it's a spider kit, that makes three pompom/felt/pipe cleaner spiders.

Maddie had a blast helping me with this but we made our pipe cleaner legs too long and thus a) our spiders only have six legs and b) we had to get a little funky:



This is the Daddy spider, because apparently daddies have crazy striped arms.

These pipe cleaners were part of an awesome craft supply bag I got at Target for about $2.



It had regular pipe cleaners and pompous galore, plus sparkly poms and pipe cleaners AND googly eyes of all sizes.

So once we made our three spiders from the kit (quickly dubbed "Maddie, Mommy and Daddy"), we had to keep going and make spiders to represent the cats.




They were very involved in the process (yes, that is a 30 pound cat. He's on a diet. Don't judge.)

And then we just had to keep going so we made some monstery stick puppets.



I'm loving how Maddie chooses to model things lately.



Our monsters and spiders are currently at home on top of my television which is helping make the actual cobweb on my wall look planned. Thank you craft day!

Of course once we got crafting and hot gluing we just had to make a fairy wand.



This actually looks like a hazards to avoid poster. How many dangers can you spot?

Fall Nature Walk

Long ago, when I first started thinking about science for my science kid, I talked with my friend Melisa. She had told me, "science for kids is easy. Just take them for a walk!" (I use the quotes loosely because as I said this was a long time ago.

Well, Melisa, you're right. Certainly the best way to get kids interested by science at this time of year is by looking at our ever changing world. So today Maddie and I braved the elements (50 degrees, rough --I know!) and took a nature walk.

We focused on three things: nuts/seed pods, leaves, and falling asleep in the stroller after a really long walk.




Along the way we also found this. One of our neighbors just cut down a tree. And there was a seed pod stuck in it! Score!

We collected some cool looking leaves. I'm not gonna lie -- I found the cool leaves. Mads is a big fan of dead leaves. This is a bouquet she gathered on a recent trip to Niagara-On-The-Lake:



Cute, but dead.

After our collecting was done we got to do some playing with the app Leafsnap. It's supercool! Just snap a photo of a leaf on a piece of white paper and upload.




Leafsnap will tell you what kind of tree it is. Again, I'm not going to lie. This science project was more for me than my daughter.


Here's a sampling of what we found. Here's what Maddie did while I leafsnapped:



Maddie did get involved at looking at nuts and seeds.


She helped sort acorns, chestnuts and seed pods. Then she took them someplace, saying she had taken all the money. Maybe she'll go into business. I hope she chooses that over shopaholic-ing.