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| Listening to a story |
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| Eating cookies and doing project. |
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| The baggie represents the stomach filled with pretzels and cereal. |
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| Adding orange juice to represent the digestive juices. |
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| Holding the "stomach" contents up to the light to see how the digestive juices help break food down. |
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| A model of the digestive system |
On Friday we had library (little) co-op, which Tania and I hosted.This was our first little co op of the new school year as we had taken a break over the summer. We changed this up a bit and now will be doing monthly science themes. It was decided for the month of September to do an oceans/marine animals theme. It runs for 2 hours and we break it up into two 45 minute sessions with 30 minutes used for playtime, set up and clean up.
For my 45 minutes I decided to do a few different "experiments" and activities with the kids.
*I forgot to take pictures during the first hour of this co op.*
First we did an activity on sink or float. I brought in a bucket filled with water and picked 10 little items from around my house such as a pen, crayon, medicine cup, eraser. ect . I set each kid up with a chart numbered 1-10 and they each could pick up an item, show it around, and as group, guess whether the item would sink or float. I also brought my kitchen scale so that they could weigh each item and make an educated guess. The kids were really into it and make some pretty good guesses.
Next we did the age old float an egg experiment. I filled 2 pitchers of water about half way. I had the kids add sea salt to one of the pitchers. We ended up with a pitcher of salt water and one of fresh water. Then I had the kids guess in which one of the pitchers an egg would float.
Finally, we did an ocean in a bottle. The kids each took turns adding blue water, baby oil, sand, and shells to empty water bottles. Once closed they could mix and slosh the water inside the bottles and the separation of the sand, water, and oil is suppose to emulate the ocean. *We got real sand from the beach and it may not have been such a good idea because the dirt in the sand made the water and oil pretty dirty so the end result wasn’t pretty to look at. So next time, we’ll just do it without the sand. But the kids thought they were cool, so that’s all that counts.
This is what that was suppose to look like:
The ones we did were not so pretty.
When Tania took over, the kids made their own aquariums:
This project carried us to end of co op. While the kids where working on their aquariums, Tania was using her superior sewing skills to make the kids sock octupi. Here is Hayzel’s:
Hayzel LOVES him, and I had to pry it out of his hands while he was sleeping so I could take this picture. Thanks Tania!
The kids seemed to genuinely enjoy all the activities we did, and I'm so relieved. Its a little daunting to host a co op for the 6 and under crowd because you never know if they'll be interested or not.
Now I don't have to worry about anything for the next month as far as little co op is concerned. For big co op, its my turn to host next, so yikes! Another worry.
