Meteors are most likely pieces of asteroids or comets that travel in outer space.  These rock-like chunks burn up as they enter the earth’s atmosphere.  This fast and easy experiment shows how a meteor burns up as it enters earth’s atmosphere.

 What you need:

Plastic bottle, water, half seltzer tab

Fill bottle with water, drop tablet into water and observe.

More information on meteors:

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/education/skytellers/meteors/activities/trails.shtml

http://starryskies.com/The_sky/events/meteors/meteors.html

Pick your theme such as shapes, colors, textures, letters, etc and go on safari! Children love to dress up and what a fun way to reinforce any concept. You can make binoculars with cardboard tubes such as toilet paper rolls or a paper towel roll cut and taped together. Younger children find the object and discuss with parent, older children can write or draw what they found on their search. You can decorate a fun notebook to document all of the objects.
Variations: Detective with magnifying glass or use digital camera to find objects and then make into book by putting pictures on pages.

Passing on our family history is important so children have a sense of history, family and belonging.

My mother has always been interested in genealogy and I grew up knowing my roots and stories from the past so I was surprised when I asked my husband about his family and they knew very little about their history. Children love stories and why not enrich their lives with stories from their very own family. How can we do that?

Start from the source if possible. Ask questions and document everything. In my family, I have recently asked all moms and dads to answer questions in a book I gave them to fill out. So far I have one, but with a lot more nagging I may get the others. Find out a few interesting things about any ancestors and use this to share stories, make a family book or plot a map with the locations family have lived.

Family Book-Take a picture, scan old ones and write a little bit about each person, who they are, where they lived and how they relate to your child(ren.) Children may appreciate the little things like what pet they had. This can be simple and put in 81/2×11 page protectors for little ones to touch or more elaborate if you are crafty and would like to make as a keepsake.

What is a word family? The ending letters are all the same but you can change the first letters to make different words.  This is a great visual for children to see the relationship between words and expand their vocabulary.

This simple to make book is a good tool to use when children are first learning to read and write. Using sentence strips or cut strips of paper write the last letters of the word family leaving space at the beginning (flush right) on a long strip (about 6 inches.)

Example: all.

On little strips write the different beginning letters for the word family words.

Ex: b, c, t, sm, st

Staple together and you will have a flip book to,practice word family words!

Some Word Families

ide: ride, stride, tide, wide

all: ball, call, tall, small, stall,

ight: light, right, sight, bright, tight,

This experiment demonstrates the importance of eating foods with calcium. Plus, it is just fun! First ask your child or class, Can you make an egg shell soft?

What you need:

one egg, glass, vinegar

Put egg in glass, pour vinegar over egg, wait several days .  Take egg out and feel shell.

The vinegar dissolves the calcium in the shell making it soft and rubbery. Note that this shows the importance of calcium to make the shell strong, just like our bones need calcium.

To extend this activity, ask questions, list foods with calcium, eat foods with calcium, write out the hypothesis before the experiment, guessing what will happen and record the results at the end.

A simple Valentine’s Day craft that allows the freedom for children to create any heart friend they can imagine! The heart lady below is made of all hearts except her hair, arms and legs. For younger children have all shapes of hearts available to assemble a person and for older ones you can have templates or have then cut their own heart shapes.
Face-eyes are three different heart sizes, nose is upside down small heart, and mouth is small red heart.
Hat-made from upside down heart, folded over about a half inch in the middle to fit better.
Body-Mid section is same size as head, arms and legs are long strips of paper folded accordion style. Hands and feet are small hearts glued on.
Skirt is three-four upside down hearts glued to body.

Not much time: Use markers and crayons for face.

This video shows you how to make a letter sound recognition game to use at home or in the classroom. The bean bag toss game is a valentine theme but could be made for every day use by using another shape besides a heart.  You can adapt this game for older children by writing blends and digraphs (ex: str, bl, sh) or high frequency words on the hearts.

Have a few minutes to fill at home, why not make it educational and fun?

Simple and Fast Games on Paper or Dry Erase Board:

-Tic Tac Toe
-Which letter is missing?
Write a word and omit one letter and have them write it in the space.
-Which number is missing?
Write part of a number line and omit one or several numbers to fill in, for older children you can do this with equations (the beginning of algebra!)

Use the dry erase board to keep track of 20 questions as your family plays, another good way to practice groups of five using tally marks.

Dice are an easy way to practice math while having fun. Plus they are easy to pack and cheap. Little ones can get the big foam dice and just roll and try to match the two numbers on the dice. As they do this you can attempt counting the numbers if they have the attention. Do not worry it will come. Some die also come with the written numeral on them which is also good for the little ones to start identifying numbers.

A few activities:
Roll ‘em:
1. Each person rolls a die and the one with the larger number wins the round.
(to extend this you can use tally marks to keep score on a paper or board.)
2. Each person rolls two-three dice and adds them. The person with the largest number wins the round. This can also be done with multiplication and subtraction.

Race Car:
Using poster board, draw a road and mark lines like a gameboard. Each player rolls a die and moves the amount of spaces, first to reach the end wins. We use hot wheels as the markers. The many versions of this are what your child is “into” at the time. For example, trains tracks, steps to a castle, Earth to moon-draw (the beginning) earth and draw stars to the moon (the end).

Collecting:
This again is a homemade game that can use any collection of things. You use two dice to add or subtract (Can do multiplication but will need to have a large collection.) For example, we use sea shells. The player rolls the dice and adds the numbers and collects that amount. Each player continues, the player with the largest collection is the winner.

If you have a spouse who travels you have heard the numerous calls for either mommy or daddy. My husband has always traveled and when my son was about two years old he started to realize daddy was not home every night. Throughout the day he would ask “Where daddy?” I would have a great one ended discussion and ten minutes later, “where daddy?”

So, the next trip I filled a jar with fruit treats (I could get away with that back then). Each treat represented one full day daddy would be gone, so when my son ate his last treat that was the day he would see his dad. We called this our Daddy Jar. I will not say that he did not ask for daddy or look for him that first time, but it did work after that first time. We have used other goodies like marshmallows and stickers. It is so easy, now the children will tell me, “only three more night Mommy!”

Paper chain countdown: Cut strips of paper (one for each day parent will be gone.) Make into circle and tape, then add the next link, and so on. Each day child takes off a link until getting to the last one!

Themed jar: When a parent travels to a “themable” (I just made a new word…I like it) area it is fun to find items related to the area. Stickers are an easy item to find, just look in craft and scrapbook stores. Is daddy going fishing? Buy some gummy worms or fish crackers for the tiny ones. When my husband goes to Germany I use gummi bears since that is where they are made.

Paper quilt: Cut squares (one for each day person will be gone), glue or sew with yarn for older children, then each day draw, write or decorate one square. On the last day the child will have a sweet welcome home sign to hang.
Idea: Child can write or draw favorite things to do with that person or write/draw about what the child did each day so when the absent parent arrives the child can share their days.

How does your family survive when mom or dad travels?