rainy day kids ideas

I've just started back teaching one day a week and one of the classes I'm teaching is 5 year olds. Their teacher wants me to do lots of 'language experience' activities where we do an activity or listen to a book and then write and draw about it. So I dragged all my old resources out and made a list of ideas and practiced a few on my 3 year old.   I thought I'd share them with you if you're wanting some things to do this rainy weekend! (Both activities use things you've probably got around the house)
Magic Milk
This activity is a great little science one and also good for learning about colours/colour mixing.
You will need

• full fat milk (full fat seems to work better than trim, also warmer milk seems to work better than milk straight out of the fridge)
• food colouring- red, blue, yellow and green
• eye droppers
• dishwashing liquid (I use Palmolive, a teacher said she used the cheap pink stuff and it didn't work that well)
• saucer

1. Pour milk into saucer
2. Put a drop of each food colouring into the saucer (top, bottom, left and right like this)

(I used way too much food colouring here, two or three drops is enough!)

3. Squirt a bit of dishwashing liquid into the middle of the saucer

4. Watch what happens (it's pretty cool!)

Magic pictures
The teacher in the 5 year old class I'm in had just done this with the class so it was a good memory jogger for me as I used to like doing this activity with my own classes -it's neat as an intro to print making but is also just a good art activity that can take a little while to do which is always good!!
You'll need

• A4 paper 
• chalk (any colour)
• crayons 
• sharp pencil

1. Fold the piece of paper in half width ways and cover the inside right side with chalk quite thickly

2. Now cover the chalk with crayon; again the thicker the better (no gaps ). You can just cover the chalk in one colour, do stripes like mine horizontally or vertically, thick zig zag lines, anything really as long as the crayon completely covers the chalk.

3. Fold the piece of paper back over like a card, draw on the front of the 'card' with the sharp pencil. Colour in some of the pictures with the pencil to see what happens when you open the card (like my heart and the birds wing)

You could get them to write their name too- kids love seeing their name backwards!
4. Open up the card and see how the picture has lifted from the right side and made a print onto the left side!

Have fun!

Megan