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Category Archives: Kid Projects
Boring Words
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Do you ever get tired of reading books that have a never-ending he said this, she said that, they said what. Yeah, me too.
Teaching strong verbal and communication skills is very important to my husband and I. The more words a child is taught, the greater their reading comprehension will be. The more they are able to comprehend, the more they will be able to take that information and apply it to other aspects of their life.
One of the best methods of teaching vocabulary is teaching synonyms of common words…and because “said” is word that we strongly dislike, we came up with this handy poster. It was so much fun to make, that we quickly made a second one for another disappointing word…good.
We used poster board, foam board and glue. Together, we created lists of synonyms, which I typed up, printed out and glued onto the foam board. I cut the words into their rectangles, using an exacto knife, and we glued them onto the poster board.
Of course, you do not have to glue your words onto foam board. You can just glue them directly onto the poster board around your large “no-no word” but we liked the way the foam board made the words pop out.
If you would like to see the lists of words we used for say and good, you can download them here.
Pi Day = March 14 = 3.14
That picture above cracks me up. Gotta love what you find on Pinterest!
March 14th is Pi Day. Not Pie Day, but Pi Day. Why is Pi Day celebrated around the world on March 14th? March 14…3/14…3.14…get it? Pretty neat huh! If you would like to learn more about Pi you should visit the official website for Pi Day at PiDay.org.
We are geeks, we celebrate Pi Day every year. I hope you will join us this year and let your inner math nerd out. Below are a handful of some fun pi ideas that we have done in the past.
- Memorize as much as you can of the super long digit. My son got much much farther than me. I won’t even tell you how far I got. He jokes with me that I have a 30-second memory. This website lists the digits of pi up to 100,000!
- Make Pi art. For the project below, we added scrapbook embellishments to each number in the series 3.1415926535
- Write a Piaku: Poetry in which the number of syllables in each sentence correspond to the consecutive digits of Pi.
- Eat pie! Apple pie, pumpkin pie, pizza pie. What do you think of the “pi” pan I made last week? I etched a pi symbol onto the bottom of a regular glass pie pan.
- Create a pi chain with loops of construction paper. Use a different color for each number. For example, you could use red for 1′s, pink for 2′s, orange for 3′s, yellow for 4′s, white for 5′s, green for 6′s, light blue for 7′s, dark blue for 8′s, purple for 9′s, brown for 10′s, black for 0′s. If you wanted to make a chain of 3.1415926535, the first 11 digits, your rainbow would be orange, red, yellow, red, white, purple, pink, green, white, orange, white.
- Make a pi collage. Trace or draw a large pi symbol and fill in it with circles that you can cut out from magazines or catalogs. I have one of these small projectors and it comes in very handy. We use it for many many projects. You can get one at Amazon for only $40.
Don’t forget that in addition to Pi Day, March 14th is Albert Einstein’s birthday! It certainly is a day for your genius to shine through.
We made this to celebrate the brilliance of Einstein. If you would like to download the quotes we use, you can find them here.
There’s No Place Like Space
Welcome to the Dr. Seuss Birthday Blog Hop! In honor of Theodor Seuss Geisel’s birth in 1904, I am joining 7 other bloggers to share our love of all things Dr. Seuss with you!
Although my chosen book There’s No Place Like Space: All About Our Solar System was not actually written by Dr. Seuss, it was written in his style, with the blessing of his family and publishing company, and is in the famed Cat in the Hat Library.
We created 2 space-themed projects to go along with this book and we hope you will enjoy doing them in your home as much as we did!
To make this 3D solar system poster, you will need:
- a styrofoam solar system kit or a variety of sizes of styrofoam balls. I found it much easier to buy the kit, as the sizes were already measured out and the balls could be cut in half and used on 2 different projects.
- a small amount of salt dough. To make salt dough use these ratios – 1 water : 1 salt : 2 flour. For example 1/2 cup water, 1/2 cup salt, 1 cup flour.
- paint in all shades of the rainbow, including black and white
- black posterboard
- a hot glue gun and lots of glue sticks
1. Cut the styrofoam balls in half and paint them to look like the sun and the various planets.
2. To make the Asteroid Belt and Kuiper Belt, make a small batch of salt dough and mix it with a tiny amount of both black and white paint. Take a handful of the dough and roughly pinch off small pieces to resemble rocks. Don’t worry too much about their shapes and sizes, you want them to look like banged up asteroids. Either let the asteroids dry overnight or place them in your oven on 300 for about 20 minutes.
3. After the sun, planets and asteroids have dried, arrange them on your posterboard to make sure you can fit everything in. Lay out the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter and lay out the rest of the “rocks” at the far end of the posterboard to signify the Kuiper Belt.
4. One by one, use your hot glue gun to attach the sun and planets to the board. Next, work fast as you glue down the rocks. Because the hot glue dries so fast, you may want to squeeze out a small line of glue at a time and have the kids place the asteroids on the glue.
What you will need:
- constellation images of your choice. We used the constellation images of Ursa Major and Orion from the Chandra X-ray Observatory.
- straight ball pins that are not too long
- cork board squares
- colored string or yarn
- a thick black marker
- a hole punch
1. Cut out your constellation images and punch holes on the stars. Lay the images out on your corkboard and use a thick black marker to mark the stars. Remove the paper and insert a pin on each spot that you just mark.
2. Take your colored string and slowly wrap it around each pin several times before moving on to the next pin. Keep your constellation image close by so you can refer to it when you need to. Because I wasn’t paying attention, I made a huge mistake and left out Ursa Major’s back leg and had to redo it! 
Be sure to visit my lovely friends today to check out their celebrations of Dr. Seuss…
- Ami from Walking by the Way
- Amy from Milk and Cookies (me)
- Cindy from Our Journey Westward
- Jenn from Daze of Adventure
- Jimmie from Jimmie’s Collage
- Karin from Passport Academy
- Kendra from Preschoolers and Peace
- Tricia from HodgePodge