Fun and Facts with Kids: May 2010

Monday, May 31, 2010

Happy Memorial Day!

In honor of the soldiers who have given their lives for our country

and for the lives they left behind - Happy Memorial Day

HERE is a link that describes the history of this day

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Facts -
For most of us this is a day to celebrate the beginning of summer activities. Truly this is a day that dates back to the end of the Civil War and is dedicated to the men and women who served our country and gave their lives for our freedom. With that being said Memorial Day marks the beginning of summer season.

Fun -

We will be celebrating Memorial Day in the traditional way by having a BBQ. Grilled vegetable kabobs, Turkey Burgers, Corn on the cob, patriotic cones filled with blue, red and white corn chips! Yummy! Of course with any good and successful BBQ you need a fabulous dessert and have we got the perfect Memorial Day dessert. We will be using freshly picked strawberries, blueberries, homemade whipped cream and delicious short cake to create a delicious, phenomenal, fun and patriotic desert. For those who do not want the short cake, we will be using skewers to make fruit kabobs. So fun and very occupational for Lauren who will meticulously place fruit onto the skewer in a pattern that we will draw for her to follow. She will be encouraged to try to skewer the fruit through their centers and in a pattern.

Crafts -

One of the crafts we decided to make is something we saw on Martha Stewart's website. This craft is a great way to use the Fringe Scissors we bought for Easter Crafts we did back in April. As we love things that can have many uses we will be using these wooden BBQ skewers for both decoration in and around our plants and for our meal. You can place these paper fireworks in your plants or you can fill glass jars or cups with play sand in patriotic colors of course, and use them around the table setting.

Whats great about this holiday is that you can reuse your crafts or decorations for more holiday to come like Forth of July and even Labor Day! We will post our own pictures after we make our crafts and tablesetting for you to see soon!

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Horseshoe Crabs with Kids!

Activity:

After checking the moon phases and the tide schedule we found a good day to go to a beach in Delaware to see the horseshoe crabs. These are amazing creatures that spawn on the beaches of the Delaware Bay every year around the full moon and high tide. There are a few weeks you can see this fabulous display of survival. The Crabs lay their eggs in the sand and then the Red Knots (bird that fly from South America to the Arctic every year) come and feast on the eggs before continuing their flight north. This is a wonderful display of nature and we really enjoyed our day.

Education:

There are a lot of great facts and fun things to learn about

Thursday, May 13, 2010

Archeology with Kids

For Matthews’s end of the year project, he chose to do a study on shark fossils and the erosion of land into bays and seas. For the research section of this project we took him down to a beach where we spent the day panning and searching for fossils.

We found many sharks teeth, ray plates and barbs that Matthew will sort, organize and find the Latin names for. He will then further sort the teeth by where they are located in the shark’s mouth and then create a final project/presentation that will show the organized teeth and some history on the erosion of land into the bays and seas.

This was fun to be involved in the research part of this project. Though it was raining, we were able to find lots of cool fossils and had a good time doing it!

Archeology is such a huge field today; there are many sites that the kids can check out. You can also take your kids to a dig and see archeologist at work if there is one going on in your area.

Below are some cool sites for kids to further learn about Archeology that give some great information for kids:

Archeology for Kids

http://www.nps.gov/archeology/public/kids/index.htm

Fossil information for Kids:

http://www.fossilsforkids.com/

http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/dinosaurs/dinofossils/

Dig Magazine – The Archeology Magazine for Kids!

http://www.digonsite.com/

Fun Archeology Games:

http://archaeology.mrdonn.org/games.html

Archeology Lesson Plans (including Video, PowerPoint Presentations etc):

http://archaeology.mrdonn.org/lessonplans.html