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Today was all about wind power! After our usual morning routine, we revisited a wind power experiment and expanded upon it. At first, we had making hollow paper "rockets" fly off the ends of our straws, but we quickly moved on to a game of wind-powered keep away using a cotton ball. It was fun to try to keep the cotton ball away from our side of the table!
The littles definitely got the idea of blowing through their straws, but the sensory enjoyment of feeling soft, fluffy cottonballs won out. The big kids were happy to blow lots of cotton balls their way.
After the game, we moved on to a more scientific experiment. We made a hypothesis about which of five pom poms of varied sizes would be the easiest to blow out of a funnel and which would be the hardest. The children quickly stated that the biggest pom pom would not move as easily as the smallest. Very intuitive!
The children tested their hypothesis and were proven correct... and they had great fun in the process. It was the height of toddler hilarity to watch the pom poms come shooting out of the funnel further and further as they decreased in mass.
Later in the morning we headed outside to enjoy the sunny weather. We took the long way to the park and ventured through the "woods." We saw lots of animal activity- red-winged blackbirds made noisy appearances and squirrels dashed across the path in front of us. No animals were nearly as conspicuous as the large group of Canada geese that were populating the nearby field and marsh area.
The children watched a smaller group of the geese for a few minutes and we talked about how they were deciding which were going to be mommy and daddy geese this spring. We all agree that they honk about it an awful lot!
We made it to the park and the children had a wonderful time working on gross motor skills. The littles were very interested in learning to navigate stairs while the big kids enjoyed the slides and interacting with other children.
We capped off our visit to the park by letting the big kids push the littles in the swings. The big kids were so proud of themselves and the littles liked the extra attention. What a lovely day!
See you tomorrow!