Wednesday, February 6, 2013

The things you can do with clear plastic cups

Blogging today proves a couple of important things.  The first is that homeschooling is easy.  The second is that you can use your household items to do some pretty cool lessons.  The third is that you do not need to make it up yourselves.  The ideas in this lesson all came from other homeschool bloggers.  And the fourth thing is that you can homeschool even when life is rough. 

We started by labeling some clear plastic cups as "1 cup", "1/2 cup", "3/4 cup", and "1/4 cup".  We then poured water in the cups to see the different levels.  We compared them discussing which one was "most", "least", and "middle".  We got this idea from http://royalbaloo.com/fraction-matching/

Then we did another cup activity from Royal Baloo.  It's at http://royalbaloo.com/the-walking-water-experiment/

We first practiced counting to 5 by counting out 5 plastic cups.  We then practiced adding by grouping 3 cups together and then by pairing 2 cups.  And then I asked him what 3 cups plus 2 cups were and he said "FIVE!!!". Happy dance :)

We placed 3 cups on top of our Rainbow Resource book (that HUGE homeschooling materials book IS good for something!).  And we filled them to the top with water.  We then put blue food coloring in one, yellow food coloring in the middle one, and then red food coloring in the last one. 

We then put the other 2 cups below the 3 cups (hence the placing of the 3 cups on top of the Rainbow Resource book).  And to finish the experiment we put slips of paper towels going from the cups on top to the cups below.  The colored water moved from the cups on top along the paper towel slips into the empty cups below.  (There is a good discussion of gravity in this lesson.). The blue and yellow water mixed in the empty cup to make green.  The yellow and red water mixed to make orange. 

See the pictures below for our lesson.

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