It's EGGciting! Making a Jelly Bean Tree.

April 07, 2014

We had a lot of fun Easter and egg themed work planned for today. I love making our schoolwork fun with holidays themes!

We started our school day with a walk in the woods.

I had a craft activity planned for the day and we needed some sticks and branches.

We walked over to the brook and watched the running water, examined what we thought were some skunk cabbage plants (and later confirmed were indeed skunk cabbage with the help of the internet), and found that we have some cedar trees nearby!

Ian was mystified when he pulled a small dead stick off the bottom of a tree and found that it was pink inside. I smelled it and had all the boys smell it too and explained that it's a type of wood called cedar and that many people will have closets made of cedar to help preserve their clothes.

playing with the water

inside of a skunk cabbage plant

Skunk cabbage

a "natural" teepee

counting the rings on the tree to see how old it was

Looking at red/pink wood inside the tree!

Once home we decided to start right in with our craft project.

We made Jelly Bean Trees!

I gave each boy a plate of jelly beans and told them to take a bite of the bean and then stick it to their tree branches. After we all worked for a bit and got most of the jelly beans to stick we combined them together in a vase and made our own jelly bean tree.

It was fun (if a bit frustrating at times when jelly beans didn't stick or fell back off). I love how cute they look together and several times throughout the day the boys commented that all the sticks put together look like one big tree.

I'm sure it would have worked better with hot glue but then the boys wouldn't have been able to do this activity by themselves.

Our jelly bean tree

Evan and Alec then decided to try running their own science experiments and threw a few of their jelly beans into a cup of water.

In no time we saw the candy coating breaking up and floating to the top. We noticed that the colors settled to the bottom of the cup and once Alec poured out all the water the kids decided that the middle clear part they were left with looked a lot like rice.

see our "rice bean?"

Egg- citing Math Match- Up!

Evan was working on filling in his 100's chart activity I had made up over the weekend. I printed out two 100's charts; one was plain white with the numbers in black and another was white with the even numbers in red and the odd numbers in blue.

I cut apart the chart with the colored numbers and hid two numbers inside each plastic egg. I piled them into a bucket. I then took the chart with the black numbers and taped a piece of contact paper to it sticky side up.

For today's activity Evan had to crack open the eggs, match the numbers to the chart and stick it down.

After a while I asked him what patterns he noticed:

All the 1's were in the same column, as well as all the 2's, 3's, 4's, etc.
He told me that all the red were even numbers and the blue were odd numbers.
He told me that all the numbers go up one when moving in one direction and down one when moving in the opposite direction.

He found lots of patterns in the 100's chart!

finding the matching numbers

seeing our patterns

Next, Evan worked on finding some sight words.

I squirted a few drops of paint into a Ziploc bag and taped it down onto a white sheet of paper that I had randomly written sight words all over. I then re-wrote the list of sight words down the side so he could cross them off as he found each word.

He had a lot of fun with this activity but soon realized he'd be done faster if he tried to uncover all the words so he started using the marker to squeegee all the paint out of the way.