Explore Natural Materials in a Jar

Playing with, exploring and mixing up natural materials like said, soil and stone is a lot of fun for kids, and you can make it an easy science exploration without a lot of effort, as shown in this tutorial from Preschool Toolkit.

You probably have all the materials you need in or around your house, and you can take the time to explore the materials before putting them in the jar, predict what might happen when you add water and shake the jar, think about how long it might take for the water to become clear again and other topics (there’s a good list to get you started on the site).

Make this a fall activity by adding crushed dry leaves, or putting in small leaves to see if they float and what happens when you shake the jar with all the other things in it.

How do you explore nature with preschoolers? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

[Photo via Preschool Toolkit.]

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Stone Soup Activities for Kids

Shark Week generally happens in July, but any time is a good time to learn more about sharks.

First, start with some fun whale facts like these from Kids Craft Room. Here I learned about the dwarf lantern shark, which is the smallest shark and only grows to about 6-8 inches (about 15-20 cm) long. It also emits light. How cool is that?

Natural Beach Living has some great printable shark information guides, where kids can learn about different kinds of sharks, match the facts to the pictures, or print out doubles and do a shark memory game.

Living Life an Learning has some great shark activity pages including the parts of a shark, types of sharks, a crossword puzzle and more. Also check out their parts of a shark and word scramble download, and a life cycle worksheet.

Learn about how sharks float with this great activity from JDaniel4’s Mom.

Need more facts about sharks? This fact pact from The WOLFe PACK on Teacher Pay Teachers includes fact sheets, a printable flip book, informational text, vocabulary, comprehension questions and more.

Living Montessori Now has a great collection of shark themed activities with a Montessori inspired twist. You’ll find a shark roll and cover, shark phonics and lots more shark activities Deb has collected from all over the Internet.

Remember the “Sharknado” movie? A Few Shortcuts turned the combination of sharks and tornadoes into a fun science activity. You’ll need a bottle connector for this project but otherwise should have everything you need on hand. Use their template to make your sharks out of aluminum foil. So fun!

You can also do some shark themed coloring with these coloring pages from Encouraging Moms at Home. Or make a cool 3D shark with this template from korkotak. And there are tons of different shark crafts collected in this post from Kids Activities Blog.

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