rainbow discovery bottles

I've been busy with a couple of summer teaching projects so here is a mini post to share! For our week of A Rainbow of My Own, I whipped up a batch of RAINBOW DISCOVERY BOTTLES for the kiddos to enjoy. Each one was made with warm water and clear glue with extra bits of color added for well...discovery.

 

The red bottle had glitter, orange had buttons, yellow...a chunky gold glitter, green...marbles, blue more glitter, and purple...beads. The children loved these. LOVED these! They practiced arranging them in rainbow order, naming the colors, and counting the bottles. They also carried them around the room, played with them all day long, and asked me all sorts of questions about what was inside each bottle, often bringing a bottle to me randomly throughout the day to proclaim that "Blue has glitter, Purple has beads." It was super fun!  They are now in our BIG window and make the room just a little more happy.

bear hunt discovery bottles and the dance...

I wanted to create a discovery center centered around our literature for the week which was We're Going on a Bear Hunt and wondered how long shaving cream would last in a bottle to represent snow. I hopped on over to pinterest to see if anyone else had done the bottles and discovered this nifty post from Nestpirations, yay! While they used cotton balls for snow, I stuck with shaving cream and it lasted longer than the "grass" did as the grass got a bit funky in all that moisture but a week was all we needed and the children LOVED the bottles. They would gather them up for each story time and arrange them in order/sequence as we read the story each day. The grass came from my garden cut from a swath of some sort of floral pretty, the river is sand from our sandbox with water mixed in. Our forest is a gathering of sticks and leaves, the mud is potting soil and water, and the snow is shaving cream. The children really enjoyed our literature and would retell it as they played around the room. During snack and at lunch we would make the sounds from the book that went with each bottle. So much fun!

 

 

So much fun that one of the kiddos decided to gather up ALL of our discovery bottles to create this awesome piece of art. He spent more than thirty minutes arranging all the bottles to his liking and asked me to take a picture of it telling me it was a dance. Swoon!

discovering discovery bottles

 One morning I was feeling a smidge under-the-weather and did not get everything together as planned for class. This called for a rifle through our sensory cabinet to see what I could come up with to set out and so I went with a small collection of discovery bottles. If you do not know what discovery bottles are they are upcycled clear plastic bottles filled with all sorts of wonderful things for children to look at.

 The children were so enthralled with the bottles that they asked if they could make their own. Luckily I had enough empty bottles in the cabinet and so while they were out playing and I was on my break I pulled together an assortment of items for them to add to their bottles.

 There were cut pieces of colorful straws, buttons, foil confetti, and more. The children worked their fine motor skills by picking up each item, one by one to add to their bottles. Some found items that were too big and some used the funnel to add their glitter in bulk.

 After they were satisfied with what they added, a pitcher was brought out and they poured their own water into their bottle. Some overfilled, some barely filled...it was an interesting lesson in volume and esitmation.

They LOVED their bottles and admired them during rest time, on the car rides home and later at bedtime.