Exploring the five senses - Taste

 This is one of the easiest of our Exploring the Five Senses series. I felt that the two easiest tastes to describe were SOUR and SWEET. This was easily done with a lemon and honey.

First we cut some slices of lemon and  let the boys taste them. They made a few pucker faces and after a few laughs I described the fact that lemons are sour. Surprisingly they actually didn't hate it, they kept eating it. Twitching a bit between sucks but they both actually ate their slices without so much as a fuss.

Classic sour face!

On to the sweet part of the experiment. Two sticky spoonfuls of honey. They obviously devoured it with gusto. They seemed to get the hang of SWEET pretty easily. In fact Bear asked for "more sweet"

Wolf wanted no funny business, he is guarding his spoon with all his might. 

 I love that this experiment  is so simple and straight forward. It is a great way to introduce your little ones to the concept of taste in such a simple way. 

Be sure to check out our other senses exploration thus far:
SIGHT- Reading in the Dark
SOUND- Sound Hunt
TOUCH- Exploring TOUCH a simple activity 

Spending time together

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving. We had a lovely time just the four of us, stuffing our faces with a ton of delicious food. Since then the boys and I have been taking it easy and enjoying decorating for the holidays and just playing together. 

Husband has been working a ton of extra hours lately so our time together is really limited. So when he called me yesterday telling me to get the boys dressed because we were going out, I was in. Turns out   there is a park near our house that on clear days you are able to see Mt. Hood perfectly. It was beautifully covered in snow that made it look a a little pink during the evening light. 

The boys have missed  their papa a lot so they were overjoyed running around the park with him. 

Afterwards we enjoyed going out to dinner and spending some much needed time as a family. 

On the Farm- Milking a Cow

Over the weekend I pulled out our farm animals and barn toys. The boys have had a lot of fun playing with them and I can see Bear's imagination growing by the second as he pretends to feed the animals and have his trains carry the animals along. 

When I worked at the preschool I came up with this activity (at least I think it's original) and it worked so well I was excited to try it with the boys. It is a way to teach your kids not only the basic concept of how to milk a cow but also it teaches them how to sign the word MILK in ASL (HERE is the link to what the sign looks like). 

You will need

1. a latex glove (this will be the utters) 
2. watered down white paint (milk)
3. a pin or small sharp object
4. something to contain the mess (i used a casserole dish)

First of all, you are going to want to teach them about cows and milk. Here are a few things I used

• cows make milk
• we can drink cows milk 
• cows milk comes out of their utters

We read a few books and watched a YouTube video on how to milk a cow by hand. All the while having him imitate the hand motion of milking.

When we were all set up. I pricked a hole in the tips of two of the gloves fingertips. Then I filled it up with the watered down white paint. You could at this point tie the top of the glove in a knot so it won't spill everywhere. I only had one glove and wanted to be able to refill it once it was empty. So I held it from the top while the boys worked.

 Have your little one pretend to milk the cow over your container. At first we had a piece of paper inside the dish to attempt to make a finished art piece but the paint was so thin that it just soaked through the paper. We ditched the paper and kept working. 

The Results: This project has not failed me yet. Bear understood that milk comes from cows, and we freshened up on our "milk" sign and both the boys enjoyed this whole process. Bear splashed in the "milk" for a while and had to be reminded that it was paint and we really couldn't drink it. 

Afterwards we cleaned up and enjoyed some homemade cookies and a  real glass on milk. Not a bad morning.