Adventures of Evie

  This week Evie has had a TON of questions about the Ice Age. I'm not sure what sparked her curiosity but when she gets very interested in something we tend to run with it and try to learn as much as we can. So today to follow with that theme I set up a little ice and snow box for her with some Sago creatures.  We had snow and acrylic ice on one side and on the other I gave her bars of ice with this pretty mica in them. She had lots of fun playing snowball fights, sledding, and other games with the animals. And eventually the ice melted down into swirly, icy waves. It was lots of fun to stir them up and watch them swirl around too! Sensory bins are still one of her favorite things to play with and learn with and today was no exception. We did use up the last of our fake snow though, but since it lasted us over a year (maybe even 2) I feel like it was definitely worth it! We'll have to buy another bag soon. :)

  This week I am on a staycation from work so I spent a lot of time today getting some things done around the house. One of those things was to clean up some of the stuff in the backyard. When I went out I let Evie come and play and she discovered some leaves in the pool. But to her surprise they were trapped under a sheet of ice! She really wanted to rescue them so I tipped up the pool to allow the water underneath to pour out, thus freeing the leaves. Once the ice was free she spent some time examining the pattern on the back that was made by the bottom of the pool. Then she had an idea... She asked if she could smash up the ice and I told her that was fine so I set it on the grass and she grabbed her T-ball bat and went to town! Once it was in smaller pieces she tossed them at the bricks on the patio to break them down further and then we got warm water to see how small she could get them. Some of them got so thin she could see right through them which she found VERY exciting! I...

  It's Ocean Week! Not to age myself or anything but when I was learning about geography in grade school there were four major oceans; Atlantic, Pacific, Arctic, and Indian. Of course, back then we still had nine planets too, sorry Pluto. 😂 Sometime about 1999 we apparently got a fifth one -- the Southern Ocean. This threw a tiny wrench in my plans to have us focus on one ocean per day this week. We have a little field trip on Friday so we won't be focusing on anything specific that day. To fix this problem we lumped the Arctic and Southern Oceans together for today since they have similar climates. They don't have similar inhabitants though and Evie was SHOOK this morning to find out that penguins actually do not live in the same place as polar bears. At any rate this morning her sensory activity involved getting all her arctic animals out of a block of ice.   This took her about 45 minutes with multiple refills of warm water and some tools. She loved it though and stuck ...