#3beansplaytime

Autumn 🍂 Art! Acorn/Conker/Pine Cone Paint Rolling! (With a bit of leaf printing thrown in for good measure! 😂) Here’s a fun after-school activity that you might like to try? We recently went on a woodland walk and collected lots of little autumnal treasures on our travels. Acorns, conkers, pine cones and autumn leaves all make for great natural resources to be used at home in arts and craft activities! We picked out some autumnal colours from our collection of poster paints 🎨 - orange, green, red, yellow and gold - and decided to have a go at a version of ‘marble painting’, using the natural resources we had collected in place of the marbles. We put our paper in the bottom of a shallow box and experimented by dipping the various objects in paint, then tilting the box to watch the patterns the paint made as the acorns, conkers etc rolled over the paper. We also had a go at leaf painting and printing and, towards the end of the activity, everyone decided to get really messy with some hand printing too! We spoke about how, when all the colours mixed together, the paint eventually turned brown. Just like the leaves on the trees in Autumn 🍁 Simple, fun and helped us to pass a little bit of time before bedtime! 💤 We hope you enjoy it too! #threebeansplaytime #3beansplaytime #autumnart #autumncrafts #autumncraftsforkids #acornpainting #conkerpainting #paintrolling #eyfsideas #eyfs #eyfsinspiration #eyfsactivities #funcrafts #learningthroughplay https://www.instagram.com/p/CFNgYVenfk_/?igshid=804ajdip41t9

Sugar Cube Absorption Experiment 🧪 Today, the Three Beans tried out a fun and easy science experiment to take a look at the properties of different materials. We tried the Sugar Cube Absorption Experiment! If you want to give it a try too, you’ll need: 🧬 Some sugar cubes 🧬 A Plate 🧬 Water 🧬 Food colouring 🧬 Aluminium foil 🧬 Cling film 🧬 Paper 🧬 Baking parchment 🧬 Kitchen roll This experiment allows kids to learn about: 🧪Absorption 🧪Hygroscopic Behaviour 🧪Dissolving 🧪Capillary Action 🧪Changes of State 🧪Properties of Materials - specifically, Porosity Check out our page on Facebook for the full instructions of what to do by searching @ThreeBeansPlaytime #threebeansplaytime #3beansplaytime #funscience #funscienceforkids #funlearning #funlearningathome #funlearningforkids #simplescience #homelearning #homelearningfun #scienceactivities #eyfsideas #eyfsinspiration https://www.instagram.com/p/CDfOCQUnCh0/?igshid=fvfjti3e0q1s

Happy 3rd Birthday, Oliver! The littlest Bean is getting bigger! 🥳 #threebeansplaytime #3beansplaytime #3rdbithday #3rdbirthdaycake #stegosaurus #stegosaurouscake #dinosaurparty #dinosaurcake #happybirthday #happyboy #growingupfast https://www.instagram.com/p/CDND11Dn6SE/?igshid=kp7ddyf8ifpz

Making Phonics Fun - Magic ‘Tricky’ Word Reveal! Charlie’s been working hard trying to learn his ‘tricky’ or, high-frequency, ‘sight’ words. We usually like to sing songs to help him remember these or use flash cards. Today, I thought we’d try to make it a little bit more fun. ✏️ I wrote the words on a piece of paper 📝 using a white wax crayon 🖍 (you could also try using an unlit candle 🕯) ✏️ I watered down a little poster paint 🎨 ✏️Charlie picked a piece of paper then picked a paint colour and gently brushed some of the paint over the page ✏️Since wax is oil-based and the paint is water based, then don’t mix, so, the ‘invisible’ tricky word is revealed! ✏️To keep things going, as a challenge, he then had to read the word aloud, match it to the correct flash card, find the magnetic letters to spell it, write it down 3 times, then tell me a sentence with the word in it! The more ways you can practice the same thing and the more fun you can make it, the more likely they are to actually remember it! Charlie absolutely loved this and thought it was, “So cool!” When the words ‘magically’ appeared. He kept asking to do another one and kept going, staying engaged, for much longer than we would normally spend on this. All in all, after 113 days spent trying to homeschool in lockdown for us (yes, really! 😩), I’m definitely taking this as a win! 🙌🏻😃 #threebeansplaytime #3beansplaytime #trickywords #sightwords #twinklparents #homelearningfun #homelearning #homelearningideas #phonics #phonicsfun #funlearning #homeschooling #eyfsideas #eyfsinspiration #eyfsactivities https://www.instagram.com/p/CCUqGrWHvTF/?igshid=tzt99770n4w0

DIY ✂️ Mini Dinosaur 🦖 Torch 🔦 Projectors! This week is ‘Dinosaur Week’ on our home-learning journey and, honestly, it’s a topic that requires little encouragement for the Three Beans. All three of them just LOVE all things dinosaur related already! So, as something a little bit different, we thought we’d give this cool dinosaur craft a try and make ourselves some mini dinosaur torch projectors. The idea was to use these as an alternative to story spoons/puppets and spark their imaginations to act out and tell their own dinosaur stories! All you need to make these is: ✂️ Some empty toilet roll holders ✂️ Cling film ✂️ Sticky tape or an elastic band ✂️ Small dinosaur 🦕 shapes or stickers (I literally googled ‘dinosaur silhouettes’ and picked some images to print and cut out from there and, actually, you don’t even have to use dinosaurs, any shape would work!) ✂️ Optional paint/felt tip pens if you also want to decorate your torches ✂️ Smart phone or a small torch We decided to make this more of a craft activity, rather than just an imaginative play/role playing exercise, by decorating our torches first. We used a 1:2 poster paint/PVA (white school) glue mixture to paint our toilet rolls. Adding the glue to the paint made the colours more vibrant and gave the paint a slight sheen. It also meant that it wasn’t absorbed straight into the cardboard and so the different colours merged together to create a marbled effect when they dried. Though this step is totally optional and doesn’t affect how the projectors work, the kids enjoyed doing it and we thought they looked pretty cool! Once your toilet roll holders are dry, all you need to do is stretch a piece of cling film over the top then pop your dinosaur shape or sticker on the top. Sandwich your shape between another piece of cling film and then secure everything with a piece of sticky tape or an elastic band (we used tape). The smoother you can get the cling film, the better. Then, you’re all set and ready to go! In a darkened room, shine the torch on your smart phone (or an actual torch) down the toilet roll and project your image! 😃 #threebeansplaytime #3beansplaytime #dinosaurprojector #funkidscraft https://www.instagram.com/p/CCLax48nPCa/?igshid=3oeja2h2abfe

Dinosaur 🦕 🦖 Small World 🌍 Play The theme set by Holly’s nursery for her home learning this week is ‘Dinosaurs’! But, honestly, they’re all a bit Dino-crazy in our house anyway, so, this needed little encouragement! It was a damp and miserable afternoon, so, we headed into the garden for a bit of fresh air...close enough to home that it didn’t matter if the heavens opened and we got totally soaked! 🌧 ☔️ Some rain water had already gathered in our Tuff Tray and this was inspiration enough for Charlie...given that we’d already been talking about dinosaurs inside he declared, “I know! Let’s get our dinosaurs and make a dinosaur land for them!” Before I knew it, they’d gathered up their plastic dinosaur toys from inside, scooped some sand from the sandpit and liberated some stones from our boarders to form, “A rocky coastline along the beach!” And, their dinosaur land was ready! They loved making up stories and adventures for them and seeing the different footprints they made in the sand as they stomped around on their ‘beach’. Holly found it hilarious that she hid a plastic frog that she found in the sand on their beach too! 🤷🏻‍♀️ “It’s a dinosaur-frog!” She tells me!...Which actually prompted us to research whether frogs were, in fact, around when dinosaurs were? Turns out, they were! They’ve been around over 200 million years and most of the frogs that are around today (about 88% of all living species) actually began to thrive shortly after the extinction event that signalled the end of all, non-avian, dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous Period. So, you really do learn something new everyday! And, it truly is amazing how this type of activity can allow children to lead their own learning and take you in so many different directions. Child-led, open-ended and sensory play has such an important role in the early years environment! Plus, this took zero effort from me (save a few minutes on Google reading about frogs! 🐸🙈) and kept them busy for AGES! Win-Win! #threebeansplaytime #3beansplaytime #dinosaurs #smallworld #smallworldplay #eyfsideas #homelearningfun #homelearning #homelearningideas #eyfs #funlearning #funkearningathome https://www.instagram.com/p/CCJcyWRn-7m/?igshid=1d5twmog8jz7m

Floating Lemons 🍋 and Sinking Limes?! We all know that scientists seem to be mildly infatuated with objects that float and sink. Well, the Three Beans are clearly going to be brilliant scientists one day because they just love chucking stuff in water and seeing what happens! 😂 We had some lemons and limes in the house and, after we did the density experiment with the orange last week and discovered that it floats with the skin on and sinks with the skin off, they saw the lemons and limes and ‘hypothesised’ that they looked similar and so would do the same...so, obviously, we had to try this out! Well, would you believe, that isn’t actually the case at all?! Actually, as it happens, lemons always float and limes always sink. Who knew?🤷🏻‍♀️ First, we put them in the water with their skins on. The lime, immediately sunk down to the bottom and the lemon bobbed around on the top. We weighed the lemon and lime to show that this is the case, even though our lime was smaller and weighed less than the lemon. We peeled them both. The kids examined the lemon and lime more closely...Since the lemon skin did seem to be thicker and coarser and a little more like the orange skin than the lime, they thought this might work in the same way and trap air to make the lemon float when it was on, but it would still sink when we peeled it? Maybe the skin just wasn’t thick enough on a lime? But, once peeled, the lemon STILL floated and the lime still sank? We also sliced them and, even then, the sliced lemon floated but the sliced lime sank?! Crazy! We tried different lemons and different limes...all of the limes sank. We found one lemon that sort of only half floated once it was peeled...it sat mid-way down in our beaker of water, but, it was still more buoyant than the limes and refused to drop to the bottom completely. Obviously, this experiment shows that an object’s ability to sink or float is all to do with density, rather than weight or size. A lime is denser than a lemon...no matter which way you slice it! 😂 And, it is also denser than water, even with its skin on! #threebeansplaytime #3beansplaytime #floatinglemons #sinkinglimes #densityexperiment #funlearningathome https://www.instagram.com/p/CCCRckUHvGx/?igshid=mpjjgaj1xrhd

Butterfly 🦋 and Bee 🐝 Feeders! 💖 The weather has been glorious ☀️ where we are at the moment, so, it was time to take our home learning/crafts outdoors again! We decided to make these colourful butterfly and bee feeders to hang in the garden and around our bug hotel in the hope of attracting even more mini visitors. They were really simple to put together and a fantastic, combined; art, design and technology, maths, sensory and fine-motor skills activity for the kids. All you need is: 🦋 A plastic jar/coffee canister lid (ours were actually lids off some Betty Crocker cupcake frosting, I believe 🤔) - the brighter the colour, the better. 🦋 Some string or twine. (For an easier threading option than string, you could try substituting pipe cleaners/chenille stems instead and just twist them together, instead in tying at the top) 🦋 Pony beads (as little as 15/20 to as many as 100 per feeder...it’s up to you) 🦋 A Phillips Head screwdriver and a ball of Blu Tac or plasticine. (Or something similar, to make holes in the plastic lids!) They’re really simple and you can probably work out what to do just from the pictures but, if not, the full method is available in the original post on our Facebook page 💖 #threebeansplaytime #3beansplaytime #butterflyfeeder #beefeeder #butterfliesandbees #savethebees #kidscrafts #homelearning #homelearningfun #homelearningideas #eyfsideas #funkidscrafts #easycrafts #easycraftsforkids https://www.instagram.com/p/CB6u2Eqnz1w/?igshid=1serummltz44m