All Natural Lip Balm Valentine's Gifts

Well, Valentine's Day is approaching fast, and one of our activities this week was making Lip Balm to give as a gift, although many of the kids informed me that they are going to keep their lip balm.  I guess that is a good sign...they loved them!  A little while ago I read what was in lip balm and was shocked that even "natural" companies loaded up their products with harmful chemicals, so I began looking for natural recipes and I found this recipe on Wellness Mama.  She has a ton of great recipes for natural remedies, you should check out her link:

Wellness Mama

It is a simple recipe:

1 tsp Coconut Oil

1 tsp Cocoa Butter or Shea Butter

1 tsp Bees Wax Pellets

Optional: 20 drops of essential oil (we used grapefruit oil)

I was able to purchase these materials at the health food store and Trader Joe's, however I purchased the chap stick container from Mountain Rose Herbs.  You can also purchase all the ingredients from Mountain Rose Herbs as well if you cannot find them at you local health food store, here is their link:

http://mountainroseherbs.com/

Here is our experience with it, I was surprised by how simple the process was, and we only had one little hiccup, which we remedied the next day when we made them.

Before we started we went around and smelled all the ingredients and tried to guess what they were.

The children added the bees wax pellets first, then we added the Cocoa Butter and Coconut Oil to our mason jar.

We tripled the recipe to make 7 lip balm containers.

I placed the jar in a pot and heated it on low, then switched it to simmer as the ingredients start to melt.

Add the essential oils after the ingredients have melted down, we forgot the second day, so the lip balm smelt more like chocolate from the cocoa butter which was still nice, but the grapefruit essential oils have a lovely refreshing smell, in fact grapefruit is suppose to energize!

 While the ingredients slowly melted, the children worked on their tags for their lip balm.

Last year for Valentine's day we made beautiful hearts using homemade paper, washable markers, and eyedroppers of water to make the colors "melt" into each other.  This year I cut smaller hearts that we could use as tags for their lip balm.  Here they are filling in their hearts and then "melting" them with water.
If you would like to see more of what we did last year, click below:

 Valentine's Day 2012

 I love how these come out, when we do this technique on handmade paper the colors stay rich and the paper holds up a lot better then coffee filters, which are often used for this process.

Back to our Lip Balm

You will need a glass eye dropper for this next part, and here is where we had our only problem the first day.  Because I would call the children up one at a time, and they took their time with the process, the lip balm started to solidify in the eye dropper.  So the second day we did it, I kept a cup of hot water near by, and as each child finished with the eye dropper, I soaked it in the cup to avoid this problem.

the children opened up their chap stick containers, writing their initials on the bottom with a sharpie helps.

I moved the melted lip balm to a trivet, but kept the water on simmer near by so it didn't harden.

The children then proceeded to fill their containers with the balm.  It is not hot like melted wax, so do not worry if it drips a little.

Have the children try to hold their containers as straight as possible, and fill till it is above the stick inside.

They take about 15 minutes to harden, but a couple hours to be ready to move up and down in their containers.

On sticker labels they made their own lip balm labels, and then I tied on their tags.

Puckering up to put on her lip balm!

Too Cute!

Perception and Hand-Eye Coordination Skills

There is a Local Materials Exchange that I love to frequent for supplies.  It is a unique place where surplus materials are sold cheaply and are saved from the landfill, so in my book it is a love/love situation for both economical and environmental reasons.  On my last visit they had grates for sale.  I had never considered using a grate as an exploration tool in play, but this grate had such a wonderful mirrored surface I knew the kids would love it. 

We actually have been playing with it for a couple months and I am just getting to a post about it.

When we first started to play with the grate, the children filled it with buttons and gemmies.

Because of the reflective surface, the children started to gain an awareness of the different dimensions of the objects, and the refracted images of their hands, faces, and tweezers as they reached and looked into the compartments.  It is a great sensory experience where they are perceiving themselves and objects from different points of view. 

After exploring for some time with gemmies and buttons, the children then started to place pom poms in the compartments.  The pom poms are easier to grab with the tweezers, but still challenging and a great hand-eye coordination builder.

Now they are challenging themselves to get more than one at a time!

We then took it to the light table to have a different perspective.

Another thing the children love about the pom poms, is that if they are tossed into the air, they bounce into the compartments of the grate.

I love how this simple grate has become the source of so much play and exploration.

Through the presence of a simple stimulus the children are gaining hand-eye coordination and perception skills, and cognitive development through the senses.

Brr It's Cold Outside

It has been a very cold week, and we go outside in pretty much all weather, but the cold and wind have kept us inside twice this week, a rarity.  So, I decided to bring a bit of the weather inside for play.

Though it looks like it is melting in this picture. This little igloo was a ton of fun!

I took a card table and piled pillow on top, then covered with a duvet, I then took one of our tunnels and covered that with foam and a sheet, home sweet home.

 

The lights that I strung in the igloo had a nice glow and gave off extra warmth.

 

I don't think our little friends minded playing inside on these days.

I also talked with the children about freezing temperature, and made some ice cube "paints" for them to enjoy.  First they wet their paper with warm water, and then the fun began.

Some even attempted to paint with all four colors at once.

I recommend using a plate under the paint sticks while they are not being used, and be careful, several children wanted to eat them!

The end results were very similar to water colors, however it is just food coloring and water in ice cube trays.  It looks like tomorrow will be another bitterly cold day, so perhaps my littlest ones will enjoy these activities as well.

Color Mixing Lab the Next Phase: Studying Acids and Bases

Color mixing has become our big project at school.  If you have been following these posts you know we first started with several weeks of simple color mixing using water and food coloring.  The children were fascinated with the mixing of different colors.  We then experimented with adding our colored water to snow.  

The last week and a half we have been watching as our colors fizzed with baking soda and vinegar, so what next?  Well, why not some more experiments.  I boiled some purple cabbage and ended up with 4 cups of dark purple liquid.  The next day at school I put the cabbage juice in one of their tray compartments, and lemon juice and baking soda water in two other compartments.  The invitation was put out for exploration, lets see what happened.    

This student is pointing out to his friend that when the baking soda was added to the "purple water" the mixture began to turn blue.

Here we see what happened when the lemon juice was added to the cabbage juice, it began to turn pink.

 

Here we see a young scientist turning a blue mixture back to it's original purple by reversing the results  first baking soda, and then lots of lemon juice to turn it back.

When the children began asking why the colors were changing, I explained to them that lemon juice is what we call an acid and baking soda is what we call a base, the cabbage juice is neutral.  I asked them which one turns the cabbage juice from purple to pink and light purple, most told me the lemon juice.  So we talked about acids must then make things lighter.  I asked which made it turn turquoise and dark blue, and they said the water...which was water with baking soda, and we said that bases turn the color darker.

 

Each time the color changed,they were in awe, it was like magic because both the baking soda water and lemon juice are fairly clear, so the fact that they were mixing the colors was really exciting.

Trying at small amounts of liquid  had quicker results  as the little researcher in the photo above found out.  Another student in the picture below noticed that when she added her baking soda water first, the color changed on top but not on the bottom.

We had all sorts of variations of the three colors and questions and theories.  It was a lot of fun, but also a great way to approach science and the art of color mixing in one.

I can't wait to see what will be next in this color mixing journey!

Honoring the Dream

Today is the celebration day of Martin Luther King Jr's birthday, and not long ago I read some place that instead of this being a day "off," it should be a day "on."  Because I run a private preschool,

I always chose to have school on this day.  I think it is an important day to pay tribute and honor to Martin Luther King Jr, and not to just look at it as a day off from school or work. 

We started talking about "Dr.King" last Monday, shortly before his actual birthday.

Although the children of my school are little, they had a deeper understanding of his message and dream than one might expect of them.  We talked about peace and what that means to us.  We also talk about why Martin Luther King Jr's work was so important and what equality means. 

Different variations of this conversation were shared and talked about throughout the week.  What are our dreams, and how we can be loving and peaceful.  Each day I would share a little bit more with them, and they with me, though I had not shared that Dr. King was assassinated.  I was waiting to approach that subject, when one of my students raised his hand today and shared with us: "Danielle do you know that he was killed?"  I said "yes, I did know that."  This little guy went on to share with his peers; "He was walking out of his apartment and a bad guy shot him who did not like him."  Everyone got quiet for a minute and another child said, "how come?"  It is hard to tell children who are 3 and 4 why someone would kill another person.  I shared with them that sometimes when people do not agree with each other they make bad choices, and sometimes these bad choices really hurt another person, and this man made a very bad choice that day.  We expressed how it is sad, but we also shared that even though Dr. King died, his work continues and changes towards good keep happening.As I said, these little ones think deeply and know a lot.  Honest sharing can be very profound.

A song we have been learning all week which the children love, is a variation of Common's song "I Have a Dream."  I taught the children just the refrain which is:

I have a dream, (clap) we're gonna work it out, out, out

We're gonna work it out, out, out,

We're gonna work it out.

Repeat

I have dream, that one day

That one day

I will look deep within myself, I'm gonna find a way

I have a dream we're gonna work it out, out, out.

We're gonna work it out, out, out,

We're gonna work it out.

My Dream, my dream is to be free

My dream, my dream is to be free

My dream, my dream is to be free

My dream, my dream is to be free.

In terms of an art project for this day, I found it very difficult.  There are many art projects I have seen that the children can do, but none of these felt right, and none of them felt like they would touch upon the truer message of celebrating Martin Luther King Jr's birthday.

Then I came upon a quote by his wife, Coretta Scott King:

"The greatest birthday gift my husband could receive is if people of all racial and ethnic

 backgrounds celebrated the holiday by performing random acts of kindness through service to others."

After reading this I knew what I wanted the children to focus on.  We have talked in the past about doing a fundraiser for Hefer International, an organization that gives the gift of animals so that impoverished countries can begin a life of sustainability and the means to produce their own food.

To learn more, here is the link:

www.heifer.org

Our fundraiser will be a T-shirt sale featuring one or two drawings created by the children.  So, today the children created drawings of animal that we can use for this project.  This service project will be our tribute to Martin Luther King. 

It is nap time as I write this blog post, and we do audio stories the first half of quiet time to settle the children down for rest.  Today's story was from Rabbit Ear's Audio, Treasury of African American Heroes.  The story we listened to was the story, Follow the Drinking Gourd, a beautiful story about one family's escape from slavery by way of the underground railroad.  I highly recommend this audio book read by Morgan Freeman and music by Taj Mahal.

I also recommend the book I have a Dream Dr. Martin Luther King, JR., which we read during circle time.