Math Monday: Sensory Play with Rice and Numbers

I bought two sets of these super cute magnetic wooden 

numbers for less than $1.00 on Amazon

I then buried them in a plastic shoe bin filled with rice:

The girls had a great time digging through the rice finding numbers 

to match to their identical counterpart on the table. 

My 4 year old said that next time it would be better if we had groups of items 

set out on the table and she would find the number that matched how many were in each group.

I then set out a bunch of different measuring cups and spoons on a sheet on the floor. 

We explored how many scoops of the various cups it would take to fill one whole cup with rice.

Sunday Science: Butterfly Life Cycle

The best way to learn about an insect's life cycle is to watch it first hand. 

A really easy and amazing insect to care for is a butterfly. 

We used the kit by Insect Lore and love it:

You receive a net habitat and a cup of caterpillars with food. Once the caterpillars form their chrysalis you transfer them to the net.

Our butterfly emerging from it's chrysalis

 Butterflies grazing on juicy oranges

 Butterflies mating!!! We did not expect to see this.

 Butterfly laying over 70 eggs.

 The instructions said to let the butterflies go within a week and we should not have to worry about eggs. These eggs appeared 5 days after the butterflies emerged.

If you look closely, there is a tiny and very hungry caterpillar on top of this leaf.

We let most of the eggs out in a field in upstate NY and kept a few at home on a bed of wet paper towels and leaves.

And of course we had to introduce him to the famous hungry caterpillar by Eric Carle (in Hebrew). 

There are tons of other activities that can be down alongside "The Very Hungry Caterpillar":

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