Today, we FINALLY did the potato printed snowman craft.
Jake immediately took a bite out of the potato and then started to eat the white paint. I cleaned him up and then gave him some paper to rip up instead. He enjoyed that.
Joe, at first, was really excited about the stamping. He thought the raisin eyes and pretzel arms were pretty cool and created a “four-eyed, four-armed snow monster”. After the initial excitement, Joe decided that a wind storm needed to sweep through and destroy the snowman. The activity lasted all of 5 minutes.
As the boys were making a fantastic mess of the kitchen table, I flipped through a new magazine called Humpty Dumpty that my mom had brought for Joe. I came across an activity called “Go Fish for Ice Cubes”.
I cleaned up the paint on the table and brought over a cookie sheet full of ice cubes, a wet string and a salt shaker. Jake, again immediately, grabbed an ice cube and started playing with it on the table. The sound effects and faces he made were pretty funny.
Joe started to swirl the cubes around on the cookie sheet while I placed the wet string on top of them. I handed Joe the salt shaker and he proceeded to heavily salt the ice cubes. We waited about 30 seconds and then lifted the string.
Joe giggled and then followed suit with Jake and started licking the ice cubes remaining in the tray.
I explained the why behind the experiment to Joe and Jake (who were too busy playing with the ice and licking the salt off the cubes to listen). Salt turns ice to water, which is why it is effective at making steps and sidewalks less slippery in the winter. Once the temperature of the ice refreezes, the string to sticks to the ice.
Since the table was a disaster, I served a messy lunch of rice, cheese, chicken and broccoli. Jake proceeded to make a giant mess. I “turned my back for 1 minute” and Jake was wearing the bowl on his head.
Luckily, not all of the lunch spilled out.
a pinch of homestead 