Daily Idea #325: Salt Dough

Mother’s Day is on Sunday and while I did some daily ideas last year around this time to thank our moms, I figured we could always do a few more this year to show our love for moms. So, for today’s daily idea we are making salt dough in which we can then make personalized charms.

INGREDIENTS:

1 cup flour (or gluten free flour)

1/2 cup salt

1/4-1/2 cup water

Mix together the flour and salt. Starting with 1/4 of a cup, add water slowly to the flour and salt mixture. Knead together. The consistency should be firm and smooth— definitely not sticky. Separate the mixture into small sections (you decide how small) and roll into a ball. Then, flatten the ball with a “rolling pin”— some have said markers work really well as rolling pins. Once flattened to about 1/2 cm push a finger onto the salt dough to make a fingerprint or use small letter stamps to display a message. Bake at 250 degrees for about an hour or until hard. Let cool and paint.

NOTE: If you want to make this into a hanging charm make sure to make a hole in the dough before you bake it.

Daily Idea #324: Dice Roll

We are always working on number recognition and math in some way, shape, and form in our home. I found this game on inspiredelementary.com and thought we would try it for today’s daily idea.

On a blank piece of paper, draw a 10X10 grid big enough to write the numbers 1-100 with one number per square. Each player gets a different color marker. Taking turns, each player rolls two dice and counts that many spaces on the board starting at 1 for their first turn and continuing through to 100. When the player counts out their spaces for that turn and lands on the last space they must say that number. If the number is said correctly they then mark that space with their marker (either with an X or by outlining the square). If they don’t say the number correctly, they loose their turn and the next player goes. The player that makes it to 100 first wins!

Daily Idea #323: Ring Toss

Ring toss games are always fun— they have a degree of difficulty for any age that keeps it engaging and makes you want to get those rings over the posts.

Now imagine ring toss game taken to the nest level. Target and Walmart have round pool floaties that level up this simple ring toss game. Get one or two of the round pool floaties (the ones that you use to float in a lazy river). Once it is blown up, take turns having each person be the post for your ring toss and try to throw the pool floatie to land around the “post”.

Daily Idea #322: Post It

Today’s daily idea is a super simple game and all you need are post it notes. Each player will get a large stack of post its— the goal is to see how many post it notes each person can stick to their own face. That’s it. Have fun:)

Daily Idea #321: What If?

We play the “what if” game in our house on a pretty regular basis. “What if we are at a park and you don’t see me?” “What if I told you I was picking you up from a class and someone else comes that you were not expecting?” “What if you are at a friend’s house and want to come home without letting your friend know that you want to leave?”

For today’s daily idea, we are playing the “what if” game but with fire safety as the theme of the questions. We will come up with a plan as to how to get us all out of the house and to a safe meeting place if there is a fire. We will discuss and review how to use a fie extinguisher (I’ll attach a picture of how to use one below). We will also go over who to call and what to say on the phone if there is a fire (your name, your address, your emergency…)

Daily Idea #320: Stop, Drop, and Roll

Since we started going over fire safety, I figured the next logical step was to go over what to do if your clothing should catch on fire. As a child, I felt that this was bound to happen at any moment and I was always going to be prepared with the “Stop, Drop, and Roll”. Thankfully, it is not as common as I thought, but with campfire season coming up as well as having a gas stove, it could happen and it’s always better to be prepared.

For today’s daily idea, we are going to “Stop, Drop, and Roll”. Anyone can yell out, for the whole day, “STOP!” Everyone then needs to stop, drop, and roll. I found a song to go with it (sung to the tune of Frere Jaques) on rubberbootsandelfshoes.com

Daily Idea #319: Low Crawl

My kids have recently been asking about fire safety. Before lock down they had participated in a few fire drills through their “unschooled” classes (we call it homeschool but we were hardly ever at home). However, that feels like a lifetime ago and now that my kids have discovered their love of cooking, I figured it was a good time to bring back some fire safety instructions.

For today’s daily idea, we are going over the fire/smoke crawl. When (g-d forbid) a fire starts in your home, the smoke and the flames can be overwhelming. A good thing to remember is that smoke rises. The closer you get to the ground, the better the air quality. In order to get out of the house and get to safety, get down on your belly as low as possible and army crawl to a door or a window.

In order to practice this move, one person throughout the day will call out “low crawl!” Everyone will then practice their army crawl across the room.

Daily Idea #318: Silent Movie

We have a lot going on with classes and homework today so we are going to have a quiet daily idea. We are going to turn on a movie this afternoon when all of our work is completed. However, we aren’t going to watch the movie with the sound on. We are going to mute the TV and then we are going to make up our own dialogue.

Daily Idea #317: Straw Worms

Watching the natural laws of the world be transformed right before your eyes is pretty incredible; that is probably why magic tricks are so fascinating. With the “straw worm” trick it’s a matter of science, but the whole thing just blows my kids’ minds. I only taught this trick to my kids a few weeks ago and I am still shocked it took this long for me to show the magic of “straw worms”. I think my dad was keen to show me this trick when I was no older than 3 and it wasn’t something we got to do all the time. What made it special was that it was only done when we went out to a restaurant to eat and we received straws with our drinks (fancy, I know).

All you you need for today’s daily idea are straws with paper wrappers and a small amount of water. The first thing to do is take the paper wrapper off the straw— you want to hold the straw upright and smush the paper down the straw until it’s nothing more than a hollow scrunched up tube. Then, using your straw, take a bit of water and dribble it over the smushed up tube. Watch it expand before your eyes!

Daily Idea #316: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

To round out our week of celebrating the earth we are going over the 3 R’s: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

The first thing we are going to do for today’s daily idea is to come up with ways of reducing our carbon footprint. I am going to let my kids come up with various ways they can help— turning off the water while brushing teeth, turning off lights when you leave a room, knowing what is trash/recycle, etc…

Then I am going to collect a few items from around the house; scrap paper pieces, plastic bottle tops or food pouch tops, baggies (both plastic and reusable), etc… and we are going to decide if we should reuse these items or recycle them.

Once they are sorted, we will put the recycled materials into our green topped trash (the trash cans are different colors based on where you live) and then I am putting my children to task to see if they can create something new with the materials they have sorted into the reuse pile.

Daily Idea #315: Clean Up!

For today’s daily idea, in honor of Earth Day, we are going to help clean up. We are headed to a local park armed with a trash bag and gloves to pick up some trash. For those kids who may grumble about the clean up, make it into a competition; see who can pick up the most pieces of trash (empty water bottles, papers, plastic bags…). Set some ground rules about what the kids are allowed to touch and not touch to keep the clean up safe.

HAPPY EARTH DAY EVERYONE!

Daily Idea #314: Eat Dirt!

My 7 year old is obsessed with asking “would you rather” questions right now and he likes to make them as weird as possible. Many of these questions revolve around food— i.e. would you rather eat frog guts or or cow poo? Delicious, isn’t it? 🤮 For today’s daily idea, I am going to ask him if he would rather eat mud and worms from a bowl or in a jar.

ITEMS NEEDED:

• gallon sized plastic bag

• large mixing bowl

• whisk

• a rolling pin or something to break up the cookies into small bits

• Serving bowls or mason jars

• 1 15-oz. package chocolate sandwich cookies (like Oreos)

• 1 3.9-oz package chocolate instant pudding

• 2 cups cold milk

• 8 oz. whipped topping (like Cool Whip)

• Gummy worms

Let’s get started by making the “dirt”. Place all of the sandwich cookies into a gallon sized plastic bag. Using the rolling pin smash the cookies. Keep crushing up the cookies (cream filling and all) until there are fine crumbs.

Then follow the instructions on the pudding box to make your pudding. Usually it entails pouring the pudding mix into the bowl and adding milk. Then, whisk that together until the pudding powder is dissolved into the milk and there are no more clumps. Let it sit for a few minutes to thicken.

Add the whipped topping and just under half of the crushed cookies to your pudding. Fold the mixture together until it is fully blended.

Divide the pudding mixture into the serving bowls/jars evenly. Add a few gummy worms to each bowl and more of the cookie crumbs and voila! Enjoy your mud and worms!

Daily Idea #313: Shrinky Dinks

Remember shrinky dinks? If you don’t or have never seen nor heard of them, they are plastic designs that you color in and then place in the toaster oven to turn into much much smaller designs. They could be worn as earrings, on a necklace, or sometimes even as a keychain. Watching the magic of your regular sized art shrinking down was the best part of the whole process.

For today’s daily idea, we are going to make our own shrinky dinks with recycled materials. You’ll need a plastic egg carton (Trader Joe’s usually has some small packs of eggs in plastic), sharpies, scissors, a hole puncher if you want to hang them from something, parchment paper, a baking tray, and an oven.

First heat the oven to 300 degrees. Then cut out each plastic cup from the carton. Try to make the top edges as smooth as possible. Use the sharpies to color in/design a pattern on the inside of the cup. Punch a hole into the cup near the rim. Place the egg cups on the baking sheet lined with parchment paper and pop them into the oven for about 3 minutes. Make sure you turn on the oven light so you can see the magic happen! Carefully remove them from the oven and let them cool. When they are cool to touch, use some twine, a small chain, yarn, whatever you’d like to display your recycled pieces.

Daily Idea #312: Silly Grass Planters

Earth Day is this week! To honor and celebrate our beautiful planet, we are going to be doing daily ideas with this theme in mind.

For the first daily idea, we are making recycled planters. You’ll need a few empty water bottles, the caps from the bottles, googly eyes, glue, soil, and flower or grass seeds.

Collect your empty plastic water bottles. Make a mark about 1/3 of the way down the bottle and carefully cut the top section off of the bottle. If you have some sharp edges, you can use a nail file or sandpaper to smooth them out a bit. Using the lid from the bottle, glue that onto the front of the planter to make a nose for your planter’s face and attach googly eyes. Fill your planter 2/3 of the way with soil and place a few seeds (any grass or flower would work really well) just under the surface of the soil. Put a small amount of soil on top of the seeds and water until just damp. Put your planter in a sunny location and water every other day with enough water to just dampen the soil. Depending on the seeds, you should start to see growth within the first week of planting!

Daily Idea #311: Strategy

Today’s daily idea comes from an ancient strategy game. From what I have found, no one seems to know its origin, only that it was played from Asia to the Middle East.

The game begins with 16 stones (anything small can be used as game pieces— legos, matches, coins…). Arrange the 16 game pieces in a triangle with 1 piece in the first row, 3 in the next row, 5 in the next row, and 7 in the last row. Each player takes turns choosing one row and removing as many game pieces from that row as they’d like. The goal is to leave the other person with the last game piece because the person who picks up the last game piece looses the game.

Daily Idea #310: Stroop Effect

Have you ever tried nodding your head while you say the word no? Or tried to count in your head when someone else was saying the wrong numbers? When your are trying to say one thing while your brain registers something different, it is extremely challenging.

For today’s daily idea we are going to have fun with the Stroop Effect. In the picture below, there are many colors written; if you look closely, the colors do not match words. The whole point of this brain exercise is to say the name of the color you see, not the word you read. For example, if the word says “red” but it’s color is white, then out loud you say, “white”. See how long it takes you to get them all correct and count how many times you make a mistake each time you go read them.

Daily Idea #309: Laws of Motion

Ever wonder how a magician pulls a tablecloth off of a completely set table without moving the place settings? Well, for today’s daily idea we are going to try to do this but on a much smaller scale. All you need is a cup (if you are using a plastic cup put a little bit of water in the bottom to keep it steady), a small piece of cardboard from a box (it should be big enough to completely cover the mouth of the glass), and a stack of coins.

Place your cup on a flat surface. Next, position the cardboard over the mouth of the cup. Then start with setting one coin on top of the cardboard. Flick the cardboard off of the glass and see if you can get the coin to fall into the glass underneath. When you are able to get the coin in the glass, add a coin to your stack. Keep adding a coin to see how many coins you can pile up on top of each other and get into the glass.

Daily Idea #308: Hand Stacker

I’m an only child. Being an only child has it’s benefits. However, there were many times I had to use my imagination because I didn’t have anyone else around with which to play. Now, my dad is kind of a big kid. When we would go to a restaurant and service was a little slower than I could handle, he would inevitably put one hand on the table which signaled the hand stacker game.

The game is super simple and it’s not even like there is a winner; it’s just plain fun. One person places their hand (palm down) on a flat surface. Each person (for however many people are involved) then places one hand on the stack. Once each person has one hand in this pile of hands, place the other hand on the stack one at a time (hence, hand stacker). The person whose hand is on the bottom now has to pull their bottom hand out and place it on top of the stack. Each person, subsequently when their hand reaches the bottom of the pile, has to pull that hand out and stack it on the top. The game continues until you either laugh too hard to continue or until the players get too confused as to whose hand is really on the bottom of the stack.

Daily Idea #307: Questions, Questions, Questions

Kids love asking questions. They love asking questions so much that when one child asks me something, inevitably a few minutes later another child will ask the same question (sometimes with a slight spin). For today’s daily idea, we are all going to ask questions!

For this game, see how long everyone can go by answering a question with a question. For example, if I were to ask, “How are you this morning?” the next person could answer, “How should I feel this morning?” You can take turns or pose your questions to a specific person who then has to answer in return with their own question.

Daily Idea #306: Chess

I have always been a big fan of checkers. It’s a fairly easy game to play and strategy is key. Chess, on the other hand, seemed to have too many moves for me to follow and while I like thinking I’m a few steps ahead, chess players seem to be even more steps ahead than I will ever be.

However, my 7.5 year old started learning to play chess this year and has gotten everyone in the family involved. We found a chess set with the moves each piece is allowed to make on the actual piece (from Lakeshore Learning) which helps immensely! Plus, with chess.com he can go online and play whenever any one of us doesn’t want to play.

So my challenge for today’s daily idea, is to learn how to play chess (and if you already know, play a few rounds). This is a complete comprehensive guide as to how each piece moves.

Thank you to EnchanedYankee for this great cheat sheet!