Pouring + Measuring w/ Rainbow Water Beads

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A huge thanks to Experience Early Learning (formerly Mother Goose Time) for providing us with their Experience Preschool curriculum for free in exchange for sharing our honest and authentic stories resulting from our personal experiences. It’s been such a huge blessing to us! As always, my opinions on awesome stuff for little kids are 100% my own.

If you’ve been following along with our Tot School Days, then you know our theme for this month is Science Lab. If not, what are you waiting for? You can check out all the awesome stuff we’ve been up to here.

One of our activities a few weeks ago was all about Who a scientist is. And it was definitely one of those lessons that really made me think about the approach I’m taking to parenting and preschool. After all, I truly believe in taking advantage of teachable moments as they occur. And let’s face it, our days are full of them.

I loved the concept of this activity, but I really wanted to own it. The little guy is completely and totally obsessed with water beads and I thought a pouring and measuring activity would be an awesome introduction to what we were already doing.

What you’ll need

• Translucent Activity Tub
• Rainbow Water Beads
• Plastic Beakers

Here’s how to do it

Put the rainbow water beads in the translucent activity tub and add water. Make sure to add enough water to not only cover the beads, but also for them to have space to expand. We usually do this the night before.

By the time we get up the next morning, everything’s ready to roll. Our water beads have totally expanded and now they’re all kinds of squishy. Lol…

I put the translucent activity tub on the floor, handed the little guy the plastic beakers, and a took a step back. He definitely loves sensory activities and this one was no exception.

For really little kids, this is an excellent time to talk about hard vs. soft and solids vs. liquids.

For not-so-little kids, you can use it as an opportunity to work on measuring skills. 50 ml is less than 100 ml, but I can use the 50 ml beaker to fill the 100 ml beaker, etc.

And of course little kids love just exploring these materials too. Filling each beaker and then transferring water back and forth between two or more of them.

Or filling one beaker entirely with water beads, dumping it out, and then starting over again.

Just talking to your little kids about what they’re doing builds language & literacy skills.

Open-ended activities like this one are awesome and the possibilities are literally endless. They can be used for everything from mathematics and reasoning to language and literacy.

Looking for more insight & inspiration? Here are the top 10 most popular posts from The Keeper of the Memories. You’re definitely not going to want to miss these!

Thanks so much for visiting. See ya next week!