In the Science Lab – Exploring Fasteners With Little Kids

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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.

Keep in mind that all preschoolers do things in their own time and on their own terms. What one is ready for, another might not be. Please use your best mama judgement when planning activities for your little kids. 

We’re unfortunately just about to wrap up our Science Lab curriculum kit. I could seriously do experiments every day and I’m sure the little guy could too. We love all things creative and curious around here.

The topic for today was Fasteners and it was definitely a blast. Because we’re still bouncing back and forth between the Little Goose Teacher Guide and the Mother Goose Time Teacher Guide, I’ve been choosing no more than three activities for each day.

Today’s “tray play” was Bandage Art and this was definitely the little guy’s favorite for the day. I literally have to hide the Band-Aids around here. It’s hilarious. If he can get to them, he opens them up one by one and sticks them to anything and everything he can find. Ditto with stickers. Needless to say, I do my best to keep both out of his reach. Thankfully, that made this activity all the more special for him.

He was so excited to make art this way. And as is usually the case with Mother Goose Time, there are so many ideas that I would’ve never thought of on my own. That’s just one of the many reasons I’m head over heels in love with this curriculum.

The skill listed for this particular “tray play” activity was Fine Motor and the supplies were nothing more than bandages (or stickers) and paper. How much simpler can it get, right?

The great thing about these activities is that I can just hand him the supplies and let him have at it. Everything else is basically intuitive. Give a toddler something sticky and what do they do with it? Not exactly surprising.

We also did something called the Missing Bolt Mystery. This activity was in both the Little Goose Teacher Guide as well as the Mother Goose Time Teacher Guide, but the instructions were a little different.

I chose the simpler of the two to do with the little guy, which was set out the nuts and bolts manipulatives with the nuts partially screwed onto the bolts and encourage him to finish screwing the nuts onto the bolts.

We also explored tightening the screws and then loosening them to the point that the nut falls off the bolt.

And last but not least, we talked about the shapes and colors of these awesome manipulatives. Can you believe these came in our Science Lab curriculum kit from Mother Goose Time. I seriously love them.

The last thing on our to-do list for today was the Spiral Screws activity. We rolled out the Play-Doh and wrapped yarn around it.

The marks left on the Play-Doh resemble the threads on a screw. Isn’t that cool?

This was just another one of those things that the little guy kind of, sort of did his own way. I love watching him explore different materials and this was definitely no exception. Needless to say, there’s a lesson in all of this. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again… The process is almost always more important then the product.

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!