What My Children are Reading: WATER by--Tara

We recently had the great excitement of winning this unique book from a giveaway at Live, Learn, Love.

WATER: by Tara

Tara has a series of books that came about from the fact that she has a son with autism. These books, with their simple subject matter and beautiful, glossy 8x10 photographs, are perfect for encouraging verbal practice with our youngest learners.
Even if your toddlers and preschoolers have no learning difficulty, these books get your child talking and discussing the wonderful photos and subject matter.
The book Water begins with a lovely poem. Even my older children enjoyed this.
The poem is full of adjectives, which we talked about with my early elementary aged kids. (since we are learning about this in our homeschool work)
Also with my older kids, we discussed which adjectives described the different pictures, and also thought of other adjectives that could be used to describe water.
After enjoying our new book, we had some fun with some "magic" water tricks.
Of course, for the school kids, these could be science lessons, but I decided to concentrate on the littles, and just enjoyed the mystery and surprise of these activities.
The first activity was the magic pepper in water trick.
Simple fill a white bowl halfway with water and then liberally shake pepper on top of the water.
Give your child a toothpick which has been dipped into dishwashing liquid.
When the toothpick touches the center of the pepper, the pepper "magically" repels away from the toothpick.
This experiment has a big WOW factor for little ones. (Make sure you have a lot of pepper , because this is done over and over again--if your kids are anything like mine--especially is big kids notice. Even my teenagers had to give it a try. Make sure to rinse out the bowl before trying this a second time to remove any dish detergent residue.)
At the bottom of this post you can see a little video of this.
Our next magically trick was to try and pick up an ice cube with a piece of string.
Again, fill a bowl halfway with water and then add some ice cubes.
This also served as a time to discuss the different states of water.
Try as they may, Kimmy, Gracie and Luke could NOT pick up the ice cubes with string.
And then, it was time for the "magic" ingredient.
I took regular table salt and shook it over the ice cubes and strings.
Make sure the strings are laying across the ice as you add the salt.
TA-DA!! It worked. "Magic" worked again. You will notice that Luke brought up TWO ice cubes. One of those cubes were Kimmy's.
This caused problems! Loud--problems!!

So, Kimmy got to try again. We got her a new ice cube, placed her string perfectly on top of the cube, and then Luke poured a generous amount of salt onto the ice cube.

Kimmy added a little more salt for good luck.

SUCCESS!!!!
Was she a proud and excited girl!!



Don't miss our great pepper experiment video!
Also don't miss checking out Books By Tara--you will be glad you did!!
You can check out many of our other water experiments that we have done in the past by clicking on this link.
Head on over to Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns for my What my Child is Reading posts.