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Whether you have a backyard or not, a baby pool or just a really deep dish of water in a cramped condo, did you know that water can be your best friend? Toddlers and water together require careful supervision, but they need little help from us to provide entertainment and, sometimes, learning!
We like to toss different things in the water and guess what will float and what will sink. An occasional ice cube is a cheap toy and no worries with storing it (just watch out for choking).
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| If the kids like to play with squirt guns, show them how to fill them up by submerging the empty ones in water until bubbles stop coming up. You can explain that the water is taking the place of the air. |
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| The feather floats! |
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| Get a watering can that's small enough for your kids to use. Water wheels are fun, too, and can be used with sand as well. |
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| You can buy a spider (this wire and bamboo kitchen implement) in the kitchen essentials aisle and use it to fish ping pong balls out. We have tons of shells that we put in the water and in our sandbox, but I didn't notice how beautiful these barnacles were until they were all wet. |
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| This big piece of driftwood floated for a little while, but when we returned from doing errands it had sunk. It was the topic of conversation with even the older children: Why would it sink? (It was waterlogged!) |
Extensions
- lessons on the three states of matter: gas, solid (toss an ice cube in), liquid
- "painting" bricks and dry wood with water
- point out bubbles everywhere (inside the ice cube, in a boiling pot of water, in the pool when you kick really hard, etc)
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| Bubbles and water go together...... |
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A vaporizer that makes mist can be fascinating! |
