Thursday, October 13, 2011

Science Activity - Charting Favorite Fruits

If you happened to read my Lesson Plan Week 7 post earlier this week, you might remember that I decided to switch a few things up regarding Math and Science.  One thing is that I want to start doing one science activity or 'experiment' each week in addition to the one more nature related activity that we have been doing.  

Trevor loves watching Sid the Science Kid on PBS.  The kids are slightly crazy on the show =) but I think that the 'experiments' that they do are really solid for beginning little scientists!  So, I was excited to find that on PBS Parents they have a list of each episode and instructions for how to do the experiment that they did on the show!  I went through the list and picked a few that I thought would be age-appropriate and interesting for Trevor.

We did our first one this week and it was about making a chart.  The purpose of this activity is to collect data and display it in a way that we can analyze it (on a chart!)

They suggested making a chart about people's favorite fruits.  We recorded our favorite fruits, asked daddy and Mackenzie, and called all three sets of grandparents to see what their favorites were.  I wrote the names of the people, and put pictures of the people for names he was unfamiliar with reading (sorry, I couldn't find my picture of Grandma and Grandpa Berry!)  Then I wrote the name of the favorite fruit and Trevor drew a picture (his drawing skills still need some honing =)

We practiced reading the chart (very basic..."What was Grandma Schoonover's favorite fruit?")  Then I asked him some more difficult questions so he could analyze the data ("How many people liked bananas?"  "Did more people like apples or grapes?")  It was great for early science skills as well as early math skills (and reading if you count sounding out names).  Here is what our chart ended up looking like...


(Mackenzie decided to be an artist at the bottom with a pencil =)

This was a good, fun challenge for him!  Also, it was very simple and required really no prep on my part.  I am looking forward to doing more of these types of activities in the future!  I definitely don't think that science needs to be started with preschoolers, but this kind of activity is fun.  If you do science with your little ones, I'd love to hear what you do or what resources you use.

Happy Charting!

I'm linked up at:


Growing HomePhotobucket            
Hip Homeschool Hop Button

3 comments:

  1. What a fun activity! I am starting a Linky Party if you want to link up at http://livinglifeintentionally.blogspot.com/2011/10/first-ever-linky-party.html

    ReplyDelete
  2. I used to do something like this with my students. Love how you have done this with your family. I am a new Twitter follower from Living Life Intentionally Link Party. Vicky from www.messforless.net

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks for stopping by and for following on Twitter, Vicky!

    ReplyDelete

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...