Rythm sticks

Unsharpened pencils make very good rythm sticks. Bluebonnet likes "Little Drummer Boy," so this morning when we heard a recording of that I gave her two unsharpened pencils and showed her how to tap them together. We clapped, tapped, and marched, all through the song. She came surprisingly close to finding the beat of the song.

We have a constant stream of a variety of music in our home. I hope Bluebonnet is absorbing a lot of what is around here, musically.

Scientific demonstrations?

Bluebonnet has been discovering many things by doing them. This morning she was interested in pendulum motion, demonstrated by her swinging a string of beads and spools. She probably observed something about momentum too. She saw how air has to escape a vessel as liquid goes in by filling a watering can in the little tub that had filled with rainwater yesterday. We demonstrated gravity by lifting one end of her crawl-through tunnel to get the ball out of the middle of it. And they say science is unreachable.... All this stuff is just in the course of Bluebonnet's playing near mommy.

A note about the beads and spools: The beads are big colorfully painted wooden balls (1 or 1.5" diameter) that my dad made for her. The spools are a mixture of wooden and plastic ones I have saved. If you sew, save your spools! There are so many possible uses for them in playing and schooling- they can be stacked, counted, sorted, strung, rolled, raced, compared, used for patterns if you can paint wooden ones. They'd be a great thing to keep around for nieces/nephews/grandchildren, too, even if you have little space to keep toys.

Smart cookie

When I had the Olympics on yesterday, Bluebonnet identified the rowing sculls as "boats!". How she extrapolated that, I don't know, as I can't recall she's ever seen anything remotely like that, even a canoe.