Magic Water Beans Fun!

It was a nice sunny morning when we arrived this morning and we were happy to see our teachers and friends in the classroom. On the main table, we saw a whole range of water containers again but these were a different shape from those out yesterday.

There were some large square containers and some smaller round glass ones too. There were 2 big bottles of water and some small things in trays. The teachers told us that the small things were ‘magic beans’ and they were lots of different colors and very small. The teachers said they were something that could be measured in millimeters, whatever they are! We poured the water from the bottles in to some jugs and then carefully filled our chosen container with water. Some of us used a funnel for the smaller glass containers so that we didn’t spill it. We put some nice shiny ocean shells, little dolphins and other shapes in the bigger containers first to make them look pretty. We then took the little ‘magic beads’ and carefully dropped them into the water.

The beads immediately sank to the bottom of the containers and settled there. We moved the water containers to the smaller table and when we came back a few minutes later the beads had started to grow, they werenow about 5 millimeters, and when we looked carefully with the magnifying glasses we saw they were beginning to look like glass marbles.

They continued to grow through the morning and each bead is now about 10 millimeters in diameter and look extremely pretty. We wondered what they will look like tomorrow and how big they will grow. The wooden cubes, fishing rods and pirate dress up costumes were very popular this morning on the carpet area with many of us stacking the blocks up one by one and then knocking them down. On the second art table we saw some Montessori wooden shapes in different colors and when we matched the colored pieces we made shapes such as squares, rectangles, parallelograms, diamonds and trapeziums.

After packing away the toys today we quickly had our yummy snacks so that we could head to the park before the hottest part of the day. The sun was very strong but we made sure we put on some sunscreen and bug-spray before going with our water bottles too. We had a lot of fun playing ‘What’s the time Mr. Wolf’, using the slide and even found a huge caterpillar which the teachers said we shouldn’t touch as those hairy ones make your skin itch. In circle time, we all sat together on the main table and did some science experiments using water. We were surprised to see how a pencil appears to bend when we put it into the water container. We wondered how that is possible and also noticed that the end of the pencil in the water also appeared larger than the end out of the water….strange.

We thought it might be something to do with the water being clear and so we added some blue food coloring to the water but the result was the same again… bent looking pencil, enlarged too! We think it has something to do with water making things look different…More tomorrow 😊

Have a great afternoon,

Love,

Darren, Chiaki and Natalie