Guest Post: Sensory Play with Glitter Play Dough

Posted on October 10, 2013 by Squarehead Teachers

Around Christmas time last year, we decided we were going to make glitter dough! I was just as excited as the kids to make it! All you need (of course) is play dough and glitter! (just shake that glitter into your play dough batch as sparingly or liberally as you’d like 😉

Click here for an AWESOME Home-made Play Dough Recipe!

These kinds of projects are my favorite, where you can switch it up depending on the season or mood! 🙂 We chose red glitter and decided to make our dough the color green because we were feeling festive!

Here are some fun items that I put out with our play dough to blend imagination with sensory play:

Look around your house for items that could be used with play dough that would otherwise be looked over or thrown out. It might surprise you what you can find when looking at items with this in mind. For instance, at the bottom of my picture there is a heart shaped lid to a small box of candy that was given to me one Valentine’s day that is perfect for cutting heart shapes with play dough!

Do you also see a small blue rubber robot? I gave my hubs a bunch of these funny guys as a gag gift of sorts when we were dating!;) Who knew our children would be requesting them each time we broke out the play dough?! 🙂

You might also be surprised to see a child who normally doesn’t like to play with play dough much, be totally engrossed with it once you add a few fun toys and tools!

Side note: We have also made Halloween glitter dough (we did orange play dough with purple glitter but of course the options are endless..:)Perfect for this “stay indoors more” time of year!!

About the Author: Kimberly loves sunsets, hates worms (believe you me, I have a story or two to share), adores (adore is stronger than LOVE you know!) her 3 children (including 1 sweet angel baby). She dreams of being a children’s book illustrator some day, delights in killer deals, keeping everyone happy, and bedtime at the end of a loooong day. Click here to check out Kimberly’s blog, Easy At-Home Preschool.

Interested in guest blogging on Squarehead Teachers? Click here.

Teacher Memes/Cartoons

Posted on August 30, 2013 by Squarehead Teachers

These cartoons are by Jonny Hawkins. His cartoons have been in Phi Delta Kappan, American Educator, Education Digest, Reader’s Digest and in over 600 other publications. He create the annual bestselling Teachers Cartoon a Day calendar (Andrews McMeel), which can be seen at bn.com and Amazon.

Hot and Cold Candy

Posted on June 28, 2013 by Squarehead Teachers

(Guest Post by Loralee Leavitt)

In hot weather, kids crave cold drinks. This makes summer a great time to learn about hot and cold temperatures. Here’s a candy experiment from candyexperiments.com that demonstrates how things dissolve differently in hot and cold water.

What to do:

1. Fill one cup with hot water. Fill another cup with cold water. (You can even add ice cubes to make it colder!)

2. Take identical pieces of brightly colored candy, such as Skittles, M&M’s, or spoonfuls of Nerds. Put half in the hot cup and half in the cold cup.

3. Watch the colors spread as the candy dissolves. Does the candy in hot water dissolve faster?

What’s happening:

Because molecules move faster when it’s hot, the candy in hot water dissolves much faster. The candy in ice water might take all night to dissolve.

*Loralee Leavitt is the author of the new hit book, Candy Experiments. Thank you to Loralee for being the first guest post! If you’re interested in being a guest on Squarehead Teachers, contact us via email at squareheadteachers [at] gmail [dot] com.