Money and Magnets and Marhsmallows, Oh My!

Will stayed home from school yesterday with croup -- yuck! It was his first time to miss "real" school and he definitely didn't think staying home from school was cool. He really didn't want to miss out on math tubs (where they use manipulatives to explore math problems).

To keep us all busy and sane, and in an effort to recreate the fun that is Will's Kindergarten classroom (both yesterday and on Sunday), I broke out the money, magnets and marshmallows!

Will's class has been studying money for the past week and his teacher encouraged us to work with our kiddos at home. We started with sorting pennies, dimes, nickels and quarters. Goofy-faced boys!
Then we moved on to adding nickels and pennies mixed together. I wrote out the problems and Will used the coins to come up with the correct answer.
Yesterday, I decided to let Will go shopping at Mommy's Farm Stand for some produce. Mommy's Farm Stand has excellent prices, I must say!
The carrot cost 17 cents (3 nickels and 2 pennies).
Will bought a pear for only 15 cents. He put all his produce in a bag for Henry, who used it on Baby's camping expedition. Next, we moved on to a magnet exploration. Will is fascinated by how things work and we just got a book called What Makes a Magnet? by Franklyn M. Braney that is full of information and experiments. Will was so excited to gather household items like a bouncy ball, a twig, a nail, paperclips, rubber bands, paper, aluminum foil and coins to go fishing with a magnet!Of course, he discovered that his magnet fishing pole only picked up items made out of iron. Then we made our own magnet by rubbing a needle against a magnet. We put pieces of cork on both ends of the needle to make a compass. It worked! We put a black dot on the end pointing north and no matter how you turn it, it always comes back to north. Both boys thought it was a fun experiment. On Sunday afternoon, we made marshmallows ghosts. I drew a white ghost on black construction paper for Henry and let Will draw his own ghost. Then the boys put dots of glue on the white lines and glued on marshmallows to make marshmallow ghosts.

Of course, Henry's favorite part was eating a few marshmallows along the way! Super cute marshmallow ghosts! Being stuck indoors is no fun, especially when fall weather first comes to Houston, but hopefully all our indoor activities at least made it bearable for the boys. And best of all, everyone is healthy and back to school today!