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Inside the Beltway
Jul. 15, 2006
Cheap Shots: Milk Gallon Lids
In my last installment of "Cheap Shots", I wrote about those wonderful
plastic gallon jugs we buy milk (or juice or water) in. Guess
what, each of them comes with a free math manipulative. Yep,
those brightly colored lids are great for pre-math concepts: sorting by
color; making one-to-one correspondence of members of a set (for
example, can you put one blue one on each of these red ones?); identifying groups with the same number, greater number, or lesser number of members; etc.
They are great for early math concepts as well. You
can add or subtract groups. For example, you start with 5 lids
(count them together). The child closes his or her eyes while you
hide 2. The child opens his or her eyes and counts 3 lids and
tries to tell you how many you took. Then you switch roles and
the child hides the lids and you "guess" how many.
Groups of equal number can be added to illustrate
how multiplication is a "shortcut" way of adding equal groups. A
bigger group of lids could be divided into equal groups by "dealing"
the lids out.
The notion of "average" by putting together groups
of unequal number into a "pot" and then divide them equally.
I'm sure you all have a lot of things to use for
math manipulatives. You might enjoy recycling your plastic milk
lids to have some more!
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Jul. 13, 2006
Cheap Shots: Plastic Gallon Jugs
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Does
your family consume a lot of milk (or other drinks that come in plastic
gallon jugs)? Ours does! Most of the jugs get
recycled. Some get used for carrying water to the garden or
keeping water in the car. One fun thing to do with them is to
carefully, with a craft blade, cut away a section from the side and
bottom of the jug on the handle side, forming a large scoop. Make
several of these, buy a package of plastic "whiffle" balls or nerf
balls, and you can play "scoop ball." The ball(s) must be tossed
and caught in the scoop. It is played like monkey in the
middle. If you have several people, put some on each side and
some in the middle. The side teams try to throw the ball over the
heads of the people in the middle. The people in the middle try
to catch the ball. If some one in the middle successfully catches
the ball before it touches the ground, the one who tossed the ball goes
to the middle and the one who caught it gets to go take his
place. When we have a lot of people playing we usemore than one
ball at a time. We keep playing till everyone is tired or it is time to
come in.
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Jul. 12, 2006
Cheap Shots: Cereal Boxes
Living inside the Washington D.C. beltway is expensive, especially on
one income. So I am grateful for ideas for saving money. I have
learned a few and would like to share some with you. I hope you
share your ideas with me.
Today's "cheap shot" concerns cereal boxes. I
know a lot of families skip the whole cold cereal routine, but my
husband, myself, and 7 kids like it. We have found that Aldi's is
a good place to buy it. But when you buy the cereal, you also pay
for the packaging, so use it!
First, when you are done with the cereal, take
out the wax paper lining, shake out the crumbs, and store it. Use
the bag for wrapping sandwiches when you have to pack lunches, for
storing things in the refrigerator, for shaking chicken pieces and
breading in before baking, and for corn on the cob. Yes, corn on
the cob. Wash the cobs thouroughly and place a few, still damp,
loosely in the bag. Place the bag or bags in the microwave
oven. For my microwave oven, I cook on high for around 2 minutes
per cob.
Now what about the box. Most of them you
will recycle, I am sure. But when you need something to contain
magazines or reports, cut the top off and cut out a triangular wedge to
make a magazine holder shaped like the plastic ones in libraries. You
can cover it with construction, wrapping, or contact paper.
If you buy a box with a cool picture on it,
like the Cheerios Honey Bee, you can cut out the rectangle panel and
then cut the picture into pieces for a jigsaw puzzle. The first
one I made for my kids only had like 5 pieces but they enjoyed it.
Alternatively, you can cut out the cool
picture, punch holes around the edge, tie a long shoe lace onto it, and
voila, you have a lace up card.
I bet you can think of even more things to do with things we normally throw away.
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Mar. 7, 2006
Air and Space Museum - another free field trip
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One of the greatest free field trips in Washington, D.C. is the Air and Space Museum (one of the Smithsonian institutions). located right on the Mall. The exhibits are all free, though you do have to pay for the IMAX theater and for the Albert Einstein Planetarium. Keep in mind, on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday evenings at 5 p.m., the Planetarium offers a free program on the Night Sky.
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Mar. 6, 2006
Free things to do in Washington DC
I urge all of you to bring your family to Washington, D.C., at least once. One of the blessings we have here is a wealth of free field trips. I'll be highlighting some of them in this blog.
Last week, for example, some of us from CHE-DC (Christian Home Educators of the District of Columbia), took a field trip to the Rock Creek Park Nature Center and Planetarium. For Black History Month, the free planetarium show was about how slaves used the night sky to escape to freedom.
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