Shake Shake

I have pinned a ton of ideas (my user name is sharingiscaring) to use with the girls. I still haven't decided if I am homeschooling Gracie or not, but even if she does go to kindergarten it won't be for a few years (she will be one of the oldest kids in her class). We are pretty good on numbers, starting to work on basic addition and subtraction, know all the upper case letters and most of the lower case ones, and great with imagination. Most of the things I want to do with her are crafts, basic science experiments, and a few sight word activities. I have been trying to find a program to order for teaching reading, but so far I haven't found what I think is the right fit. Gracie can already recite stories, follow print from left to right, look at pictures for context clues, and recognize a few words so I think if we took reading at a slow pace she could definitely learn. Until I figure out what I'm doing with that I think we'll just do a lot of crafts, baking (like always), and work more on our writing (one thing Gracie really does have problems with-poor thing can't copy letters/numbers except for i, t, 1, and 7). I am really intrigued by the idea of sensory bins, but I thought I would start small and make some sensory bottles and see how much they got used, what kinds of things Gracie liked, and how they used them. There are tons of examples out there if you just Goggle "sensory bottles." So far they are a really big hit. I have made five (four with water, one with shredded paper):

You can use any kind of bottle, but pretty much all I had easily available was water bottles. Make sure to hot glue the lid on once you have filled the bottle.
 First bottle: water, silver fine glitter, beads, mickey mouse buttons, fabric flowers, and two pipe cleaners
Second bottle: water, a few squirts of dish soap, some squishy balls. I might remake this one, because the lid isn't completely tight, and it probably should be full to the brim.
Third bottle: Water, vegetable oil, two drops green food dye. Baby oil is probably prettier, but I didn't have any on hand.
Fourth bottle: Water, glitter, two drops red food dye. 

Gracie's favorite bottle is probably the one with beads (she calls them pinwheels). She likes to look for the Mickey button and watch the beads go up and down. Ruby loves shaking the bottle with "bubbles" in it. The last bottle I made was kind of different. I had an empty vegetable oil container that I just put shredded paper in it (Gracie loved to feed the paper in the shredder) and then dumped a variety of objects. It's kind of like an I Find book in a bottle. Gracie has to shake it, turn it, etc. to find the items. So far Gracie has spent the most time playing with this one. I put in plastic dinosaurs, a plastic lion (for some reason she looks for this the most), a ball, another Mickey Mouse button, some random other buttons, and a shake of star sprinkles.

I really found making this pretty quick, easy, and cheap. The hardest part is gluing the lid on. If you get too much glue or don't line the cap up just right there may be drips. I think it would be nice to have different size bottles, but I used what I had. We've also made bird feeders in the past few days so I will post about that soon.