Homeschool: Magic Tree House Activity

Eep! I'm so excited to share a peek with y'all of some of our homeschool activities! Hopefully this can be a regular thing, but I never promise to be on my A-game, so who knows! 

Anyway, this year, I'm really wanting to foster a love for reading with Adalyn. Math is her favorite subject, and she's really good at it, but she does not love reading. I asked her what type of books she wanted, and she told me that she wanted to read the Magic Tree House books, because her 1st grade teacher had started reading them before school ended last Spring. So, I hopped on Amazon, and bought her the first 4 books in the series. I will gladly buy the girls books all day long. 

Magic Tree House is about a brother and sister who find a treehouse in the woods near their house, and it's full of books. He makes a wish, and they magically go to the land of the book they're looking at. In the first book, they travel back to the time of the dinosaurs. 

The book was an easy read, and we finished it within a few days. I usually read to Adalyn while we are waiting at sisters during their activities. 

My plan, is that when we finish a book, the girls will have some sort of STEM or fun activity to fit it's theme. Megan and Gretchen were both super pumped even though they didn't read the book. (Actually, Megan picked it up and read about half of it. )

I had wanted to do our first activity outside, but we woke up to a cloudy, rainy Saturday morning. So, we improvised. I purchased a set of "grow" dinosaurs from The Dollar Tree for our activity. We used the phone flashlights to trace a shadow of our dinosaurs. Each girl had a different dinosaur. 

Megan had the coolest dinosaur shadow! 

After they traced the dinosaur, we measured to see their size before we put them in water to "grow"

The instructions said to put the dinosaur in luke warm water and that it could take up to 6 days to grow 600% bigger. So, we filled up their sand pail buckets with water, tossed in the dinosaurs, and put the buckets outside on the patio so they wouldn't spill in the house. 

The girls have had SO much fun checking on their dinosaurs each day and pulling it out to see how much it's grown. 

For our next activity, we made dinosaur eggs! I used 1 1/2 cups of baking soda and 1/2 c. of water and mixed it together to make a paste. 

We used tiny dinosaurs, and covered them with the baking soda mixture and formed "eggs" around the dinosaurs.

Our eggs were not perfect! I bet you could use plastic eggs though and make them a little prettier.

Addy was enjoying the mess! 

Each of the girls was able to cover 5 dinosaurs. This was messy, but so fun. Once the dinosaurs were all in their eggs, we placed them in a dish and put them in the freezer. It takes about 45 minutes for them to freeze solid.

After lunch, we pulled out our dinosaur eggs. You can see that some were covered better than the others.... and if you want to be real creative, you can use a q-tip and food coloring to paint dots on the eggs, before you freeze them. 

Then, it was time to "crack" the eggs. Each kiddo got a bowl of vinegar and a pipette and used the vinegar to crack the egg. 

Baking soda will bubble when it's mixed with vinegar, so this was a cool scientific reaction to watch. 

Y'all, this activity was fun. Even Gretchen enjoyed it, and it kept the girls busy for a while! The dinosaurs that had the most "shell" around them took much longer to crack open, and it was a great fine motor skill to squeeze the pipette to fill it with vinegar. 

We let our growing dinosaurs stay in the water for about 6 days. Once they had grown, we took the dinosaurs out to measure to see how much they actually grew. 

Adalyn's grew about 3 inches bigger! 

I'm hoping that every other weekend, we can do some sort of activity that fits whatever book Adalyn is reading. And we're looking in to more book units for Fall.... I really want to read Charlotte's Web to them, and we're slowly working our way through the Little House books with Megan, so I've been pinning some activities to accompany the books. 

Since the girls knew I had a surprise activity after Addy was finished with the book, she was really motivated to let me read to her. Gretchen and Megan kept trying to guess what we would be doing with all of the dinosaurs, and they came up with lots of great ideas! I may even have them plan out some activities for us as we get further along because they're so creative!