ABC Beads

Material from a previous blog:

We are in our second day of non-stop heavy rain at my house which can become stressful when you have 6 people (5 of them male) in 1000 sq. feet.  Yesterday, I had to banish the boys to the hay barn for a short noise break.  Today we all got involved with a box of ABC beads from Walmart ($3.67.)

The idea was to make one of those water filled bottles full of floating stuff to go in one of L4′s preschool activities in a bag which I use in his workboxes.  The basic idea is from Preschool Activities in a Bag Book 2 & is called ABC HIdden Treasure. The book instructs you to hide the ABC beads in rice but we had been wanting to make one of the floating bottles so we decided to do that instead.  Luckily our bag of beads included 300 beads so we’ll have enough to do a rice version as well.

Basically, we used an empty water bottle filled with 50% light corn syrup & 50% water (although I plan to experiment with this % & see how it changes) & added ABC beads (2 of each letter to make it a little easier) & glitter!  The whole crowd got invloved.  L4 found the letters to his name & then E6 & F9 wanted to do the same of coarse!

E6 & F9 went in order to make the complete alphabet in a line of beads (so we could make sure we got 2 of each letter in the bottle.)

Afterward we decided it would be best to store the beads sorted so we could easily find any letter we needed so E6 went through the remaining 248 beads & grouped them by letter alphabetically.  It was really great alphabetizing practice & fun for him too.

Here is E6 posing with his alphabetized piles of beads & the " ABC Under Water Search" we made for L4!