tub 'o water

The other day, I grabbed one of the many craft books laying around, randomly flipped to a page, and ran through the house gathering supplies so we could actually do it.

Cork boats.  (I happened to have five corks laying around.  Isn't that amazing?)

Everyone enjoyed it for a short while.  Then it quickly became something else.  Joaquin decided to build a four cork raft.  And I decided to turn it into learning.

I started cutting out letters from the craft foam.  Then while they were floating in the water, I asked Diego to grab the "A" out.  He had a lot of fun doing this!  (If the water looks a little murky, it is.  The cork boats had playdough on the bottoms to balance them, and being homemade playdough, it slowly started to dissolve in the water.  It became ooey and gooey and not so fun after that.)

As I was typing this, I was thinking how this could even be a great reading activity for older kids...you could hook two letters together like "ay" or "oy" and ask them to pull out the one that says "oy" like in "boy".  If you took the time to cut out phonics patterns, you could even start to make words:

 'n'+ 'ight' = night.

Or throw all the letters in there and see if they could spell their spelling words.  Hmm, you might need more than one of each letter for that...but it still sounds a little fun.  They could even use them in the bath and stick the letters to the tub walls!