Play Doh Sweets

Isaac received the Play Doh Candy Cyclone from Grandma for Christmas and it's been a huge hit. He's able to crank the handle himself, and loves seeing the resulting balls of play doh swirl down the helter skelter. It's motivated him to finally attempt making balls and sausages of play doh himself, and he enjoys making the little sweeties by hand. Fab for developing his fine motor skills. After a bit of complaint that I wasn't Daddy (Daddy is much more fun to play with), we settled down to almost a couple of hours of play doh play.

After he'd made as many sweeties as we wanted, we worked on putting them into size order. This was actually a really tricky task, as the shapes of the sweeties were very variable, so it was hard to assess which had the larger volume in some cases. But we managed to agree on a sequence. 

The fancy word for this skill is seriation.

...relationships can exist within categories. This is illustrated by the ability to arrange similar objects according to some quantified dimension, such as weight or size. This ability is called seriation. A seven-year-old can arrange eight sticks of different lengths in order from shortest to longest, indicating that the child appreciates a relation among the different sizes of the objects....

"The sweeties looked yummy and good!" - Isaac, aged 3 years, 10 months

Vampire Squid

This morning, Isaac's body wanted to wake up quite a while before mine, so when we got downstairs, we snuggled under a blanket for a while and watched Octonauts.  Today's episode featured a vampire squid, and Isaac straight away wanted to make a vampire squid from lego.

He then wanted to make more sea creatures - an orange anemone, and a yellow, red and orange cuttlefish.  The yellow octopus, the blue sailfish and the yellow lemon shark are courtesy of Daddy and Isaac, and the red sparkly anemone is a previous creation.

Later in the day, Daddy and Isaac found some youtube videos on vampire squid.  Then we all did some reading about vampire squid.

Things we've learnt from Octonauts about vampire squid:

• They are reddish
• They leave in the deep sea where it's always very dark
• They look like they have yellow eyes on the top of their head but they are really two lights
• They have two black eyes on the front of their body
• They have webbing between their tentacles that forms a cape like structure, hence the name
• They pull up their tentacles like a cape when scared
• They have spikes along the underside of their tentacles

Things we've have learnt about vampire squid from reading and watching videos:

• Its full name is the Vampire Squid of Hell (Vampyroteuthis infernalis)
• It's not a true squid, but a cephalopod that shares characteristics with both squid and octopuses
• It squirts bioluminescent mucus from its arm tips.  This mucus which contains lots of little blue orbs of light
• The vampire squid is covered in photophores, meaning it can create flashes of light all over its body.
• There are two small white discs on the top of the head, which were initially thought to be photophores (the lights mentioned on Octonauts), but they are actually photoreceptors.

"They cover themselves up when they're a little bit scared, but when they're really scared, they squirt ink slime!" - Isaac, 3 years, 10 months