Our FREE Guide to Winter is jam packed with tips, tricks and inspiration to help your whole family get the most out of winter—and do it your way. Find our Winter 2022 Gear Guide with favorite gear from across our Tinkergarten community, too!
Our FREE Guide to Winter is jam packed with tips, tricks and inspiration to help your whole family get the most out of winter—and do it your way. Find our Winter 2022 Gear Guide with favorite gear from across our Tinkergarten community, too!
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Enjoy this sweet, simple way to harness the power of the sun to brew cooling ice tea and extract the flavors of fruits and plants this summer. We had no idea how easy it is to make delicious tea—set it and forget it! You just need a little patience...but the wait is worth it!
This activity is featured in our July Activity Calendar. If you do not yet have your free copy of the calendar, get it here.
The Guide
Gather Materials—You'll need a large jar or pitcher with a lid to start. Then, you'll need water, tea bags, herbs or slices of fruit. We use two one tea bag for every two ounces of water. Our kids love herbal teas like peppermint, hibiscus or fruit flavored teas. We love to include sliced peaches or citrus in our brews.
Fill the Jar—Enjoy filling the jar with water and tea bags, then cover the jar.
Place the Jar in the Sun—Place the jar in the sun, then wait about 5 to 6 hours. While it sits, it soaks up heat and brews the tea. If you can place it on top of stone or metal, it will absorb even more heat and brews even faster.
Remove it from the Sun—Once it has brewed to the strength you like, remove it from the sun. You can enjoy or refrigerate it.
Enjoy tea! When you are ready to enjoy, pour some of your sun tea over ice and ahhh! You can add even more fresh herbs and fruit slices to your glass for extra fresh flavor, too!
Spritz! If you brew peppermint tea, you can pour some of it into a spray bottle and spritz your skin. You'll feel cool as the water evaporates on your skin, and you may feel a little extra cool from the menthol in the mint, too!
Why is this activity great for kids?
Kids love to transform things, and that's just what you are up to when you make sun tea! It's also a captivating lesson in cause and effect to put clear water and tea bags into a jar only to come back and find something with such different color and taste. The chance to watch this happen as well as smell and taste the results dazzles kids' senses, too. Without asking too much, this sweet activity also helps kids learn that patience pays off, too.
Try a Free Class
Two class formats: try a free In-Person session (where and when available) or try Tinkergarten Anywhere, our on-demand product available anytime.
In either format, a certified Tinkergarten Leader will teach a Tinkergarten lesson and inspire your kids to play.
Sample the additional activities and resources families get each week to keep kids learning outside at home.
Curiosity means the ability and habit to apply a sense of wonder and a desire to learn more. Curious people try new things, ask questions, search for answers, relish new information, and make connections, all while actively experiencing and making sense of the world. To us, curiosity is a child’s ticket to engaging fully in learning and, ultimately, in life.
Why does it matter?
As a parent, this skill is, perhaps, the easiest to grasp and has the clearest connection to a young children’s learning. We all want my children to wonder, explore and drive their own learning and, better yet, to experience the world fully. Most teachers would agree that the curious children so often seem more attentive, involved and naturally get the most out of time in school. Even the research suggests that being curious is a driver of higher performance throughout one's life, as much if not more than IQ or test scores.
Behavioral Schema
Category:
Body Skills
What are schema and why should you care?
There are patterns of repeatable behavior known as "schema" that you can notice in your child's play during early childhood (~18months-age 5 or 6). No matter where you are in the world, these same schema are exhibited by kids. Experts believe that when kids repeat these patterns in different situations, kids develop physically and cognitively. In turn, they are better able to understand, navigate and interact with their worlds, resulting in transformative learning. Kids naturally become absorbed in repeating these patterns, and practice with schema is highly engaging for them.
“Children’s schemas can be viewed as part of their motivation for learning, their insatiable drive to move, represent, discuss, question and find out.”—Professor Cathy Nutbrown, UK
How are schema useful to parents and teachers?
First, it just feels great to better understand your little ones. Once you notice these patterns, your child's seemingly random and (occasionally frustratingly) repetitive actions suddenly appear elegant and purposeful. Best of all, once you realize that they are really exploring a certain schema or two, you can pick activities for them that give them the opportunity to practice them, increasing their engagement and extending their learning.
Does every kid get absorbed in schema?
These are universal patterns, but different kids will engage in schema in different ways. For example, some kids dabble in schema, engaging in several at any given time. Others move from one schema to another over time. Others still stay working on a single schema for years.
How should you support your child as they exhibit schema?
Exploration with various schema is built into Tinkergarten activities. It's also interesting to notice how some of the best kids' toys enable children to practice with schema.
To get started, check out the most common schema and see if you recognize these patterns in your child's behavior. If you do, check out our activities that help to extend his or her learning by supporting that schema. For fun, mention these to your friends as you watch their children at play. They'll be in awe of your observation skills, any maybe even refer to you as the toddler-whisperer?!
The scoop on common schema:
Transporting
You may have noticed that your child seems to spend lots of time picking up objects, putting them into a container, perhaps only to transfer them to another container or dump out the container and start again. Your child may also simply love to haul around hefty things (e.g. logs, books, blocks). Kids may also love to fill up wagons, carts, strollers, etc. so they can "transport" objects or people around.
Rotation/Circulation
So many children become engrossed in spinning around and around to the point of dizziness…who hasn’t?! Kids who are focused on rotation/circulation spin themselves or become fixated on watching things that rotate, like a wheel, or the clothes dryer. That is the magic behind rolling down a hill.
Trajectory
Many kids go through a phase or just always seem to like moving in straight lines. They probably like to walk along the cracks in the sidewalk, balance on the curb, walk along a log, climb up and down ladders or whiz down slides. Some can't get enough of those swings. They also love to throw, drop, roll and toss all kinds of things.
Positioning
Kids like to order, arrange and position objects or themselves. They may arrange blocks, cars, rocks or other objects in lines, rows, piles or patterns. Drawing, painting and sculpture work likely includes lines and patterns as well. Lining up may be a favorite activity, and where friends and family stand, sit or walk may be of particular interest.
Enveloping/Enclosing
Kids like to cover, wrap or enclose things and themselves. For example, your child may hide themselves under the bed covers, love to wrap up in a towel after the bath, or use a single crayon to cover a whole piece of paper during art time. You may also notice a time when your kids continue to find places to tuck objects or themselves out of sight (aggrrr, not the keys again!). They may love to sit in tunnels, climb into empty boxes, hide up in trees, build forts, or squirrel away in a little area under the stairs. Or, they may love to tuck treasures away into boxes, bags, pockets or hidden nooks around the yard.
Connecting
A child might spend a great deal of time connecting things to one another. You may notice that they love to join the train tracks together, link LEGOs in long chains, build “fences” out of blocks, each block touching its neighbor. They also love to use tape, glue, string, and other things that connect objects.
Transforming
Kids like to transform the shape, feel and look of things and themselves. You'll notice this when they are dressing up in costumes or putting on make up. These are your potion-makers and demolition crew, who may add milk to their mashed potatoes, make potions in the backyard, knock down buildings and towers, and mix all of the play-doh colors together...in short, they can be a big sister’s nightmare!
Sensory
Category:
Body Skills
What is Sensory Development?
Although some scientists classify as many as 20 senses, when childhood educators talk about "developing the senses," we typically mean developing the five standard senses: sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste. In addition to honing these senses, educators care about sensory integration, which is the ability to take in, sort out, process and make use of information gathered from the world around us via the senses.
Why does it matter?
The better kids are able to tune and integrate their senses, the more they can learn. First, if their senses are sharper, the information kids can gather should be of greater quantity and quality, making their understanding of the world more sophisticated. Further, until the lower levels of the brain can efficiently and accurately sort out information gathered through the senses, the higher levels cannot begin to develop thinking and organization skills kids need to succeed. Senses also have a powerful connection to memory. Children (and adults) often retain new learning when the senses are an active part of the learning.
So, if kids have more sensory experiences, they will learn more, retain better and be better able to think at a higher level. Makes the days they get all wet and dirty in the sandbox seem better, doesn't it?