Yellow Ball Book Unit

Yellow Ball is one of the books from the excellent Before Five in a Row curriculum. This Yellow Ball Book Unit contains so many wonderful hands on activities. Enjoy!

This book screamed out to be used to learn more about the beach so I collected any other FIAR books that were vaguely beach themed along side a nice collection of specifically themed beach books:

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Yellow Ball Book Unit : Special 1-2-1 Activities

Whilst it won’t look like I’ve tried to rein myself in during this Yellow Ball book unit, I promise you I have. That said, there are 76 photos in this post, so I think I may have catastrophically failed!

Making Sand Dough

Each morning during our Yellow Ball book unit I put out some play dough at their table. They both really enjoy play dough and having different themed cutters and molds each week keeps it fresh and exciting. This week we made sand dough (4 cups play sand 3 cup flour 1 1/4 cup water 1/4 cup oil- mix together thoroughly), to go along with our beach theme and I let the little ones have some of our beach toys:

Yellow Ball Book Unit — Making impressions

Painting Pebbles and Egg Casts

A4 and I decided to paint a few of the pebbles we picked up at the beach and later on in the year we will turn them into Christmas presents:

Large pebbles painted and a few egg casts (A4’s idea)

Making Shell Shaped Soap

I picked up a soap making kit from the local charity shop which is perfect to go along with our Yellow Ball book unit.

Soap making kit
£1 at a charity shop, never been used!

I created the above activity tray for them to surprise Abigail with. I wanted to help her to make some soap to give as presents:

Having melted the soap bits, A4 added some red dye and some vanilla scent to the pot

Making a Sandy Desert

Of course, I needed to come up with lots of sand related activities for the seaside themed Yellow Ball book unit. Firstly, Becca and I made this sandy dessert. Becs made some simple yellow angel delight. She then chopped up Oreo biscuits and plain vanilla biscuits to make the sand:

After we had finished those she kept saying ‘more, mummy, more!’ so I quickly gathered the supplies together to make some edible sand for a snack I had planned later in the week…

Making Edible Sand

Becca divided some Fruit Loops into their different colours and then used the grinder to finely chop them into coloured sand:

We used Fruit Loops and divided them into their three colours

These were then set aside for a snack activity I had planned for later in the week.

Yellow Ball Book Unit: Tray Activities Together

Making a Bouncy Yellow Ball

Our main tray activity to go along with Yellow Ball was making bouncy balls. We had attempted some home made ones in our science on Monday using borax and glue (posting about that tomorrow). These bouncy balls were made using a kit we had purchased from Amazon, and it used some sort of powder, water and the molds provided. The result was a very bouncy ball. We used our normal Learning Resources science kit:

Whilst this activity was quick, easy and fun which is perfect for a tray activity, the polymer bouncy balls they made from scratch at the beginning of the week were a much bigger hit. B2 even hid hers under her top and went for a nap with it and it half melted and stuck fast. She lost some clothes to the bin that day!!

Coloured Sand Play

Another activity I had planned was for some sand play. I thought it would be fun to colour some sand but the play sand we bought was too dark in colour to be dyed successfully. So we opted for some fake sand in the form of salt, which we first dyed in zip lock bags using food dye: