Shaker Bottles from Sunny Days

Woo hoo! A SNOW DAY!

 Ok, enough celebrating. . . Get back to work Missy!

Have you seen Sunny Days in Second Grade before?  She is a great friend and creates a terrific blog. I have followed her from my first days of stalking people on blogs.

If you click on her link you'll see these very cool shaker bottles. And if your kids are anything like my kids, they love to shake and they love noise.
These shaker bottles have words inside that the kids have to try to find by shaking them and moving them around. There is a sheet for them to fill out when they find the word they are looking for.

And as far as the noise goes, it really isn't much, because it is made with rice. Really now, what's quieter than rice?  But even still, I can send two of my  kids out into the hall to play this game and they do very well with it.
So far I've made the Valentine one, but I'm working on the opposites and the synonyms.

I thought I would share with you my step by step process of how to make these. It's very easy, cheap and not very messy.

First you need a bottle like this one. It had Orange Juice in it, but you can buy other flavors of juice. Clean it out well. And let it dry completely. To remove the label, fill the bottle with very hot (maybe close to boiling) water. Let it set for a few minutes. Then peel the label off.  I  had to use some Goo Gone to remove the adhesive residue that was left behind, but it didn't take much.

Then I bought the cheapest rice I could find, alcohol, and food coloring. 

Place about 2-3 tablespoons of alcohol in the bag and several drops of the color you want. Seal the bag and smoosh it around until it is all covered. Repeat for each color. These are sandwich bags so they aren't very big. These 4 bags were the entire contents of this box.

Spread them out on newspaper to dry. It really doesn't take long, since the alcohol is 

 a drying agent anyway.

When they are dry you can mix any combination of colors that you would like to go into your bottles.

Denise is so creative and giving. She even includes a label to laminate and hot glue to your bottle.  There are cards to copy, cut, fold, and glue before laminating that you will put into the bottle. There is also a worksheet to match to the words inside the bottle. 

It really is a fun activity and I will gladly post more pictures of my kids using it when I get back to school. If you want to know more about these Shaker Bottles and what Denise does with them, 

go to Sunny Days in Second Grade.

And if you like what you see, be sure to sign up for her free newsletter. She's a very generous lady and I'm glad to have her as a bloggy friend.

Patty