By Rennu Dhillon

Craft 1

Goal: To develop your hearing senses and identify between sounds.
Materials: Plastic eggs (available at the Dollar Store), rice, dried beans,
popcorn, cereal, salt.
Procedure:
1. Take 3-5 plastic eggs.
2. Number each egg.
3. Fill each egg with different items e.g. Egg 1 – dried beans, Egg 2 – rice,
Egg 3 – cereal, Egg 4 – salt, Egg 5 – popcorn.
4. Now try and identify what is in each egg by shaking the egg and listening
to the sounds it makes.
5. Repeat the exercise with a friend and have them guess what is inside
each egg. Show them a list of items which they can guess from.
Additional Experiment: You can repeat the experiment using different amounts
of rice in different cups and listening to how the sounds differ depending on
the quantity of the item in the cup.
Explanation of what is happening:
Sound is made when the air around us is pushed and creates a sound wave. This
sound wave causes our eardrums to vibrate. Our brain can decide what sound
we just heard depending on how fast the ear drum vibrates or moves back and
forth.

Craft 2
Goal: Make a Kazoo or a Humming Flute
Materials: wax paper, cardboard tube ( from a left over kitchen towel or toilet
roll), tape or rubber band, pencil.
Procedure for a Kazoo:
1. Cut a small square of wax paper about 1 inch larger than the end of the
cardboard tube.
2. Wrap one side of the tube with the wax paper using a rubber band.
3. Poke a small hole near the covered end of the wax paper.
4. Decorate the tube with colors or stickers.
5. Now hum or sing a tune through the open end of the tube and feel how
the kazoo will vibrate depending on how loud your sound is.
6. Make different tunes by humming loud and soft into the tube and create
music.
You can repeat the same exercise using a toilet roll to make a flute.
Procedure for a Humming Flute
1. Using a pencil, poke 3-4 holes in the cardboard roll about 1 inch apart.
Now repeat the steps 1-6 above.
Using these techniques, people have created music over the years. Music can
be made using different things such as cans, wires, cardboard tubes, craft
sticks and bells.

Rennu Dhillon is the founder of Genius Kids Inc, “Never 2 Little 2 Learn”.
Dhillon has a BSc. in Pharmacy, DSc. Naturopathy. She has combined her
education and experience to develop an award winning curriculum at Genius
Kids, a very hands on learning program incorporating a full academic
curriculum to include public speaking, drama, science, art and cartoon art to
children ages toddlers to K.

By Enakshi Choudhuri

Is there change on the cards?

Change may be here at last and it is not the “change” that the different presidential candidates have been expounding upon everyday for the past few weeks and months. The change I am talking about is taking place in the corridors of the U.S. Department of Education, which has awakened from its deep slumber and realized that the new ‘fuzzy math’ is not working as well as they had thought it would.  It has taken twenty five years of math wars between parents, teachers and school administrators and repeated international trend studies indicating that American students are “mediocre at math”  to spur into action a National Mathematics Advisory Panel that put together their report after examining over 16,000 research publications and studies. Continue reading →

By Piya Mitra

Piya Mitra is an event planner. Under the banner of her company “Elegant Eventz” she has organized theme and birthday parties for both kids and adults.

If I ask you about your plans for this weekend most of you are going to say you have a birthday party to attend. Most of those parties will either be held at restaurants/banquet halls or crowded children’s birthday party places.
Birthday parties in the South Asian community are used as opportunities for socializing and networking for adults. The parties fall into two broad categories –

Restaurant/Banquet hall/Home – Food is the big factor here. A magic show thrown in for entertainment or a bouncy house. The rest of the time the children just run around the tables & chairs while the parents are busy chatting about work or catching up with each other. At the end of the party the kids get a favor bag full of candy and little toys that are thrown away or lost in a day. Continue reading →

Craft/Experiment 1

Goal: To learn about primary and secondary colors.
Materials: food coloring (red, yellow, blue), corn syrup, 2 paper plates (not
the plastic plates but paper plates)
Procedure:
1. Mix each food color with the corn syrup so you have 3 colors – red,
yellow, blue in 3 separate dishes or bowls.
2. Take each plate and using a pencil divide the plate into 4 parts or
quarters – e.g. like an apple into 4 parts.
3. Using finger painting techniques you will spread the paint in each
fractional part.

Plate 1 – finger paint red into one part. Now mix red and blue and paint thisinto the other part and see what color you make. Now mix red and yellow
paint into the 3rd quarter. See what color you make. Now mix all 3 colors
into the 4th quarter and see what color you make.
Repeat the steps using blue and then yellow.
Look at the different colors you have created. To be really adventurous, take
some white paint and mix in to create different shades or tints of the same
color. Write down the colors you make.
Yellow + Blue = Green
Red + Blue = Purple
Red + Yellow = Orange

Craft/Experiment 2

Goal: Make a Color Wheel using primary and secondary colors
Materials: Paper plate, red, blue, yellow paints, brushes, water.
Procedure:
1. Take a paper plate and draw a circle about the size of the plate. Now
divide the circle into 12 sections or slices.
2. Color code each section as shown in the picture.
R- red
RO –red Orange
O- orange
OY – orange yellow
Y – yellow
YG-yellow green
G-green
BG – blue green
B- Blue
BV- blue violet
V- violet
VR – violet red
3. First paint the main primary colors into the sections – Red, Yellow
and Blue.
4. Then mix equal part of red and yellow into the RY section and see
what color you get? It should be orange. Take that new color and paint
it into the section labeled O.
5. Repeat the exercise with each color and color combination.
6. You will create a color wheel that you can dry and keep forever.
Bonus: Experiment mixing several colors and create your own shades
and tints.

Rennu Dhillon is the founder of Genius Kids Inc, “Never 2 Little 2 Learn”. Dhillon has a
BSc. in Pharmacy, DSc. Naturopathy. She has combined her education and experience to
develop an award winning curriculum at Genius Kids, a very hands on learning program
incorporating a full academic curriculum to include public speaking, drama, science, art
and cartoon art to children ages toddlers to K.