Zebra crossings and pelican crossings

Look out for the bright orange beacon, marking a zebra crossing, together with the black and white stripes across the road. Explain that this is one of the safe places to cross the road, using the Green Cross Code. Explain the difference between a zebra crossing and a pelican crossing. A pelican crossing is located at traffic lights – there is no orange beacon or special marking on the road. When it is safe to cross, there will be a picture of green, walking man on the traffic lights and when your must wait, there will be a stationary red man.

Use this as an opportunity to make sure your child knows what to do to cross the road safely and encourage him to tell you where you should cross. Practice crossing safely. Making sure you hold his hand.

Road markings and signs

Look out for different markings on the roads, such as lines in the middle of the road, different lines close to the pavement, speed traps, parking bays, speed limit restrictions, warnings to slow down, and etc. what colors are used to paint these? Why does your child thing those colors have been chosen? Point out the various road signs. Can he guess what any of these mean? Explain some of the easier ones, for example, school, STOP, cross roads, roundabout, etc.

Give your child some dark grey paper and several colors of poster pain, including yellow, white and red. Explain that this paper represents the road and your child is going to try and find which color is the most suitable for marking marks on the ‘road’, bearing in mind that it is very important for these markings to be seen. Encourage him to try out the various shades of paint, to see which color is the most visible. Hopefully, he will understand why white yellow and red are used.

Sun

Point out what happens to pot plants or window boxes when it is very hot and sunny. Show him how the flowers droop over and dry up.
Look out for dark shadows when the sun is shining brightly.

Can you child tell you why flowers droop in the hot sun and what he needs to do about it to rectify the situation? Let him water the flowers and watch them stand up straight again. To show him that the flower stem has actually acted as a straw and sucked up the water, put a carnation in colored water and watch as the flower head turns the same color as the water.
Can your child identify what has caused which shadows? Have fun making puppet character shadows by moving your hands in front of a light source.

Rain

Look at pavements and roads when it has been raining, especially once it dark. Notice the wonderful glistening which occurs when the streetlights and car headlights shine down on the wet surface. When you are driving in the rain in the dark, show your child how the car’s headlights light up a very shiny road and highlight the spray from excess water on the road’s surface.

Ask your child to look out for reflections on wet surfaces. When walking along the pavement when it has been raining, look out for the multicolored effects you may be able to see in the gutter, caused by oil dispersing on water. Why might your child see these patterns at the side of road? Explain how some oil escapes from cars when they are parked at the roadside. Can he tell you what will happen when the sun comes out again?

Spiders’ webs

Look out for the webs made much more visible by dew. Rain drops sit on the web and highlight the beautiful and intricate shape of it. Note how strong the web must be so that it is not destroyed by the weight of the water. In the winter, you may be lucky enough to find the webs covered in frost, emphasizing their shape in the same way.
See if you child can see the spider in the web or indeed, any prey that is caught in it. Look carefully at the shapes involved. Can he draw a web with white chalk on black paper?

Seasonal colors in the garden

Notice how the colors get brighter and more profuse in summer. In winter, gardens are very bare, with no color on the tress. In spring, bright green leaves start to appear on the tress, together with flowering shrubs and flowers. In summer, leaves on the trees are fully opened in every shade of green and there is a mass of other color around. Autumn sees leaves beginning to turn red and brown before they fall off, leaving the trees bare again.

Can your child tell you which season it is from looking at the garden? Let him paint or make a collage of a garden in the four different seasons.

Sun’s rays shining down through the trees

Encourage your child to look at the lovely light effects observed in a wood when the sun is shining. What does he think causes these? Point out how the sun shines onto and through the leaves of the trees, thus producing dappled effects on the wood ‘floor’.

Can your child see this effect elsewhere? Look out for plants causing similar dappled effects in garden or park. At home, let him experiment by putting a colander between a light source and a piece of white paper on the floor. Notice the same effect. Again, the light is only coming through the holes in the colander, like the gaps in the trees.

Sunsets

Notice how the sky turns the most beautiful shades of red, yellow and purple as the sun sinks down behind the clouds. As your child looks at the sunset, point out how everything in front of the bright sun looks black. Objects become ‘silhouetted’ against the bright red, pink and orange.

Let your child create his own sunsets by painting water onto drawing paper until it is quite wet and then putting on blobs of bright red, orange and purple paint, allowing the colors to mix freely. Another way to create the same effect is to glue torn strips of tissue paper, in appropriate colors, over each other in a random pattern. When the ‘sunsets’ are dry, add some silhouetted objects to the pictures, using thick black felt-tip pen, or by sticking on black paper shapes.