Cost: $0.50
Skills learned: Fine motor, creativity
Age: 6m+
Rating (out of 4 stars): 2
I have tried several different ways in the past to try and interest Izzy in finger painting, but nothing has really worked. However, today's technique seemed to interest him a little more than all the others... finger painting with baby food! For set up, I thought a piece of card stock would work the best so I taped it to the table, scooted his high chair up nice and close and put a dollop of mixed veggies on the paper for him to smear around. I let him have the spoon as well to see if he would be interested in self feeding (he self feeds with his fingers, but we haven't learned how to use a spoon yet). He thought it was pretty good fun trying to eat the veggies with his fingers, smearing them around the paper, and when the paper had been thoroughly soaked through with veggies, tearing the paper off the table. And as he would get low on veggie mounds, I would just scoop more onto his paper for him to smear around. This was definitely the most successful medium we have used for edible finger painting thus far and probably the healthiest too. As far as clean up, it actually wasn't too much worse than him just eating the veggies for lunch (and he needed a bath besides).
Cost: $0.50 Skills learned: Fine motor, creativity Age: 6m+ Rating (out of 4 stars): 2
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I'm pretty sure that every mom deals with baby food jars at one point and time or another. Even though Izzy is 13 months, baby food veggies are still the best way to get him to eat his vegetables. So why not recycle those jars and reuse them for an activity? After saving up jars for about 3 weeks, I had collected 9 jars which was actually pretty perfect for my purposes. I numbered the top of the jars 1-9 and then put a corresponding number of items in each jar as follows:
I then screwed the lids on super tight for the jars containing things I didn't want him to get into and put the tops on loosely for the jars it was okay for him to get into. Then I lined them all up nice and neat to make a sort of baby food jar number line as follows: To start off our activity we read some books we have about numbers, counted the jars and then dug in. He absolutely loved it! He was able to figure out how to get the looser lids off the jars, enjoyed eating the fruit snacks, and shaking each jar to hear the different sounds. He played for over 1/2 hour so it was quite amazing! Cost: Free
Skills learned: Counting, fine motor skills, critical thinking skills Age: 9m+ Rating (out of 4 stars): 4 Today Izzy and I played the classic game Connect 4... without the rules of course. Obviously I didn't expect him to actually match the colors together but I thought we could start by learning how to drop the pieces into the board. Overall he got the idea, but he couldn't quite get the pieces in the right place before dropping them so after about 5 minutes he decided it wasn't working for him and decided he had had enough. However, even though it was kind of an activity fail this time, we will definitely be doing it again as he gets older to first help develop fine motor skills and then continue it to work on counting, sorting, and patterns. For this time though, he did have fun exploring the pieces and the board itself. Cost: Free
Skills learned: Fine motor skills (and counting, sorting, and patterns as he gets older) Age: 12m+ Rating (out of 4 stars): 1.5 So not all weeks go as planned and this was one of them. Due to nap schedules not working out we only have one more activity to share with you this week instead of two and it was kind of an activity fail at that. For our activity we played with pipe cleaners (with the ends folded over so they wouldn't be pokey) and an empty puffs container. The idea was very similar to our Colander and Straws activity in that he was supposed to put the pipe cleaners into the puffs jar. I also used different colors of pipe cleaners and sorted them into piles of 5 so we could work on colors and counting. Unfortunately I didn't get a picture of our set up, but I did get these gems. Izzy didn't get the concept of putting the pipe cleaners in the jar and he wasn't too interested in them anyway. The thing he did enjoy about the activity was the empty container. He carried it around and chewed on it for about 15 minutes so I guess it wasn't a complete fail.
Cost: About $1.50 for pipe cleaners Skills learned: Fine motor skills, colors, and counting Age: 12m+ Rating (out of 4 stars): 1 for the actual activity, 3 for the puffs jar :) This activity by far takes more time and energy to set up than any other activity we have ever done but it is so worth it! This is the second time we have done it and Izzy still loved it almost as much as the first time. Basically for set up, you just get a bunch of tables, chairs, boxes, pillows, etc and arrange them into a baby approved obstacle course. I decided to make ours in the kitchen since the cabinets created a nice barrier and I added two tables to make an entrance he had to crawl under to get to the actual course. For the course I had six boxes/laundry baskets that I put different toys in. I tried to make the boxes themed so that they toys in each box were all related somehow. My 6 themes were:
I just set the boxes up so they weren't too close to each other and then put pillows and place mats in between the boxes for Izzy to crawl over. Here is a picture of my obstacle course before play began so you can get a better idea of what I'm talking about: As I said, although the set up and take down time are a little more than I normally like to be involved in, it is so worth it! Izzy played in his 'course' for pretty close to an hour until dinnertime came. The last time we did this he also played for close to an hour if not more. It is the perfect activity for babies like him who are super curious and observant about everything because there is just so much to explore! Another thing that makes this activity great is that it is so versatile. You can set it up however and wherever you want and you can include various baby safe materials and such. For example, the last obstacle course we did had more chairs and other random things for him to maneuver around instead of just giant boxes with toys in them. Both were super fun and I'm sure your little one would enjoy whatever you decided to include in their obstacle course as well.
Cost: Free Skills learned: Depending on what you include and how you set up the course a wide variety of skills could be taught. Our particular course worked on critical thinking skills, gross motor skills, and object permanence. Age: 9m+ Rating (out of 4 stars): 4 This is a variation of an activity that we did when Izzy was a few months younger. The first time we did this activity, we cut up some squares of scrap fabric for him to pull out of an empty wipes container, but he didn't really get the concept of that and got bored after 5 minutes of play. I really wanted this activity to work out somehow so today instead of fabric squares we used scarves. I tied four of my older scarves together to make one big long scarf chain and then stuffed them all inside an unassuming wipe box as follows: Using scarves instead of fabric squares worked so much better because once he got pulling, the chain of scarves didn't end until they were all out of the box which he enjoyed so much more than digging around trying to find another piece of fabric to pull out. We pulled out all of the scarves twice and once the box was empty he had a ton of fun exploring its properties on its own. While I wouldn't discourage using simple fabric scraps in the making of this activity, I would definitely encourage using a huge chain of scarves more :)
Cost: Free Skills learned: Fine motor skills, the concept of 'pulling' Age: 12m+ Rating (out of 4 stars): 3 For our last activity of this week we decided to do a messy activity except for in the end it wasn't really that messy which was definitely a plus. We played with edible play dough! You can find the recipe we used here at Love, Play, Learn. It was really easy to make but with the food coloring we added, the husby thought it looked like a ball of dirty carpet. Oh well. Following the recipe made a ball of play dough slightly bigger than a baseball. For our activity we added a potato masher and cookie cutter to mash and mold although Izzy didn't really understand the concepts of mashing and molding. However, he did enjoy playing with the ball itself and it is a good thing it was edible because he ate quite a bit of it. Overall it was a pretty simple activity and as I said, super easy to clean up since the play dough didn't stick to the floor when Izzy decided he didn't need his trusty sensory bin anymore.
Cost: Free Skills learned: Fine motor skills Age: 9m+ (the play dough ball is a bit heavy) Rating (out of 4 stars): 2 Sometimes as a mother I think to myself, "If anyone else knew what I was letting Izzy play with, they would probably think I was the worst mother ever!" With today's activity, I definitely had one of those moments. I mean, what mother lets her child play with a bunch of small letters with small magnets on the back? Well apparently I do! And since no one got seriously injured in the making of this blog post (because close close supervision was definitely involved), we are going to go ahead and post about it. So for today's activity we played with ABC magnets. To set up the activity I just simply put all of our magnets on the fridge as follows... Before we got to actually playing with the magnets, we read some books we had about letters. We read Dr. Seuss's ABC and Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. Then after we read, I made him sit still while I sang him the ABC song and pointed at the letters. Finally, I turned him loose on the magnets and he had fun pulling them down and trying to eat them. Luckily, the letters themselves are too big to fit in his mouth and I just periodically checked the magnets on the back to make sure they weren't coming loose. An added bonus to this activity that I didn't think of when setting it up was that my magnets were colorful so in addition to working on letter recognition we were also able to work on colors. Cost: $1 for magnets
Skills learned: Colors, fine motor skills, letter recognition Age: PG - 12m+ AKA parental guidance for 12m+ due to small parts Rating (out of 4 stars): 4 Today's activity dealt with contact paper! Contact paper is, by definition, a sticky substance which makes it a really fun play medium to explore and get stuck to. For our activity I cut out a good size portion of contact paper and laid it on the floor sticky side up. I then used my lovely peacock print duct tape to secure it to the floor. I had originally thought about putting it on our coffee table but opted for the floor instead so that he could walk and crawl over it if wanted to do so. Once the contact paper was in place I stuck some toys to it. I wanted to use this activity to talk about rainbow colors so this is what the contact paper looked like when I was finished... I set up the activity while Izzy was napping and when he woke up from his nap and saw the activity he was beyond excited. However I made him eat a snack before I let him loose which I think just built his anticipation. When I finally did set him loose he was more excited about it than I can even describe but some of these pictures portray his excitement quite accurately... As you might be able to tell from our picture overload, the orange pompom didn't leave his side throughout the entire activity. Silly boy.
An important thing to keep in mind when doing activities with babies/toddlers is that just because they crawl/walk away doesn't necessarily mean they are done playing. I can't even count the number of times Izzy picked up an item off of the contact paper and walked away to explore it only to return a minute or two later to find another item to explore. If I were to clean up his activities immediately after he walked away the first time I would be cutting his exploration seriously short. Cost: $6 for contact paper Skills learned: Colors, fine motor skills, the concept of 'sticky' Age: 9m+ Rating (out of 4 stars): 3 Today's activity was one that we tried to do before when Izzy was 10 months old and back then he liked it but this time when we did it he loved it! Its post-it squares! The idea behind this activity is to put a bunch of sticky notes on a surface and let your little one pull them down. We used our sliding glass door as our surface and our setup looked something like this... Before I let Izzy have at it we talked about the different colors of squares and counted how many squares there were of each color. Then as the activity went on I would say things like, "That's a blue square. Are you going to pull the blue square down?" to reinforce the colors. We would also periodically count the remaining squares to review the counting aspect of the activity. Because we used a window as our background our pictures didn't turn out too well but I thought these were worth sharing... As a warning, if you have a baby who puts everything in their mouths some paper probably will get eaten. The first time we did this activity I made him give me the squares after he had pulled them down to reduce paper consumption. This time I just let him have at it and paper consumption was minimal. This activity was definitely a hit and he even wanted his Hello Kitty figurine to get in on the action with him... Cost: $3 for post-it notes
Skills learned: Colors, counting, fine motor skills Age: 9m+ Rating (out of 4 stars): 4 |
AuthorHi! My name is Cassity and I am the mom to a little 2 year old boy named Izzy and a baby girl named Sydney. I am lucky enough to get to be a stay-at-home mom to them and we have fun thinking of new activities to do together in the afternoons. We created this blog as an opportunity to share those activities with you. Archives
March 2015
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