Cost: Free
Skills learned: Fine motor skills, cleaning up (hopefully)
Age: 12m+ (I wouldn't have dared do this when he was younger for fear that he would have eaten the paper)
Rating (out of 4 stars): 3
You know all that super annoying junk mail that I'm sure is either in your trash can/recycling bin right now? Well we saved all of ours for a week and recycled it into an activity today. I took all of the junk mail we had collected over the past week and simply put it all into a box like this: The idea was then for Izzy to come along, take out all the paper, and rip it. I had some reservations about the messiness of this activity at first, but it really wasn't that messy. I also worried about letting him tear up paper thinking that he might want to go around ripping up all paper from here on out, but I think he understood the difference between normal paper and this special stuff I was letting him have. He got the idea of taking the paper out, but he had a little bit of a harder time actually ripping it. I showed him what it meant to rip the paper and after that, he would just bring me the papers he wanted to rip so I could start the rip for him and he could finish it off. Although he didn't do all the work himself, it still helped him work on his fine motor skills. After he was done taking the paper out of the box and ripping it to shreds, I had him help me put all the papers back in the box which hopefully taught him some clean up skills. And to be honest, he had almost as much fun putting the papers back as he did taking them out.
Cost: Free Skills learned: Fine motor skills, cleaning up (hopefully) Age: 12m+ (I wouldn't have dared do this when he was younger for fear that he would have eaten the paper) Rating (out of 4 stars): 3
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A while ago, I bought Izzy one of the best toys he owns; a huge bag of ball pit balls. I bought them for $15 at either BabiesRUs or Target and we use them in lots of activities and even play with the balls on their own at times. The colors of the balls also coincide perfectly with one of our favorite books, One Sheep Blue Sheep. For today's ball pit ball activity, we decided to just turn his crib into a mini ball pit by dumping the entire package of balls into his crib. This activity would probably work better if we had a pack and play instead of a crib since there aren't enough balls to cover the entire crib and the balls tend to fall out of the crib bars, but Izzy doesn't mind much. He loves bouncing in his 'ball pit' and swishing the balls around. We use One Sheep Blue Sheep to talk about the different colors of the balls and then review them as we go along. We have done this activity several times and Izzy loves it each and every time and will play until he tires himself out. We have also turned our tub into a ball pit before which tends to work better than the crib at containing the balls. You can read about that activity here.
Cost: $15 Skills learned: Colors, gross motor skills Age: 6m+ Rating (out of 4 stars): 4 I have seen a lot of ideas for pasta sensory bins. Pasta is a great material for a sensory bin because it is edible and full of fun textures. Some of the ideas I have seen use food coloring to make rainbow colored pasta and some use uncooked pasta but I decided to cook our pasta so that Izzy could eat it if he so desired. Then to make things more interesting, I cleaned some of his smaller toys and hid them in the pasta for him to find. Izzy enjoyed 'splashing' through the pasta and finding the hidden objects. He also ate a few pieces of pasta, but not as many as I had expected him to. He also tried to climb in the container with the pasta itself and wanted to get a hot pad and dish towel involved. Although the pasta did get all over the floor, I wouldn't describe this as a messy activity since it took a couple of minutes at most to clean up. And yes, he was wearing Halloween PJ's, but no, it wasn't laundry day. Cost: Free
Skills learned: Textures, pincer grasp/fine motor skills Age: 9m+ Rating (out of 4 stars): 3.5 Izzy and I always get behind on blogging and our activity schedules when we have good long weekends like this last one so we will be on a bit of a blog overload today. The first activity we have to share is a DIY milk jug toy. All you have to do to make this toy is cut a hole in the top and another one in the side of a one gallon milk jug making sure that the holes are big enough for baby to fit their hand through. In the end, your milk jug will look like this: Then you can choose any baby safe object for your little one to drop in the top of the jug and then get out through the side hole. We used our baggie of finger puppets. Izzy understood this concept but was more interested in playing with the finger puppets. I was still proud of him for being able to drop the objects in and take them back out. Cost: Free
Skills learned: The concept of 'in' and 'out', fine motor skills, critical thinking skills Age: 12m+ Rating (out of 4 stars): 2 Izzy loves stuffed animals! And for only being 14 months old he already has quite the collection of them. Most of them are hand-me-downs from my own stuffed animal collection I had when I was little, but his collection isn't even 1/4 of what my collection was thank goodness. Since we both love stuffed animals I decided to take that love and turn it into today's activity. I simply gathered a few of his animals, added some laundry baskets and we were set. My original idea was that he could practice transferring the animals from one hamper into the other, but Izzy had different plans and since I always try to let him direct our play time, I decided to just go with it. After a minute or two of investigating the baskets (and their contents) he decided he would just climb on in there with all of his animals. He had fun sitting in there throwing a couple of the animals out and I would throw them back in. I think it was a good way to practice the concept of in and out. Sometimes I would throw the animals back in the basket he was in and sometimes I would throw them in the one next to him. I would also sometimes mimic the animals sounds of whatever animal he had thrown out. After about 10 minutes of sitting in the basket, he decided to get out and spend a few more minutes pushing the basket around the room. And since he loves stuffed animals so much, I may have gone a little picture happy but its hard not to when he is just so happy. Even though the activity didn't go exactly as planned, I think Izy still had a ton of fun and probably even more fun than he would have had with my original idea so all in all it was definitely a success.
Cost: Free Skills learned: The concept of 'in' and 'out', gross motor skills Age: 12m+ Rating (out of 4 stars): 3 Yesterday was our Friday messy play activity and it was so much fun! I wasn't sure how this activity would go over because first of all, it was a cold activity and our track record with cold activities are not very encouraging, and second, Izzy hasn't been enjoying his messy activities too much lately so I was really beginning to wonder if the mess was really worth it. But yesterday it was. The activity we did was to mix jello and tapioca pudding together. I started out by making the jello and letting it refrigerate for about 30 minutes to an hour before mixing in 4 of the snack pack size cups of tapioca pudding. I then let it refrigerate for another 3 or so hours. When it was time for play I added a whisk and a wooden spoon to enhance our activity and this is what it ended up looking like: I don't know how to describe the texture of this mixture but I can tell you that the more we played with it, the smoother it got and it is super fun to play with. Izzy especially loved using the wooden spoon to stir it and see what sounds were made when he would bang it against the bowl. This activity was really really messy though so I didn't get to take too many pictures before I felt the mess was endangering my camera. Here are some of the shots that I got before then: The one drawback to this play substance is that when it covered the floor it ended up being really slippery and we had a couple of falls that Izzy didn't think were too particularly fun. To avoid that problem I would suggest laying out towels to reduce both the mess and the slipperiness.
Cost: $2 Skills learned: The concept of cold, the ability to stir Age: 12m+ (since pudding contains milk) Rating (out of 4 stars): 4 This activity may seem fairly simple but because Izzy had never colored before we decided to make it into an official activity. At first I was nervous about letting Izzy color because I thought all he would want to do would be to eat the crayons. However after doing a lot of research on babies/toddlers and coloring, I realized that we were a little behind on the coloring band wagon and decided to jump on. In my research I had also read that it is good to set up baby's coloring surface on the floor so they can get their entire bodies into it so I found the biggest piece of paper I had and set things up. The original plan was to start out with one color at a time but it didn't take long for Izzy to decide that he wanted all of the crayons he could possibly get. Thus for the first 15 minutes or so Izzy just wanted to explore the crayons and figure out what they actually were. He spent a lot of time putting them in the box and taking them back out again. He would also hand me crayons here and there and watch me as I made marks on the paper. This was a great time to talk to him about the different colors of the crayons. After exploring the crayons he decided it was time to get to work and started making piles of crayons on the paper and making marks here and there. In total we spent about 35 minutes on our first coloring project so this activity definitely gets an A in my book. Oh, and as far as eating the crayons go, he did take a chunk out of a brown one but then decided that it was pretty disgusting and that was the end of it. Cost: Free
Skills learned: Colors, the concept of coloring, fine motor skills Age: 12m+ Rating (out of 4 stars): 4 When I first tried to explain this activity to the husband he just kind of gave me a blank stare like, "What? You really think that's going to do something?" So maybe describing this activity will be a little complicated, but I will do my best. This is an art based activity and for it you will need a few supplies. I used the following (and you can see them below):
I started by putting a piece of card stock in the bottom of the Tupperware container and then adding a little bit of paint of each color on top of the paper. I let Izzy watch me while I did this so we could talk about the different colors of paint. Once the paper and paint were added to the container, I threw in a handful of beads on top and put the lid on. The idea was for Izzy to shake the container, thus causing the beads to roll around the paper and smear the paint. It actually worked out pretty well but unfortunately I didn't get any pictures of him with the container because he wanted to be independent and play on his own. We made three separate paintings (for three sets of grandparents) and I did get a picture of the end result. Not bad right? Very abstract I'd say, but much cheaper (and more sentimental) than buying them from a gallery. And hopefully the grandparents will enjoy :)
Cost: $3 for the beads (marbles may have been cheaper and probably would have worked better) Skills learned: Colors, fine motor skills Age: 9m+ (although I had more fun than he did so this may be better suited for older children) Rating (out of 4 stars): 2 When I was setting up this activity, I didn't have much hope. I mean our track record with activities where he is supposed to put one object into another object is not very good so I didn't think this activity would be much different, but it was. For the setup of this activity, all you need is an empty tissue box and some balls just small enough to fit through the opening in the top. I also got a second container to put the balls in when they weren't in the tissue box so my setup looked like this: After a quick demonstration to show Izzy that the balls could go in the tissue box, he set to work and he actually transferred all the balls from the bowl into the box. I was so proud! He spent about 10 minutes transferring the balls between the two containers and seeing the differences between the two containers. We practiced learning the different colors of the balls as well as counting them. Even though the activity didn't keep him entertained for too long I was a super proud mama that he actually grasped the concept and seemed to be having fun with it. Cost: $1.50 for the tissue box
Skills learned: Colors, counting, the concept of 'in' and 'out', fine motor skills Age: 9m+ Rating (out of 4 stars): 2 |
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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