Skills learned: Gross motor/ball skills
Age: 15m+
Skills learned: Fine motor skills, counting, colors
Age: 18m+
Skills learned: Textures, creativity
Age: 18m+
I kind of skipped July's weekly activities but the majority of them were toy oriented rather than activity oriented so that partially explains why. The fact that Izzy and I are trying our hardest to finish up our summer bucket list before baby sister could be another part of the reason. However, we are getting back to our weekly activities for the month before baby sister does come and I take my activity maternity leave... seriously, its written down in my planner :) So on to this month's activities... Our first activity of the week is the slam dunk game. A couple of weeks ago I was looking over some milestone charts and feeling pretty good about Izzy's abilities, until we got to the part about ball skills. To help Izzy develop more of an interest in playing with balls, we decided to get a ball and a bucket and see what would happen. I was hoping he would try rolling the ball into the bucket but so far that hasn't happened. Instead, the majority of his time with this activity has been spent running around with the bucket on his head. He has dropped the ball in the bucket a few times though so we will count that as progress on the ball skill front. Cost: Free Skills learned: Gross motor/ball skills Age: 15m+ Our second activity of the week is beads in a paint palette. This is just another basic fine motor skill activity that you can use for colors and counting. The purpose was for Izzy to put one bead in each hole of a paint palette. Pretty basic but he has actually been pretty excited over this activity, probably because the beads we got brightly colored beads with fun textures. However, since beads are pretty small, I would not recommend doing this activity unless you can trust your little one not to swallow the beads and you are willing to supervise very closely. Cost: $4 Skills learned: Fine motor skills, counting, colors Age: 18m+ Our last activity of the week is a smaller version of the treasure baskets we used to do. Although we stopped doing treasure baskets when he was 18 months old since the most beneficial age to do them is 6-18 months, we decided to make a little toddler busy bag that was reminiscent of one of our old treasure baskets. We decided to focus this busy bag on talking about textures so we included a variety of textures as you can see here: We included a soft duck, a hard paint palette, a pokey play tree, a rubbery measuring cup, a squishy pencil thing, a bristly paint brush, and a rough piece of glittery paper. Izzy has enjoyed going through his bag and experiencing the different textures. He especially likes giving the duck kisses and popping the measuring cup in and out. You could tailor your busy bag to include items centered around any theme you wanted but we thought that textures would be a fun place to start. Cost: Free (we used items we already had)
Skills learned: Textures, creativity Age: 18m+
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Our first activity of the week was a clothespin poke. For this activity, I took an old egg carton and cut out the bottoms of each egg home place (whatever you want to call it). When this is done, the holes are the perfect size for poking clothespins through. We tried poking them through with the carton upside down and then with it open and right side up. Izzy preferred to just play with the egg carton itself, but since this activity needs to last us a while, I couldn't let him do that for too long. For durability reasons, I would definitely try to get a cardboard egg carton rather than the Walmart styrofoam ones. Cost: $2 Skills learned: Fine motor skills, counting Age: 15m+ The second activity was pouring buttons. We initially thought about using pompoms, but since they were in Izzy's room and he was asleep while I was setting up these activities, we just used the buttons from our toddler sorting tray last week. For this activity, you just need two cups and some small items such as pompoms or craft buttons that your little one can pour from one cup to another. Or Izzy also liked pouring out the buttons and then just picking them up and putting them back in the cups by hand. Cost: $2 Skills learned: Fine motor skills, pouring, colors, counting Age: 18m+ Our last activity of the week had to do with noise makers which was supposed to focus on music and rhythm. We recycled materials we already had on hand. First we used an old pill bottle with some pennies in it to make a shaker. Then we took some corrugated cardboard and rubbed a spoon across the surface to make a cool sound. The last thing we did was take an old formula can and use our spoon to make it into a little drum. He caught on to all of these different inventions right away and enjoyed making his own little baby music. Cost: Free
Skills learned: Rhythm, music Age: 9m+ Okay so first off, I have to apologize. The last few weeks have been absolutely crazy! All of us have had some health issues (Izzy and I with stomach bugs and husby with a probable concussion) and then on top of it all we moved to a bigger apartment to accommodate our little girl who will be joining us (and the blog) at the end of August. So with all of that going on, I never had time to post the details on the activities we did last month. And since Izzy and I have a bucket list to keep us plenty busy this summer, my blogging time might be even less so I am just going to post the details of our activities as we go along. So without further ado, our first three activities of June are: 1 - Toddler sorting tray 2 - Brag book 3 - Clothespin posting For toddler sorting tray you will need an ice cube tray and some random objects to put in the individual cubes of the tray (we used some big craft buttons we used for our buttons in a puffs container activity we did last month). The idea is to have the same number of items as cubes in the tray and have your little one put one item in each cube. Izzy had fun putting buttons in the tray, but never filled the whole thing up by himself. As he played, we talked about the different colors of the buttons and counted the buttons as he put them in the cubes. Cost: You could make this as expensive or inexpensive as you want but for us it was $2 Skills learned: Fine motor skills, colors, counting Age: 15m+ Rating (out of 4 stars): 1 For the brag book all you need is a cheap photo album and some pictures. You can use whatever pictures you want to, but we chose pictures of close family members (mommy, daddy, and grandparents) along with pictures of the cute Izzy himself so that he can learn to recognize those oh so important people in his life. He had fun looking through the pictures and pointing at the faces for me to name off to him. Cost: $1 Skills learned: Language, facial recognition Age: All ages Rating (out of 4 stars): 2 For our last activity, clothespin posting, you just need a clean and empty milk jug along with some clothespins. The object of the game is to drop the clothespins through the opening in the top of the jug. It is just the right size to fit the clothespins through and as an added bonus, when all the clothespins are in the jug, it makes a fun sound when you shake it. Izzy got a huge smile on his face every time he shook the jug and heard its beautiful AKA loud noise. We also counted the clothespins as Izzy dropped them in the jug to work on his counting abilities. Cost: $2
Skills learned: Fine motor skills, counting Age: 15m+ Rating (out of 4 stars): 2 Our latest activity we are going to call ABC Scoop. What we did was fill the bath tub with water and then dump in his bath toy letters much like these ones. We love these letters as his bath toys because they can stick to the shower walls and we can work on colors, spelling, etc. But that is beside the point. Once the letters were in the tub, I gave Izzy a spoon to scoop the letters out with. We also read some books we have about letters before we started scooping, our favorite of which is Animal Alphabet. Izzy enjoyed playing with the water and fishing for the letters to transfer to his sensory bin I had nearby. I am super excited to do this activity again as he gets older and his scooping skills develop and he learns to recognize his letters. Once he gets to that point I plan on making a poster with the letters written on it so that when he scoops the letters out, he can match them to the letters on the poster. If we evolve this activity to that point, we will definitely be posting about it in the future. Cost: $6 for the letters
Skills Learned: Scooping, letter recognition Age: 15m+ Rating (out of 4 stars): 4 Today we did some activities with tissue paper... you know the bright colored kind you stuff bags of presents with. For the first activity, I gathered a couple of different sizes of bottles and tore the tissue paper up into small pieces. The idea was for Izzy to push the pieces of tissue paper through the opening in the top of the bottles. This was not an easy task for him and I had to help a lot, but he did have fun with it for a few minutes. After we were done with the bottles, I filled a box with some full sized sheets of tissue paper and just let him have fun taking it out and throwing it all over the living room floor which he thoroughly enjoyed. And I have to admit that seeing all those bright pretty colors flying all over the place was pretty cool. Cost: $2 for tissue paper
Skills Learned: Fine motor skills, critical thinking skills, colors Age: At least 15m+ for the bottle activity. The tissue paper in a box could probably be started at 6m+. Rating (out of 4 stars): 2.5 |
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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