Rating: 4 out of 4 stars
This past week has been absolutely crazy at our house! We have had doctors appointments, 6 month pictures, and a weekend trip to the grandparents house. On picture day, sister really needed a bath before she went and got beautified, but I needed a way for Izzy to get involved without giving him a bath too so I decided to utilize the double sinks in our kitchen and do this sibling activity with a bubble bath. I filled up both sides of the sink and poured bubble bath into each and then scattered some food coloring throughout the bubbles to make them nice and colorful (Sydney's side was red and yellow while Izzy got blue and green). Then I put Sydney in her side while Izzy just played with his hands in the other (and gave his bunny a much needed bath as well). They had a ton of fun playing on their own and acknowledging each other on occasion. However, since bubble bath can be irritating to a baby's sensitive skin, I didn't let sister play for too long before I drained out her bubble bath and gave her some fresh water to take a real bath in. My kids are both water babies though so it kept them both happy for a few minutes and turned out to be an easy way to solve our bath problems that crazy morning. Cost: $3
Rating: 4 out of 4 stars
0 Comments
For sister's first non-treasure basket activity, I decided to make her a sensory bag. Sensory bags are ziploc baggies that contain any number of fun sensory materials inside of them. You can fill them with shaving cream, body wash, hair gel, shampoo, etc. and they are just fun to squish around and see what happens when you do. For sister's bag, I decided to use body wash and throw in a little confetti for extra sparkle. Once all of the contents were in the bag, I used packing tape to secure it shut and let her have at it. It was fun for me to watch bubbles form the more she squshed things around, and I think she enjoyed how it was cool to the touch. The thing with sensory bags though is that the contents inside are definitely not baby safe, so you need to monitor play very closely for any holes that could pop up in the bag (also a reason why I don't feel sensory bags are very good for babies with teeth). I kept a close eye on sister's bag and as soon as I felt a large pocket of wetness, I took it away and we were done playing for the day. However, it was probably just a whole bunch of slobber, but still... better safe than sorry!
Cost: $4 for this one... you can make them much cheaper though if you shop at a dollar store or use shaving cream Rating: 2 out of 4 stars This is another treasure basket I made for sister. I like to make a new one every Monday and then spend the rest of the week exploring it's contents. I always like to have one available, but it is too much to make a new one every day. Plus, I think it helps her learn better if she can play with the same items several times rather than just a quick introduction one day and then playing with something completely new the next. For this treasure basket, I chose a shiny theme and these are the items that were included: 1 - Potato masher 2 - Old CD 3 - Baby safe mirror 4 - Christmas ornament 5 - Bracelet 6 - Headband 7 - Necklace 8 - Barrette 9 - Watch 10 - Sequin ribbon Sister had so much fun with this treasure basket! And with all of the jewelry that was put in there, I'm wondering if it's a sign that she is going to be a girly girl? I sure hope not... That is a road this mama does not want to go down! Her favorite item was the shiny silver headband so when we were all done playing I let her try it on for a minute. It is definitely big on her, but she is such a gorgeous little girl it doesn't even matter. Cost: Free
Rating: 4 out of 4 stars For E day, our craft word of the day was elephant. For this craft, I had just printed out a simple do-a-dot page for him to put stickers on. I got the printable for that here. He was so excited when I gave him his paper and his stickers, but as soon as I pulled the camera out to take pictures, he had a come apart and refused to do his sticker page. Since then, I have learned that he does not like me to take pictures of him doing crafts, so I guess the after pictures will just have to do. Here is our completed (sort of) elephant: Our activity word of the day was eyedropper. This was an incredibly simple activity but one that Izzy absolutely loved! All you need for this activity are some paper towels (or coffee filters), an eyedropper, and some colored water. Seriously! So simple! I made up four different little containers of colored water for him and he loved sucking the water up in to his eyedropper and then squeezing it out on to his paper towel. He noticed all of the different colors, learned how to use an eyedropper, and then at the end, decided to drink what was left of the water. It was really good fine motor skills practice for him and he thought it was simply amazing. And as an added bonus, the cleanup was incredibly easy since it is just water! You don't get much better than that. Elephant Stickers:
Cost: Free if you already have dot stickers, $1 if you don't Rating: 2 out of 4 stars Eyedropper Art: Cost: $2 Rating: 4 out of 4 stars For C day, our craft word of the day was car. I thought Izzy would love this craft because he would get to glue things again, but he wasn't as into it as he was the first time I let him have glue. He still loved gluing, but then after he had put some glue on his paper pieces, he gave them to me to put together. Anyway, for this craft we made a road out of a black paper C and added some little paper C's to look like cars. Pretty easy and sort of cute. Our activity word of the day was cotton balls and with our cotton balls we put together a sensory bin. Izzy was really excited about this one because we don't use cotton balls often so they were fairly new to him. In addition to the cotton balls, I added an ice cream scoop and tweezers for him to experiment with. At first, he used his tools to examine the cotton balls. After a few minutes of examining them, he decided to take the 'ball' part seriously and we started throwing cotton balls across the room. He would pick up two cotton balls, hand me one and then say, "1 2 go!" at which point we would throw our cotton balls. Sometimes we would try to throw the cotton balls back into our sensory bin and other times we would just throw them and see how far we could get them to go. After we were done throwing our cotton balls, he decided to make them into a blanket for himself and play his favorite game of 'night night'. Once that game was done, he shoved some cotton balls down his shirt and ran off. And that was the end of our cotton ball sensory bin. Car Craft
Cost: Free (if you have the paper) Rating: 2 out of 4 stars Cotton Ball Sensory Bin Cost: $1 Rating: 4 out of 4 stars For B day, our craft word of the day was button. My idea for this craft was not nearly as crafty or complicated as our alligator A was, but somehow Izzy didn't like it nearly as much. For this activity, I wrote down a big capital B on a piece of paper and just gave Izzy some buttons to line the B with. Instead of actually putting them on the B though, he put them all in the holes (you can see what I mean in the pictures below). He also had fun tossing the buttons up and watching them spin around on the table when they fell down. Yep... definitely not as fun as all the glue we dealt with on A day. Good thing our C day craft will get us back to all that gluing action. Our activity word of the day was bananas. When Izzy was really little and we were first starting out on our activity journey, I didn't really expect him to know too much about what we were doing. Instead, I wanted to just give him a new experience and expand his horizons a little bit. As he has gotten older, I have expected him to understand a little bit better what we are doing, but our banana activity went back more to the new experience side of things we had in the beginning. Of course, bananas aren't new to Izzy, but slicing them definitely is. And that is what we did today... sliced bananas. Before you panic about the word 'slicing', let me just clarify that this was all done butter knife style because there was no way he was getting anywhere near something sharper than that. And he was supervised the whole time. Promise! In my efforts to teach Izzy how to slice his banana, I demonstrated with my own banana before I let him loose on his own. At first, he tried really hard to slice it like I had shown him. The only problem was that he was using the dull side of the knife. And of course, when I tried to help him turn his knife over so it would work for him, he got mad and refused to let me help. So from there, he progressed onto holding the knife horizontal to the banana and tried smashing it. As you can imagine, that didn't get him very far. His last resort was to use his knife like a sword and stab the banana to death. Using this technique, he managed to break his banana apart into about 5 different pieces. He was pretty satisfied with his work after that (or maybe he was just getting hungry) and settled in for his morning snack. Button Craft:
Cost: $2 Rating: 2 out of 4 stars Banana Slicing: Cost: $1 Rating: 2 out of 4 stars Izzy and I are finally into our letter activities and naturally, for our first letter day, we talked about the letter A. For our letter days, I wanted to pick two things that started with the letter of the day, hence the title of this post (alligators and apples). At the beginning of the day, I have a fun way to introduce Izzy to the letter of the day and to the two words we will be talking about (I will post about that in greater detail later on). Then with those two words we will do a craft centering around one of them and an activity dealing with the other. That might all be a bit confusing now, but as we get into this, I think you will begin to understand what I mean. Our craft word for A day was alligator. For this craft, I drew a nice big capital A on a piece of paper and then cut out some squares to line the A with along with some triangles for teethe and circles for eyes. My plan was to have Izzy glue all of the paper shapes in place on my A to make it look like an alligator. When I told husby what I had planned for our craft of the day, he thought I was absolutely crazy, and to be honest I even doubted myself a little. But it turns out that Izzy actually enjoys the concept of gluing things... maybe even a little too much. But after a lot of glue and a little help from me, we created this awesome alligator A. Our activity word of the day was apple. For our apple based activity, we took a spin on the traditional baking soda/vinegar experiment. Instead of just putting baking soda in a normal old container, we hollowed out some apples and put the baking soda inside along with a little food coloring so that the eruption would be nice and colorful. Izzy loved watching his apples erupt, but the best part for him was that no matter how much vinegar he had already poured into his apples, he could always pour a little bit more in and get a little more fizz out. Seriously. We used up a whole bottle of vinegar because our apples just kept fizzing and fizzing and fizzing (though mommy may have added a little extra baking soda halfway through to help that fizzing along). Alligator Craft:
Cost: I already had the paper so it was free, but I spent $5 for that paper a while back Rating: 3 out of 4 stars Apple Eruptions: Cost: $2 Rating: 3 out of 4 stars I am super excited to be sharing sister's first real activity on the blog... a kitchen themed treasure basket! When Izzy was little, we absolutely loved doing treasure baskets together and I made him a new one every week so now that sister is 6 months old (I have no idea how that hapened) it is time for her to start with the treasure baskets too and we are thrilled. Treasure baskets are awesome little creations for babies age 6-18 months. You just get a basket, throw in some natural, household type items (trying to avoid normal toys and plastic) and let your little one explore. I like to make my baskets themed so that it is easier for me to come up with things to put in them and I like to shoot for 10 items per basket. For Sydney's first basket, I chose a kitchen theme and put the following items in there: 1 - Disposable cup 2 - Bowl 3 - Paper plate 4 - Piece of aluminum foil 5 - Measuring cup 6 - Whisk 7 - Hot pad 8 - Spoon 9 - Clean sponge 10 - Star cookie cutter Of course since treasure basket items aren't usually meant to be baby toys, they require close supervision. I personally like to use treasure baskets to work on language skills so I will sit there with my babies as they explore their baskets and explain and describe to them what is going on. So this treasure basket inspired some good conversations on cooking and the color blue. Another thing I love about these baskets is that they are easy to throw together and you can use things you already have laying around. They are great for introducing babies into the 'real world' and my kids have absolutely loved them thus far! And you can see for yourself in these pictures how much Sydney enjoyed her first treasure basket. Cost: Free
Rating: 4 out of 4 stars Izzy loves elevators. Seriously. Last month we went to the planetarium on a family date and we thought we had lost him a couple of times only to find him in the gigantic elevator or on his way there. Who cares about the fake moon rocks, the giant globe, or even the awesome rube goldberg, when there is an elevator around? Good question. So when I found the idea to make a homemade elevator to practice number recognition with, I thought it was genius. Just get some cardboard, glue on some big googly eyes (because when you push them they indent and then pop back out much like an elevator button), and add some round stickers with numbers on them. Viola! But apparently, Izzy is only interested in the real elevators because my homemade one just wasn't cutting it for him. I did manage to get him to go over all of the numbers once, but then he just wanted to peel the stickers off of the eyes and move on with life. Sort of like how we are now officially done talking about numbers and will be starting in to letters next week. We have a ton of letter activities planned so stay tuned! Cost: $2
Rating: 1 out of 4 stars Last week Izzy and I had fun making numbers on the floor out of masking tape. While making these numbers, I had all of these awesome ideas going through my head of how we could calmly walk across the numbers together, naming all of them as we went. Then we could go back through and hop on each number the appropriate amount of times, and then we could take the numbers off the floor and Izzy could tell me what each number was as he was peeling it off the floor. Well, that idea might have worked if my Izzy didn't have more energy than the energizer bunny himself. Once those numbers were down, Izzy was off like a lighting bolt running back and forth over those numbers over and over again. Occasionally, he would slow down long enough to name a number or two, but that is no where near as fun as running full speed down the hall screaming like a wild 2 year old maniac. Just to make sure he actually knew what the numbers were, I took the index cards I had made for our feed the monster activity and made them into a matching game for him. He did match all of the cards to the correct number once so I was satisfied that he had successfully reviewed his numbers for the day and so back to running he went. When he started to lose interest in the running (or maybe he was just worn out... finally), I wanted him to peel the tape off the floor since normally he loves peeling tape, but I guess that particular day was the exception because he didn't want anything to do with the peeling process. And since I thought my numbers actually looked quite awesome in all their ran over glory (and I may have been feeling a little lazy too) the tape got left and all of those numbers are still just hanging out on the floor waiting for a rainy day to get taken off. But now that their newness has worn off, Izzy will walk across them as calmly as a 2 year old can and say their names, but then he is off running again :) Cost: Free
Rating: 2 out of 4 stars |
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
Categories
All
|