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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Although we have given up our daily activities, as part of our summer bucket list we have a few activities planned that would have qualified as one of our old daily activities. The first one of these activities we did today and it was a toddler car wash. For this activity, we got a bin of water and added a drop or two of dish soap to make it nice and sudsy. Then we added some rags and got his toy cars involved. We set it all up in the bath tub so that the water could be contained. The purpose of the activity was largely as an imaginative play exercise to wash his toy cars. Although he has gotten very good at scrubbing things when you give him a rag, he wasn't too interested in his scrubbing his cars. Instead, he found it much more fun to put all of his cars in the bin and then take them all out at once. In the end, he played happily for about 15 minutes and we ended up with some clean toy cars and a semi-clean baby. Cost: Free
Skills learned: Imaginative play, cleaning skills Age: 18m+ Rating (out of 4 stars): 3 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+ For the last month or two, we have been struggling a lot with our former activity schedule. Either we don't get our activities done because of unpredictable nap times, or if we do find the time to do our activity, Izzy simply isn't interested. So next week we will begin making big changes to our activity format, but for now, we have one last 'normal' activity to share with you. Flour play! Since we are moving at the end of this month, we have been doing a lot of spring cleaning. One thing we discovered in our cleaning is that we have a lot of expired food and one of those expired foods is flour. Husby just wanted to throw the flour away because he claimed it made some peanut butter cookies he baked stale (while I thought they tasted just fine) but instead of throwing it away, I decided to make it into an Izzy activity. All I did was pour our remaining flour into a sensory tub, added some kitchen utensils and let him have at it. He explored it in every way he could think of and had more than 20 minutes of floury messy fun. This is a super simple activity and could be done on a much smaller scale if you don't feel like cleaning up a big floury mess. Flour is also good for a first sensory activity as it is safe and edible. You can even just pour a little bit onto a high chair tray and I'm sure your little one would love you for that as well. Cost: Free
Skills learned: Textures, sensory development Age: 6m+ Rating (out of 4 stars): 4 So this is definitely not an activity you would normally plan for a little boy, but who needs to stick to those stereotypical ideas of what toys boys should play with anyway? And besides, we had the baby doll since we have been doing 'big brother practice' with Izzy in preparation for his little sister who will be coming at the end of August. Mostly when we play with the doll, I hold the doll and pretend like its little sister while trying to teach Izzy not to poke her eyes, touch her mouth, etc., but today I decided to let him have a little fun of his own with the dolly so I made him this nice little doll bed out of a box and a blanket (notice how the blanket is most definitely boy...) The idea was just supposed to be to encourage a little imaginative play and use the box like a little bed and tuck the dolly in for a good night and then maybe wake her up in the morning. However, what this activity actually did was show me that Izzy is definitely all boy because that little nurturing instinct did not kick in and instead he tried to use the dolly as a magnet (only to find she wouldn't stick to anything) and then he wanted to take off her onesie. Once the onesie was off, every time I tried to put it back on the dolly, he would start screaming so I guess the dolly is better off naked. I did manage to get him to let me put the onesie on his favorite bunny for a few minutes though. So although this activity wasn't very successful with him, hopefully it will be a big hit with baby sister once she gets to be his age. Cost: Free if you already have a baby doll, around $10 if you don't
Skills learned: Imagination, creativity Age: 18m+ Rating (out of 4 stars): 2 I don't know about you, but I always have really good intentions to save what is left of my wrapping paper after a holiday to be used in the future, but from one holiday to the next, the majority of my paper ends up crumpled and wrinkled and just in an overall state that is not fit for wrapping a nice present for someone. So I decided to re purpose some of that damaged paper into an activity for Izzy. The idea was just to wrap a small toy he already has and let him unwrap it and repeat that process as long as he was happy or until my paper ran out. It turns out that my paper ran out before he got bored so that is a pretty good sign. He had a lot of fun tearing open the paper to find his monkey and when I got to my last piece of wrapping paper, I decided to wrap a package of fruit snacks so he could get a nice treat out of it all. It obviously wasn't his birthday, but to him I think it might have felt kind of like one. Cost: Free with paper you already have or $1 for a roll at the dollar store
Skills learned: Fine motor, critical thinking and problem solving Age: 12m+ Rating (out of 4 stars): 2 (Would have been higher, but I ran out of paper) A little while ago, I made this sensory boxes and included bags of colored rice with them. Izzy absolutely loved the bags of rice so I decided to make the edible version and let Izzy have some free sensory play with it and he loved the rice even more outside of the bags. I again used these directions to make the rice. After it had dried, I put it in his sensory bin, added a spoon, and just let him have at it. I love how colorful the rice is which allowed us to discuss color a little bit. It is also really pretty when it is all mixed together. Izzy loved dumping out the bin then filling it back up to hear the sound of the rice hitting the plastic. He did that over and over again. After a while he just settled for spreading the rice all over the floor. The one issue with the activity is that when the rice got stuck to his feet and he tried to walk, the rice obviously made it uncomfortable so you might want to do this activity with clothes and/or socks on. Cost: Free
Skills learned: Colors, textures Age: 9m+ (as long as you can reasonably trust your little one not to put it in his/her mouth) Rating (out of 4 stars): 4 The idea for this activity is fairly simple. It is to hang toys from the ceiling or a doorway so that baby can bat at them. I had originally wanted to use balls for this activity, but when it came down to actually hanging the toys up I decided to go with a variety of different toys that were easier to hang. The toys I used were: A water bottle filled with aluminum foil A present bow A ball A ring from a stacker toy A football baby toy Izzy's favorite of the 5 toys was the ball because it made the most noise when he batted at it. He was able to pull down the ball and the bow after playing for a while, but I showed him how he could use the attached string to pull the toys around the house and he thought that was almost more fun than batting at them. The one thing I would change if I were to do this activity over again would be to raise the toys up a little bit so he had to stretch a little more to reach them because I think that would help more with his balance and gross motor skills. Cost: Free
Skills Learned: Gross motor skills, movement (swing, twist, fall, etc) Age: 12m+ 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 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 |
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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