Skills learned: The concept of 'in' and 'out', fine motor skills, critical thinking skills
Age: 12m+
Rating (out of 4 stars): 2
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
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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 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 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 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 Today for our activity, Izzy and I spent 20 minutes reading books and singing songs to go along with them. The setup went like this... Beforehand I went through his collection of books and picked out about a dozen or so that I could think of a matching song for. For example, we read Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and then sang the ABC Song. At first I tried reading him the book and then having him 'move to the music' so to speak, but I found he didn't like that much. Instead, it was easier to just read through the book and then let him flip back through the pages while I sung the accompanying song to him. And he sat through 11 out of the 12 books I had picked out. Not too shabby. The only unfortunate thing about this activity is that I was holding him the whole time so I wasn't able to take any pictures to share.
Cost: Free Skills learned: Language and communication, rhythm, concentration Age: All Ages (I actually think he would have enjoyed this more if he were a little younger) Rating (out of 4 stars): 4 We are super excited to share this activity with you. It is definitely one of our all time favorites and we will definitely be doing it again and adapting it as Izzy gets older. Okay, now to the activity... egg cartons! Now we don't go through a whole lot of eggs around here so the hardest part of the activity was actually collecting the egg cartons. I started collecting them about a month and a half ago and was able to come up with 4 beautiful cartons. My original plan was to just let him play with the egg cartons as is but at the last minute I decided to put some fun little toys and treasures into the cartons as you can see here: I used whatever I had on hand which included pipe cleaners, pom poms, twine, balls, bows, and Easter egg shakers. I super glued down the things I didn't want him playing with but allowed him to pull out the balls, bows, and Easter eggs. However, he was super determined and so he managed to pull out most of the other things too which meant that he played under super close supervision. However, he didn't mind too much and this was the perfect activity for his curious little one year old mind. As I said, I can see us doing this activity periodically as he gets older and adapting the materials we add to the egg cartons to his current skill level. I can see us doing this with different textures, shapes, colors, and then as he gets older using it to practice sorting and counting. As we do, we will be sure to keep you posted.
Cost: Free Skills learned: Fine motor skills, colors, critical thinking skills (for particular egg cartons we used today, but as I said, this could be used to teach a wide variety of skills) Age: 9m+ Rating (out of 4 stars): 3.5 After yesterday's post, it probably would have been safe to assume that we wouldn't be doing any more cold activities for quite a while. However, I had one more planned and I wasn't about to give it up so we have one more cold activity to share with you... playing with ice in bags! A few months ago, we put some ice in our trusty sensory bin, added spoons to stir and scoop with, and went to work. This time, we decided to contain the melty mess a little more by putting our ice in baggies. We used the rest of the colored ice we had made for our pudding activity along with some normal ice for a total of 3 baggies. I wanted to work on some counting so we varied the number of ice cubes we put in each bag as you can see here. Once the ice was in the baggies we were ready to play! I just gave the baggies to Izzy and let him go to work moving the ice cubes around in the baggies while I talked to him about the different colors of the ice cubes and counted the 3 baggies, 4 blue cubes, 5 green cubes, and 6 white cubes. All was well until about 5 minutes in when, just like with the cool whip and pudding, Izzy started getting cold and decided he was done. But while he was still having fun, this is what his exploration looked like. Cost: Free
Skills learned: Fine motor skills, colors, counting to 6, the concept of 'cold' Age: 6m+ Rating (out of 4 stars): 1.5 Izzy and I love to read. In fact, the other night while daddy was at a meeting, we spent an hour reading. And I didn't have to force Izzy to do it. He wanted to. In fact, he would sort through his books, pick the one he wanted, put it on my lap, and then try to climb up. Like I said, we repeated that process for an hour and I was so proud! I believe that the biggest reason why he loves reading so much is because it is an essential part of our daily routine. The way we read books goes as follows:
We both love this part of our daily routine and it only takes about 10 minutes to read all 5 of our books. I love it because I get to snuggle with my Izzy (who is not very snuggly at all) while we work on language skills and he gets to learn whatever the book is teaching him. He loves it because, as I said, he loves to read! I also like that we do the same 5 books everyday for a week because I think it helps the concepts in the books to stick with him better. Plus, the more we repeat the books, the more he likes them. Some of the benefits I have noticed by doing the 5 books program (as we will hereafter call it) are:
So have I convinced you yet on how fun story time with a little one can be? If not, just consider how important it is to read to a baby or toddler. Reading helps them develop language and communication skills, gives them important time to bond with you, helps them develop a higher aptitude for learning, helps them to learn discipline and concentration by sitting still through story time, and also helps them develop a knowledge that reading is fun! And no matter what, it is never too early to start reading.
Reading is so important and even if you don't use our 5 books program, Izzy and I highly encourage you to make it a regular practice with your little ones if you haven't already. And if you are in need of some good baby/toddler book recommendations, here is a list of Izzy's top 10 favorite books:
Do you have any fun tricks you use to read to your little ones? Do your little ones have any favorite books? If so, let us know. We are always up for more reading! :) |
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
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