Day: May 24, 2016

Flour Fun

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toddler 5 (8)

Travis and I have played with flour before, as one way to introduce him to the joys of cooking and the concept of working with food. Although I don’t bake as often as I did pre-motherhood, I always set Travis up with a bag of flour, a big spoon, and a few measuring cups when I do whip up a batch of cookies or weekend morning pancakes. I’ll tell him about what we’re doing, and he latched on to the concept right away. Now he tells me he’s making “hot cross buns” or “strawberry pancakes” (from Daniel Tiger) while he spoons into the flour.

Lately, I also turned to flour as an alternative to sand for an “indoor sandbox.” Travis has been on a sand-scooping kick but I’m not a fan of kinetic sand, and prefer alternatives such as uncooked oats, kosher salt, or even dried beans.

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Today, I upped the ante with additions to our flour sandbox aside from our usual spoons and measuring cups!

After some time spent with the usual scooping play, I added Travis’ construction vehicles. He immediately took to the idea of the flour as “dirt” in a construction site, and very soon was loading up dump truck with the help of bulldozer’s shovel.

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“Dump!”

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He also loved driving other vehicles through the flour, including a toy school bus and a blue jeep, although he was not impressed when I tried to help him see the tire tracks his cars made.

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Once we tired of vehicles, I smoothed the surface to draw a few shapes and letters in the flour. We’ve been working on recognition of the letters in his name lately (as well as B-O-O-T-S thanks to the Laurie Berkner song!) so those were two fun words to add to the pan.

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Travis than used the point of his safety scissors to draw and proudly told me he’d made an oval – his best yet!

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Hand prints completed the fun.

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While we worked, Travis was quite concerned that his trucks and school bus were dirty, so I promised him at the end he could help me give all the vehicles a bath. As soon as we’d wiped the flour from our hands and feet, I set him up with a small washcloth and tiny basin of soapy water, and he gave the trucks a little scrubbing (though in full honesty, this mama had to finish off the job as he got bored and wandered off midway through).

toddler 5 (12)

Gooey Squishy Bag

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toddler 4 (4)

This past weekend, Travis and I woke up with a quiet Sunday ahead of us (my husband away on a business trip), and I wanted to set the tone for a fun-filled day. So immediately after breakfast, I asked Travis if he wanted to see something very cool.

The original idea for this craft (thanks to Hands on as We Grow!) calls for orange hair gel, as it was done around Halloween. But here in mid-May, I wasn’t concerned about color, just texture, and decided light corn syrup would work perfectly as the gooey base in which to suspend some googly eyes.

I filled a large zip-top plastic bag with the corn syrup, and then added the googly eyes from my craft bin. (Eek, there weren’t as many left as I hoped, since we used them recently during a contact paper decorating session. However, I decided this lack worked in our favor, as it really gave Travis room to move each eye around, instead of having them crowded or bunched together).

Travis was mildly interested while the bag was still on our kitchen floor…

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… But loved it once taped up to our window, where the morning light coming through made the effect even better.

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He loved squishing the bag, declaring, “Squishy Bag!” and “Gooey!” and enjoyed sliding one eye at a time all the way up to the top and then back down again.

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Taking a cue from Hands on As We Grow, I thought I’d see if he wanted to drive a car across the bag, for a funny squishy sensation. He gave his red jeep a few passes, but then preferred just to drive it along the windowsill.

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I left the bag taped up and he returned to it throughout the day for more squeezes and eye-moving. Note to self to try this game at Halloween, when he’ll be old enough to understand the spooky concept of the holiday for the first time. The eyes should make for a good, not-too-scary decoration.

Spaghetti Potion

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toddler 3 (7)

This three-ingredient project couldn’t be easier, and was a huge hit.

I’m on a sensory play kick with Travis, but in the wake of his short-lived interest in Dish Soap Foam, I thought he might be averse to dipping his hands into the gooey spaghetti concoction I made. Boy was I wrong: he couldn’t get enough of the stuff!

To set up the craft, cook a batch of spaghetti (or use leftover cooked spaghetti). Drain and toss with cold water, then arrange on a disposable foil pan. I drizzled the pasta with just a touch of corn syrup for stickiness (as well as to combat dryness), and added a sprinkle of natural red food coloring, and then let the mixture cool.

toddler 3 (4)

When we returned home from a hair cut (always a bit of a traumatic experience), I asked Travis if he wanted a super fun new game as a treat for being brave in the barber’s chair. We set out the foil tray and a colander, and he immediately fell to transferring the spaghetti by huge handfuls from one container to the other and back again.

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He very quickly decided the spaghetti looked like “vines,” too (we recently had a day of play centered around a jungle theme, so the comparison was forefront in his mind). So he then began singing the Jungle Dance song from an episode of Daniel Tiger (season 1, episode 10) and told me his spaghetti was “shaking like a rattlesnake” and “swinging like a monkey.” This made for delectable fun as the spaghetti was transferred from container to container.

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Huge smiles on this mama’s face.

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