Month: November 2016

Gratitude Tree

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I found this idea on Kids Activities Blog, which is full of neat craft ideas for the holidays… or any time of year. It seemed like a beautiful way to introduce a toddler to the idea of giving thanks. Two and a half is of course young to entirely understand the concept of “grateful,” but Travis does know what he loves and enjoys best, so those were the words I used as I guided him to fill out the leaves of our “tree”.

First, find a branch or stick with several twigs on it that you can talk home – a perfect excuse for a fall nature walk!

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We took our branch home and planted it in a glass with dried beans for stability. Small pebbles would work as well, but I liked that the beans represented the Thanksgiving harvest and bounty.

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The next day, I cut “leaves” from fall-colored construction paper – reds and yellows and oranges – and sat down with Travis to fill them out. While he colored some of the leaves, I prompted him to share what he was thankful for and wrote down his answers on other leaves. I also shared my answers with him, to help him understand the idea.

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Punch a hole in each “leaf” and hang from your tree branches with string.

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Your gratitude tree is now ready to adorn the Thanksgiving table – perhaps with some turkey friends for company?

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Turkeys at the Table

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I try to make Thanksgiving a holiday full of gratitude – for our loved ones and our blessings, and also for all animals. Raising Travis vegan, this means teaching him to celebrate turkeys, while still making sure he doesn’t feel left out of traditions! So we make these beautiful birds the stars of the table, but not the plate.

Every year since his birth I’ve adopted a turkey in his name, bringing us up to our third turkey now. Meet Kristoff!

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To further highlight turkeys, we made cute napkin-ring centerpieces for the table this year!

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Cut a paper towel tube into thirds, and trim each so that a triangle sticks up at the top. Let your child cut a slit on two sides of the tube, then insert two pieces of craft foam – one yellow, one orange – that you’ve cut into “feathers.” (To simplify, you could buy craft foam flowers and cut in half).

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Fold down the triangle on each tube to be the beak, and then add eyes (either with marker or googly eyes) and a triangle beak cut from orange construction paper.

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Your turkey friend is now ready to hold a napkin at your table!

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Walnut Boats

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To truly make these adorable boats (which really float!) you’ll need hot glue. I decided to go ahead and improvise with the glue we have, so while the boats still made for fun play, they took quite a bit longer to assemble. Read on!

First, fill empty walnuts shell halves with glue all the way to the top. Travis loved squeezing the glue into a big goopy pile to help with this part.

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Insert a toothpick into the center of each glue pile to be the mast. If you have hot glue, you’ll only need to hold your pick a minute or two for it to set. I propped up the shells and masts and had to leave them overnight at this point!

Once your glue is dry, you can adorn the mast with the sail of your choosing. Paper flags would work just fine, or add pirate flag decorations if your toddler is into pirates! Instead of paper, we used little marine-themed stickers that I had lying around.

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We tested the walnut boats in a basin first, before bringing them to bath time for soapy sailing. Travis loved throwing in the additional marine stickers.

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If you successfully make these boats with hot glue, please share in the comments!

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Foil Monster Truck Rally

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Travis has a “monster Jeep” that he loves, so when I saw this adorable way to play monster truck rally at home, I had to give it a try!

Wrap small cars (matchbox race cars are the perfect size) in foil to form an impression, then remove the car to leave the shape behind. This takes some practice, but don’t worry if your work is a bit sloppy – the cars are about to be crushed anyway!

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Line the “cars” up in a row; now it’s time for your monster trucks to wreak havoc!

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Travis was mildly interested in driving the jeep over the foil, particularly when he was surprised to see the cars get crushed instead of staying solid.

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Even more so, he loved the general idea of wrapping cars in foil and then discovering which one was hidden inside. It’s yet another instance of setting up a game for him, only for him take it a new direction that he enjoys more. So why not!

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Either way, you’re sure to have some fun with this one.

Flying Saucer

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We talked a lot about modes of transportation here on planet Earth this week… but what about transportation in outer space??

To make a super-stellar UFO at home, all you need are two paper plates and a few supplies for decoration. Glue the plates together and let dry completely.

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For the best flying saucer, I recommend silver paint. Travis had a blast painting, since it’s a color we’ve never used before!

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Then we added glitter because, well, we needed space dust of course. In retrospect, I would have skipped this part, as it made flying the UFO a glittery mess every time! But for toddler fun, glitter can’t be beat.

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As the finishing touch, we added gem stickers around the rim to be the flying saucer’s lights.

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I made Travis three little aliens by gluing googly eyes onto pom poms.

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Finally it was time to soar through space!

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O Week!

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Oh what a week we had (sorry, couldn’t resist!). Many O words are very common and simple ones (e.g. on/off, open, old), so it was challenging but rewarding as a parent to devise ways to turn everyday words into games. Here’s what we fit in this week:

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Olympics: Too big a word to pass up, even if the time of year doesn’t correspond to the actual Olympic games. Stage a toddler mini Olympics with “javelin” and “discus” throws, bean bag races, and more.

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Octopus/Ocean: I made Travis an octopus to swim around the apartment (which, admittedly, looked more like a jelly fish) by wrapping a Styrofoam ball in fabric and tying on 8 ribbons as legs.

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We then staged an “ocean dive” for the octopus and other ocean-y creatures, and Travis loved filling up a bucket with treasures from the “ocean.”

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Opposites: You can use pretty much any toy and a building block to demonstrate great opposites, such as on/off, up/down, or behind/in front of, but I highly recommend Bunny Boo, which is a great toy for spatial relationships. It fit my agenda perfectly for O week!

Aside from demonstrating opposites with a toy, quiz your toddler on what opposites he or she knows. Travis impressed me getting left/right and more. For preschoolers, consider turning it into a board game or card game of some sort.

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Oak: This word made for my favorite moment of the week. We started off reading As An Oak Tree Grows, by G. Brian Karas, and the next day we took a walk among oak trees. Travis loved connecting it to our story from the night before, and we crunched through all the acorns on the ground this time of year.

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Open: Simply set out collection of all the things around the house that your toddler can open and close (hey, more opposites!), including some that are a challenge for his or her fine motor skills, like bottle and jar lids.  Some favorites were his jack-in-the-box, turtle treasure box, and the mailbox we created back in X week!

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Obstacle course: We created such an intricate obstacle course that I devoted a separate blog post to it, but needless to say, this word is the perfect prompt for gross motor skills of the week.

Then we moved on to…

Fine art: Make Olympic rings (perfectly shaped like Os!) of course. See my Toddler Olympics post for more details.

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Food: Oatmeal raisin cookies got a happy yes. Olives got a very confused no.

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Books: A few titles from the library that fit our themes and games perfectly: Thank you Octopus, by Darren Farrell and Inside Outside by Lizi Boyd (another opposite!). We also read Old Bear and His Cub by Olivier Dunrea.

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Songs: On a whim, I played a download of an oboe sonata; who knew Travis would be so fascinated by the instrument? If you’re feeling ambitious, you might introduce your child to a YouTube clip of opera singers. More toddler-friendly, Travis loved watching My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean and Old Macdonald Had a Farm and we sang lots of rounds of Open, Shut Them (more opposites!)

Math: Ovals and octagons are the shapes we focused on this week. I made a simplified outline match – another convenient O word – tracing octagons and ovals in various colors and sizes. Travis nailed the game on the first try, and then wanted to try tracing on his own!

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We’re headed into N week next, so stay tuned.

 

Transportation Crate

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We had a great time discovering our latest Koala Crate when it arrived in the mail this week! This month’s theme was billed as “transportation,” although the focus is largely on cars and trucks. I wouldn’t have minded an airplane- or train-themed craft to diversify the kit, but that is a minor quibble, because the materials provided were quite novel this month.

The first thing Travis spotted were the road signs, which meant they had to be assembled straight away (we used foam stickers to attach the sign templates to small wooden cubes). He loved making toy cars and buses stop at the traffic light and stop sign.

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To add to the imaginative play, the crate comes with a roll of washi tape for making a whole town on your floor! This activity is one we’ve done with masking tape in the past, but now we had road signs to add to the complexity of our “town.”

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This is a great chance to talk with toddlers and preschoolers about basic road rules and safety, and ask them about what each sign means. I also added a dashed line down some of our “roads” to teach Travis about two-way traffic.

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And at the end, Travis loved ripping all the washi tape off the floor and making a big pile with it because, well, #two-nager.

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The next item in the crate was a beautifully-crafted wooden truck. We ran the truck’s wheels in water in the pan provided and then across the “magic paper” to make tire tracks!

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If you don’t have a Koala subscription, you can copy this activity with black paint and drive toy cars through. We had fun discovering the different tracks that various cars made, some skinny, some fat.

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Travis also marveled at how he could touch the black watery marks left by the cars, but not get black on his finger. An element of magic is always a plus.

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Then it was time to pull out the provided paintbrush and paint black roads, which made for messy fun driving cars through blobs of black paint.

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Finally, we tested the third activity: A cardboard ramp. The varying slope of the ramp is a nice way to show how velocity varies as roads get steeper. Although the lesson was a little advanced for Travis, there’s nothing wrong with a game of rolling trucks and cars down a ramp!

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To finish, I assembled car and truck puppets on popsicle sticks for Travis by cutting shapes from construction paper, taping them together, and then taping on a popsicle stick “person” to look through the windshield.

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Travis loved driving these around for a moment… before deciding it might be more fun to rip them up, because again #two-nager.

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Thanks for the fun, Koala!

Indoor Obstacle Course

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Stuck inside on a rainy day? Look no further than an obstacle course for almost endless variations of fun.

Today I set up a course that combined gross and fine motor skills, making various “stations” at which Travis could stop.

Gross motor challenges included walking across construction cones, a masking tape “balance beam”, stepping on pillows, climbing a pillow ramp, crawling through a blanket tunnel, and jumping into a hula hoop.

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Fine motor activities were his favorite part of the course! We used a piece of rolled up newspaper as a “golf club” to hit golf balls into a tunnel.

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Then I set a straw upright in a blob of playdough for Travis to slide rings over.

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Arguably his favorite part of the whole event was when I pulled out the timer to make the course more of a race. He loved pressing the buttons and learning how the timer works!

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All in all, a nice way to make a dreary morning a little less so.

Toddler Olympics

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Although not exactly timely, we had some random fun playing “Olympic games” this past week.

For an adorable version of toddler discus and javelin throw, mark a bull’s eye on a sheet of paper. Paper plates become your discus and plastic straws make the perfect javelin.

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Get the whole family in on the action and see who comes closest to the target! Or just have fun launching the plates all around, as Travis did.

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We followed up with a bean bag race. Our favorite version was crawling with the bean bag on our backs, seeing who could last the longest, but you could also try running from a start to finish line with the bean bag on your head, or see who can toss the most bean bags into a basket.

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Finally, we made an Olympic ring craft. Although I largely had to piece it together, it was great practice for Travis to see how a straight strip of paper can fold into a circle. Once our rings were complete, I showed him the true Olympic logo online, and he was delighted to see that ours matched, including the colors in the same places.

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What other toddler “sports” would you add? Please share in the comments!

Date Nut Candy

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These little confections are so delicious that your little one will never believe the ingredients are good for them too! If you prefer, use a mix of walnuts and cashews instead of all walnuts.

Ingredients:

  • 1/2 cup old-fashioned oats
  • 3/4 cup walnuts
  • 1/4 cup chopped and pitted dates
  • 2 tablespoons agave nectar
  • 1 teaspoon canola oil
  • 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 3 tablespoons shredded coconut
  1. Place the oats and walnuts on a baking sheet and bake at 350 degrees F for 10 minutes, until toasted. Let cool.
  2. Transfer the oat mixture to a food processor and process for about 2 minutes, until the mixture resembles a nut butter.
  3. Add the dates, agave, oil, and vanilla, processing until blended.
  4. Divide the mixture into balls and roll in the coconut. Store, covered, in the fridge or at room temperature for up to 3 days.