How many ways can your toddler fill a bucket? Here’s one fun way to find out! Grab two summer beach pails and do some experimenting on a day that’s too rainy to make it to the real beach.

To start, I set out a basin of water for Veronika, along with two small beach pails and a few kitchen sponges. Her first instinct was simply to dip the pails in the basin to fill them. And of course this worked just fine!

She also spent some time transferring water from one pail to another, a second method that worked quite well.

But next I showed her how to saturate a sponge and squeeze it out over a pail. Each big squeeze would fill one of her buckets about 1/4 of the way.

Note: Older kids might enjoy the challenge of filling a big pail with the sponges (how many squeezes will it take!), but I liked using small pails for Veronika so she was rewarded quickly for her efforts.

From here she took over with dipping the sponges, squeezing, filling buckets, dumping them and starting all over. Of course soon she discovered that it was equally delightful to squeeze the water out on the floor and scrub.

So as a bonus, my kitchen got clean, too!