Herbed Broccoli

Leave a comment

This recipe comes together in minutes, and is a great way to dress up otherwise ho-hum vegetables.

Ingredients:

  • 1 head broccoli
  • 1/3 cup vegetable broth
  • 1 teaspoon dried basil
  • 1 teaspoon dried thyme
  • 1 teaspoon dried parsley
  1. Cut the florets from the broccoli head and transfer to a large bowl; reserve the stems for another use.
  2. Toss the florets with the broth and the herbs. Cover and steam in the microwave for 5 minutes, until tender.

My kids love this with Gardein chick’n or pasta for an elegant meal!

Rainy Day Pasta Sort

Leave a comment

Dried pasta has so many uses, whether for simple sensory play, making big instruments to shake, or enjoying a little early learning. So when Veronika was a little aimless today, I simply poured three different shapes of pasta from our pantry onto a tray. You can aim to have very different shapes (for a young toddler) or pasta with subtler differences for preschoolers. We used: farfalle, shells, and penne.

First, I invited Veronika to explore all three shapes. She loved that the farfalle looked just like butterflies!

Next, I set out three small containers and challenged her to sort the pasta. The idea was a little hard at first (words like “sort” or “match” are new vocabulary for her). But once I put a few shells in one bin and then asked, “Where does the shell go?” she latched onto the idea. Soon we had three sorted types of pasta!

Of course then it became a free-for-all, with lots of sensory scooping and dumping of all that pasta. You can even dye it if you want to fill up even more time on a rainy day!

Sock Matchup

Leave a comment

Veronika is working on the concept of “matching” lately; specifically when presented with a variety of objects, can she find the two that match. This vocab word will make the most sense to your child only in context, so start with the most classic match (or dreaded mismatch!): Socks.

To make the task one step more advanced than classic laundry sorting, I put dot stickers on each of her socks with numbers written in permanent marker. Now she had pairs of socks numbered 1 through 8, and we needed to help each one find its match!

Sometimes during this task she focused on the number to make a match.

Sometimes, I could tell she was looking more at the color or pattern of the sock instead. But ultimately, she was able to find each match!

Coffee Shop Role Play

Leave a comment

Veronika loves our daily jaunt out to get mommy’s coffee, so today she got to play barista with a coffee shop of her own! To start, I simply set her up with a toy coffee machine set we have, one of those great ways for kids to mimic the grown ups.

She could brew the beans, pour the coffee, and top it off with sugar and creamer for her patrons (a.k.a. stuffed animals).

Even better, though, is when you give kids a chance to play with the “real thing”. When I set out my coffee pot, the game immediately became more fun.

Now she needed a full coffee house set-up. We added menus, for which I designed the outside, but she helped decorate inside.

She could take “orders” before very seriously pouring from the percolator.

Overall, this was a great riff on tea party play, and kept her quite busy for a while!

Colorful Butterflies

Leave a comment

We spotted our first butterlfy of spring today, a lovely white one fluttering by! It felt only right to celebrate with a little butterfly craft. This was a riff on coffee filter butterflies, and was great for helping Travis hone some skills from art class this year.

First, I challenged him to cut out an oval. He decided it would be best to draw it first, then cut.

I made a few additional ovals so everyone could paint one with watercolor.

Little sister included!

Once the butterflies were dry, I showed Travis how to fold them accordion-style, back and forth until pleated.

Finally, we wrapped shiny pipe cleaners around the middle of each one as the bodies, leaving the tips sticking up for two antennae on each.

Fan out the wings, then add string or ribbon and let your butterflies flutter in a pretty window. Fun fact: tell your child that a group of butterflies is actually called a flutter, and see if they can guess why!

Q-Tip Painting, 4 Ways

Leave a comment

Whenever Veronika spots q-tips in the bathroom, she’s eager to play with them. So today we gave into that urge, and used the cotton swabs for arts & crafts instead! Below are four different methods that she and I tested out.

One: Negative Images

For the first craft, you can use any glass pie plate (or baking dish or loaf pan) as the “canvas”. I spread a little tempera paint thinly in the bottom, then handed Veronika a q-tip as her brush. Any lines that your child makes leave a negative image or etching behind.

The idea was a bit advanced for Veronika, but after she’d done some scribbling, she loved seeing the deliberate images I drew for her, like a sun or puppy.

We even tried making a print of it by pressing down a piece of white paper, although it ended up looking more like abstract art.

Two: Color mixing

Cotton swabs are just right for mixing up colors, giving a chance to teach a little about primary and secondary colors! I poured a little of each primary color (red, yellow, and blue) onto a paper plate, and first showed them to Veronika as we named each.

One at a time, we mixed them! Our red and yellow made orange, yellow and blue made green, and blue and red made purple. Now we had a full palette for…

Three: Pointillism

The tip of a cotton swab is naturally suited for making dots (although Veronika practiced making a few swirls, too), which is a great introduction to the pointillist style of painting.

I dotted right alongside her, so pretty soon we had a pointillism rainbow and sun and clouds, with a little blue puppy beneath. Veronika loved adding to the picture I started, making very emphatic dots. My little artist at work!

Four: Counting

For our final q-tip activity, I wrote out the digits 1, 2, and 3 for Veronika. After encouraging her to name each number, I asked her to make the correct number of dots with her q-tip underneath. “Can you make 1 dot?” I asked her. Dot!

She was also able to do this for number 2. By 3, she just started dotting everywhere. But of course preschoolers can tackle this task all the way up to 10, or higher! For an even greater challenge, stamp out a connect-the-dots with the q-tips, then number them and have your child connect the lines.

Which of these q-tip activities does your child like best? Please share in the comments. Many thanks to Hands on As We Grow for all these q-tip ideas!

Water Cycle Bags

Leave a comment

Travis has been learning about the water cycle in school, so here was a fun way to make the lesson hands-on at home.

In the morning before school, we each copied a template onto sandwich-sized zip-top plastic bags with Sharpies. Travis insisted that his sun have sunglasses and a smile! Make sure to draw the arrows showing evaporation, condensation, and precipitation, the three main movements of the water cycle.

We then added a little water to each bag (filling them about half way) and added a few drops of blue food coloring. Now it was time for a test! Travis’s bag went in a sunny window. Mine went in a window on the shady side of the house. The idea was to observe them for a few days and spot any differences.

After school, Travis could scope out the differences. The condensation was noticeably more apparent in the sunny bag. Obviously since the bags are a closed system, it won’t mimic a perfect water cycle, but kids can observe any changes over a few days and even take notes!

Marching Song

Leave a comment

Whether your toddler has reached that age where he or she is determined to walk instead of being carried (“all by myself!” Veronika insists) or whether you’re trying to encourage such a shift, there’s one inconvenience to those independent toddler footsteps: those little feet can go sloooow. Sometimes, a good marching song is exactly what you need to help the pace along!

This version is to the familiar tune of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”, making it easy for little one’s to latch onto. So for example when we make a routine daily trek, like our walk to the mailbox, Veronika and I sing:

See the soldiers in the street,

Hear the marching of their feet.

They are singing as they go,

Marching, marching to and fro

See the soldiers in the street

Hear the marching of their feet.

This definitely helps Veronika pick up the pace. As a bonus, it can help you as the grown-up feel less frustrated, and more engaged in the moment! There’s a reason soldiers have marched to songs for millennia.

Shoebox Train Craft

Leave a comment

Veronika has loved books about trains lately, especially old favorites like The Little Engine That Could. So today we made her a train of her very own!

To set up, I used three cardboard boxes (none of which were actually shoeboxes, despite the title of this post, but they were roughly that size). Make sure the box you choose for the engine still has a lid. Cut two rectangles from that lid, and cut out a “window” from each, then adhere to the sides of this first box as the sides of the engine. Our engine box also still had a flap on the front which was perfect for gluing down an empty toilet paper tube as the funnel. You can also affix an additional flap of cardboard here if needed.

Next, I measured construction paper to fit the sides of each box, and then affixed with hot glue. We used blue for the engine, green for the middle car, and red for the caboose. Cut black circles from construction paper as wheels and glue down. Finally, punch a hole in the front and back of each box so you can tie them together with string. This train was ready to chug along the track!

I pulled it up to the “station” (i.e. the playroom) where lots of Veronika’s stuffed animals were waiting to board. She wasted no time loading her passengers into the train!

She absolutely adored chugging the train all around the apartment, sometimes pausing to let passengers on and off, or sometimes talking to her passengers: “Come on black puppy!”

You can use these train cars in other ways, too, even for color sorting blocks or other toys into the train car with the same color paper. We skipped that part today, though, since Veronika loved loading it up in conjunction with another read-though of Little Engine.

Chugga chugga choo choo!

Alphabet Sand

Leave a comment

When I needed to occupy Veronika quickly today, I gave her a little tray of alphabet sand, one of those “oldie but goodie” sensory games that never fails.

What is alphabet sand, you ask? It isn’t sand at all, but my secret mix of equal parts sugar and salt in the bottom of a cake pan. Set it down in front of your toddler and let them practice tracing the alphabet!

For early learners like Veronika, I usually start out by coaching her through a few easy examples like O, X, V, and T. We use our fingers, but also lollipop sticks, which make great “pens”.

After she’s done a few letters, she’s usually ready just to squiggle, or to draw lines and circles. She also loves to let the mixture sprinkle down into the cake pan from her fingers. When she shifts her sprinkling over to the floor, that’s when I know the game is done and we quickly sweep up.

Want something similar but a bit more challenging? Hide alphabet puzzle pieces in the mixture instead!