Marshmallow Sculptures

March 27, 2017Leave a comment

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Travis and I had some gooey fun attempting to make sculptures from marshmallows last November, but I confess our attempts were foiled by using large marshmallows and unsteady straws as construction materials.

This time we used toothpicks and the small marshmallows from Dandies, and were able to create much sturdier constructions! Note: I recommend playing this game soon after your child has had a meal or a snack – that way the marshmallows will be viewed more as building material, and less as a treat to eat… Although we did sneak a few bites along the way!

Already compared to November, Travis was much better at construction. He loved adding a marshmallow to either end of a toothpick, and loved that they looked like Q-tips!

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I then helped arrange these into more complex structures, whether two-dimensional shapes…

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Or three-dimensional creations.

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The project was a great way to discuss shapes and dimensions! We even tried a double-decker hexagon.

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In sum, sticky fun for everyone.

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Paint Up a Storm

March 27, 2017March 27, 2017Leave a comment

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This idea from our April copy of High Five magazine was the perfect project on a gray day as we head into rainy April – what better way to help children enjoy all those April showers that will bring May flowers??

To start, we looked out the window at the stormy day, and I asked Travis what colors he saw, pointing out various tones of gray and deep blue. I asked him if he wanted to paint the day, and his enthusiastic answer was yes!

I set out watercolor and watercolor paper, but first we needed to add our “raindrops”: tear bits of masking tape into pieces, and adhere to the paper; when you remove the pieces later, you’ll have white raindrops left behind.

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Travis barely paused for this step before diving for the paints. He talked as he worked about the various shades of blue he made…

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…and then impressed me by painting “puddles”!

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Mama made her own watercolor while he worked, and we collaborated on a third, ending up with three stormy paintings.

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Let the watercolor dry completely before removing the tape and revealing your “rain drops”.

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The paintings are perfect to transform into gifts. We folded one in half to make a “Cloudy Card” as a gift for his grandpa. A second one we cut into strips to be “Rainy Day Bookmarks.”

Finally, we glued a photo in the center of the third, making a Stormy Weather Picture Frame – the perfect gift for daddy’s desk!

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What other gift ideas can you think of with these stormy paintings? Please share in the comments!

Scented Salt Dough

March 26, 2017March 26, 20172 Comments

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Salt dough projects aren’t just for Christmas ornaments – we brought the scent of spring into our house with this neat take on the project!

The first step was to whip up salt dough of course, and Travis always loves projects that involve mixing. In a bowl, combine:

1 cup flour

1/2 cup salt

1/2 cup water

If your dough is too sticky, simply add a little more flour. Next we mixed in just a drop of food coloring and kneaded it in, resulting in a pretty marbled effect. Lavender and green felt like the perfect spring shades!

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Instead of Christmas shapes, we rolled and cut our dough into animals like sheep, pigs, and cows. And of course Travis had fun just playing with the dough for a while, and requesting extra flour to make his hands a springtime mess!

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Bake the dough at 350 degrees F for 30 minutes.

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Once it cooled, we added the finishing touch – a drop of lavender oil to the back of each piece. After that, the whole apartment smelled like springtime!

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A Week!

March 24, 2017March 24, 20171 Comment

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I can hardly believe it, but we’ve reached the end (beginning) of our Letter of the Week journey, begun last September. Twenty-six letter weeks (plus a few holiday weeks) later, I can say I have loved every step of this project. Travis can identify every letter, and understands the concept that letters are connected to words, the very first step toward reading. In addition, these weeks have helped me to be creative and joyful as a parent, deciding what would fill our activities and games based on the current letter each week. So please, go back through all my letter posts and I hope you enjoy as much as we did!

But first, don’t forget to take a look at our A week…

Animals: Pull out all your animal toys of course, whatever you have. You’re guaranteed to have some lying around, whether stuffed animals, plastic animals, puzzle animals, and more. In addition, we went back to old favorite games like an animal safari this week, and then acted out animals with a game of charades.

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Put your child’s toy animals in a bag or bin, and take turns selecting. Act out the animal you selected and let the others guess what you are.

Apron: Pop a toddler-sized apron over your little one’s head and have them join you in the kitchen this week!

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For bonus points, make sure your main ingredient starts with an A, as in the stuffed baked apples we put together.

Acorns: We used a little collection of acorn caps (gathered at last week’s bird sanctuary!) and turned them into acorn jewels. Acorns lend themselves to any number of arts & crafts, so if “jewels” aren’t your cup of tea, fashion them into whatever your child will like best.

Aquarium: For our field trip of the week, we headed to a local aquarium! (Please note that I do not recommend facilities keeping dolphins and whales in captivity).

Alphabet: How appropriate that A week could also be a sort of recap week, since alphabet begins with (of course) A. We put together an alphabet flower garden, played with alphabet tiles, and searched for alphabet beads in a big bin of colored rice.

And some extras…

Fine art: The suggestion from Letter of the Week was to assemble paper bag animal puppets. I wanted to Travis to have full range of creativity, so rather than assign him a specific animal to make, I let him create and then built off his design to finish our puppets. He loved using glitter glue and stickers, and we wound up with an alligator and a tiger.

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Food: In addition to painting with apples, we ate them in the form of applesauce. Travis also enjoyed animal crackers, avocados, and alphabet soup

Songs: Ants Go Marching is a big hit around here, and we also watched the clip of April Showers from Bambi (which brought back nostalgic memories!).

Books: Some favorites this week included apple books (Secrets of the Apple Tree and The Apple Pie Tree by Zoe Hall), Let’s Be Animals by Ann Turner, Eating the Alphabet by Lois Ehlert, and Alligator Wedding by Nancy Jewell. Check out your library’s non-fiction section for a cute intro to astronauts as well!

Math: An abacus was the perfect tool to help Travis visualize his age. I started by showing him two beads for his own age, then showed my age, my husband’s, and the ages of his friends and cousins. He loved seeing two ages in comparison (i.e. himself versus his 6 year old cousin). For preschoolers, you can use your abacus for early addition lessons as well!

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All’s well that ends well… Thanks for reading along on this journey!

Acorn Jewels

March 23, 20171 Comment

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Although this project didn’t turn out quite as well as I hoped, I still love the idea and want to share!

The first thing you’ll need to make acorn jewels is… acorn caps! We didn’t let winter deter us from heading outside to collect a few. In fact, with all the acorns eaten up by animals, we found lots of large empty caps that were perfect for this project.

Next we needed to wash the winter dirt off of them, so gave the acorn caps a quick bath. This was arguably Travis’s favorite part of the entire project.

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Color in each acorn cap with marker, preferably in a variety of jewel tones and bright colors. We used fabric marker, but I think maybe those Mr. Sketch scented markers would work better.

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Now fill each cap all the way with glue.

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Let sit for 24 to 48 hours – the glue should be completely dried up, and the color will have seeped into it, leaving a jewel tone behind.

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What will you do with your acorn jewels? Please share in the comments!

Stained Glass Apples

March 22, 2017March 22, 20171 Comment

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This whimsical creation is a neat way to do stamp painting with your child!

Cut an apple in half crosswise (not lengthwise, as your normally would) – you’ll be able to see the pretty star where the seeds are, which will make for the prettiest prints!

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Squeeze different colors of paint onto paper plates so that each apple half will have a mosaic of colors. Travis loved helping with this step.

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Now dip the apple in the paint, and transfer onto tracing paper. Here’s the key – don’t smoosh the apple around.

Travis got the hang of this so much faster than I anticipated! He really liked the challenge, in fact, of pressing down the apple only once and then pulling up without disturbing the circular image, which is a bit tricky because the apple suctions to the paper. So this project turned out to be great for our motor skill development.

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Once the paint dried, I covered all the apple prints with contact paper (sticky side down), and cut out around the circles.

Travis helped punch holes in the apple circles…

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… and then I laced them together using twine.

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Suspend from a window where the apples will catch the sun!

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Alphabet Flower Garden

March 20, 20171 Comment

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We are so ready for spring flowers around here, so decided to make them bloom in our home before the ones outside catch up. This beautiful foam sticker garden was a great way to sneak in some learning.

I drew flower stems and leaves on a piece of foam with a permanent marker (poster board would probably work even better), with a letter of the alphabet at the head of each stem. I then wrote the alphabet letters on foam flowers.

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It was now up to Travis to add the flower to each stem, matching up letters as he went.

For a few minutes, he was more interested in just fooling around with the foam stickers. But once he made the connection of what I was really asking of him, he was SO excited each time he found the matching stem for his flower.

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He made it about three-quarters of the way through the alphabet before losing interest, so I finished off our garden, but not before proudly surveying his work!

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The next morning, we added additional stickers of leaves and bugs to round out the picture – a beautiful spring garden.

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Spring Sensory Bin

March 20, 20171 Comment

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Happy Spring! We’re kicking off the new season with this pastel-hued sensory bin. I made dyed rice once before on this blog, but this time I used Kool-Aid for more vibrant color; you can prepare batches exactly the same as for Kool-Aid Dyed Pasta.

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After the rice dried, I set up with a bin with a few spring animals, a rake, and fake flowers, for a pretty pastel garden.

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Travis immediately set to raking – he loves scooping through rice, no matter the theme! For this activity, we talked about how flowers grow in the spring, and he loved “planting” some in the rice. Then we decided we needed to fill up a watering can with the rice, which could then rain “April showers” down on the flowers. This went on for quite a while!

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I also added plastic Easter eggs at one point, which were fun to scoop with, fill with rice to shake like maracas, and more.

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Travis loved the way that the rice started out in 4 separate color piles, and then all mixed together.

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Hopefully this helps make your first day of spring as joyful as ours was!

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Feelings Crate

March 19, 2017March 19, 20172 Comments

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Our latest set of activities from Koala Crate was all about friendship and feelings… Parts of this crate were a bit advanced for a two and a half year old, but talking about feelings and emotions is something we always aim to do, and it was nice to have new props!

As with all Koala Crates, you could mostly put these together with craft store items, although the dry erase mirror might be difficult to replicate. Read on…

The biggest hit by far were the felt Funny Face Puppets. Travis loved applying the felt shapes to the provided felt circles, telling me what his creation was feeling (I was especially impressed when he made a “sleepy” one) and designing them to look like relatives.

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On an intellectual level, he really knew where eyes and noses and other features should go in relation to each other, a nice leap forward.

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Older kids may be interested in assembling their faces as a game, using the provided spinner to apply facial features one at a time, but Travis didn’t quite get that concept.

The Friendship Bracelet project was a bit of a dud (although I thought the provided water-filled paintbrush was neat). We threaded the wooden beads onto a dowel to paint, but Travis was more into mixing the colors than painting the beads.

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Once dry, I put together the bracelets for him… and then did love that he chose to give one half of the pair to his daddy! Still, this project was a nice way to talk about the importance of sharing with friends.

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The Feelings Poster was super cute, but Travis preferred just to doodle with the dry erase marker rather than specifically draw emotions on it.

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We then used this crate as a nice jumping-off point to act out our emotions. First we assigned actions to each emotion – stomping for angry, jumping for surprised, dancing for happy etc. Then we played “musical emotions”! I would start a song, and Travis would act out the emotion he felt fit the song best. A great way to build EQ!

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We ended by putting together a suggested craft in the kit – a “Feelings Friend” that Travis can take with him or use to help express his emotions. Punch a hole in a cardboard tube, then use scissors to make that hole the size of a quarter.

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Slip in a piece of paper, and trace a circle through the opening. Repeat all around the paper. Remove the paper from the tube to draw different emotions on each circle, then slide back into the tube.

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Now your toddler can spin the faces around!

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We’ll likely return to all these items once Travis is older, and his emotional vocabulary develops. Thanks Koala Crate!

B Week!

March 17, 2017March 17, 20171 Comment

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It’s hard to believe this is our second to last week of our Letter of the Week journey, begun last September. We had a (n appropriately lettered!) blizzard hit, and frigid temps, but that didn’t deter us from B week fun.

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Bird: My favorite moment of the week was a stop into a local bird sanctuary, where we spotted early spring birds, including a beautiful cardinal! A great way to get out into nature.

Bubbles: Bubbles are always a childhood favorite, so to make them different this week, we used bubble bath and played bubble barber, piling on silly beards and hairdos. Travis loved giving me a beard and rubbing bubble “lotion” all over his and my arms. We also made a painting with bubbles (simply add food coloring to bubble solution, hold up to paper and blow!), for a neat way to visualize them.

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For more bubbly fun (but not the soap kind), we also painted with bubble wrap.

Boats: Speaking of bath time, make an easy boat that will really float in the tub. Use an empty Styrofoam tray from the supermarket as the base; place a blob of playdough in the middle, and insert a straw with a paper sail taped to it for the mast. Travis loved it so much he didn’t wait until bathtime to play, and he loved that it really floated.

Balloon/Bounce: Balloons are another constant favorite, so we needed to make them special for B week. What could be better than balloons that bounce? Buy large balloons, and smaller rubber bouncy balls. Slide a ball up inside each balloon before inflating, then inflate and watch them bounce – they’ll be off balance and wonky and super fun. The bouncy balls turned out to be a huge hit on their own. Travis used them in musical play, to bounce backwards off the wall, and more.

Backwards: Be silly this week and do whatever you can backwards. Bounce a ball backwards, wear a shirt backwards, or even eat a backwards meal (dessert first of course, or breakfast for dinner and vice versa).

Baseball: Read a cute intro to baseball like Little Baseball from Sleeping Bear Press, listen to “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”, and then take a few practice swings with a soft bat and ball!

Beanbags: Beanbags have nearly endless possibilities; race with them on your back, squeezed between your knees, on your head – the sillier the better!

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Beanbags also make great musical props or color-learning tools.

Buttons: With the help of some sticks we collected, Travis made a button tree. Or just play with buttons! Travis loves sorting them by color, or piling them into and out of containers.

Butterfly: This word was the prompt for three fantastic art projects, one messy and fun (footprints), another a touch more scientific (balancing), and one just beautiful (zipline butterflies). It was nice to think about spring butterflies flitting about, here in our late winter weather! Of course you can also flutter like a butterfly using scarves as wings.

Our weekly extras…

Fine art: Travis helped construct an entire block city for our 3-D art project this week. Admittedly, I did most of the crafting, but he loved building stacks and towers in the final creation.

Food: Some favorites this week were baby bananas, blueberries, and bagels… And of course we had to take a field trip to a bakery for a brownie.

Books: Your child will get gales of laughter for The Pigeon Needs a Bath! by Mo Willems. You might also check out any of the Angelina Ballerina books, The Bear in the Book by Kate Banks, Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey, or The Lamb and the Butterfly by Arnold Sundgaard. Our favorite reading moment this week was with our Usborne Young Beginners Bugs, matching them up to Travis’s bug kit.

Songs: Make sure you listen to Baby Beluga this week!

Math: We talked about the concept of before, as in 1 comes before 2, 2 comes before 3, etc. Floor puzzles or number mats are nice ways to visualize this idea.

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I’ll be posting our final installment – letter A – next week, so stay tuned!