Pom Pom Play

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I sometimes forget that the best games for a toddler might involve the simplest things. This game, which I’ve pulled out twice in the past week, is a huge hit and easy for us moms and dads to set up.

Save your next paper towel tube roll and tape it to a door or cabinet. Present your little one with a bag full of large pom poms and let them go to town!

Travis started out dropping the pom poms down the chute, as I expected, and that was fun in and of itself. But his two favorite variations on the game were trying to fill the tube from the bottom up:

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And, stuffing multiple pom poms down the tube at once, while crying out, “So many!” We’d squish them and then see how long it took for the clogged pompoms to get squeezed all the way down the tube so we could start pulling them from the bottom.

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For slightly more intellectual play, I later presented Travis with mini pom poms in a muffin tin. Much to my surprise, he asked for tongs to move them from cup to cup, but when this became frustrating he had no problem using his fingers or a spoon. He clearly had some imaginative game going in his head, because he told me the pom poms were “still warm” and then “perfect temp” and that we had a to wait a few minutes, so I know he was imitating the way he plays with toy food (and also mimicking the things I say at dinner time, haha).

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My favorite moment, though, was when he spied a blue in the green bin – and made sure to place it back with the other blue ones! When we had fun dumping all the pom poms out, (which of course we did multiple times), he would sort them back into the tins by color.

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At long last, the concept of sorting!

Pipe Cleaner Fine Motor Skills

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When Travis sees pipe cleaners, he generally either wants me to bend them into shapes (hearts are a favorite) or into a loop to wear over his arm like a bracelet. So I wondered if he’d care at all when I presented him with this fine motor challenge! Happily, he took right to it.

The idea is self-explanatory from the photos: set your toddler up with pipe cleaners and a colander and let them go to town.

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Travis loved poking the pipe cleaners through the holes, although never quite got the hang of bending one so it could come back through a second hole.

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This game is the kind that’s great to leave out for a day or two. Travis would return to it in between playing with other toys, thread a few pipe cleaners, and then move on again.

All-Natural Finger Paints

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I’ve had these powdered finger paints in my craft cabinet for quite some time, and finally decided it was time to give them a try!

The paints from Wee Can Too are gluten-free, dairy-free, and vegan, and conform to non-toxic standards i.e. they are edible if your child decides to take an experimental lick. This actually isn’t a worry of mine. as Travis just doesn’t put things near his mouth that aren’t food, but it’s nice to know in case a future son or daughter isn’t the same.

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When Travis was still eating jarred baby food, we had lots of fun dolloping spoonfuls on his tray each meal to trace shapes and letters. But we haven’t bought a can of pureed food in months now, and I missed our little mealtime educational exploration, hence why I broke out the edible finger paint at last.

When breakfast was over, I told Travis we weren’t getting up quite yet, and squirted a little of each of 4 colors on his tray.

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In a fully honest product review, the paints are very uneven in texture. The first tube I tried didn’t have enough water and was so thick and gloppy I had to throw it away. On my next try I added much more water, but the paints were too runny, hence not great for tracing. The mixture I achieved with purple came the closest.

Still, you can’t go wrong with some good old-fashioned messy finger painting! Travis liked mixing the colors and making ovals (his favorite shape thus far).

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You’ll definitely smell the turmeric used to color the orange and yellow paints, and it will stain a little (as turmeric is wont to do), but it’s nothing a good scrubbing with soap and water can’t remove.

Overall, I’d use the paints again, especially with a child who seems inclined to eat paint, as they felt very natural and safe.

Ribbons for Toddlers

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I’m finding Travis to be at a tough age for game ideas; he’s too old for many suggested toddler activities, yet too young for those aimed at preschoolers. Luckily, I’m learning I can count him to find a happy medium when presented with a toy or game, as with this ribbon example.

Filling an empty plastic jar with ribbons and streamers is a nice tactile game for younger toddlers – nothing to it! Travis first tried shoving them in all at once:

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But upon realizing that didn’t work, he began more patiently adding one at a time:

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Then of course comes the fun of dumping out.

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But he very quickly tired of the sensory play, and turned to a game we’d recently played at Gymboree: “Filling up” the air on “tires” (inflatable circle shapes) and “wiping the windows” on a “bus” climbing structure.

So he used his finger to “fill up the bottle” singing, “This is the way we fill up the tires,” and then turned the streamers and ribbons into cloths to “wash the bus.” Soon he was running all over the apartment with his ribbons to “fill up the window, fill up the couch, wash the wall, wash the floor” and so on and so forth.

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I love the way he takes games we’ve played and finds a way to make sense of them elsewhere in his world. Even though we as adults know that it makes no sense to “fill up a couch” with air the way you would a tire, he’s grasping  the concept and applying it, and I love watching him at play!

Heart-Stamping Craft

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Travis and I have had fun with stamp painting before; everything from Duplo blocks to  raw potatoes have made an appearance in our amateur crafting!

For this novel take on stamp art, all you need is the leftover tube from a roll of toilet paper. Using your hand, crimp one end of the tube until you’ve made a heart. Then set your little one up with white paper and a shallow dish of red paint.

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I love it when Travis takes a familiar concept and latches onto it immediately, without my having to explain a thing. The moment he saw the dish of red paint with the tube standing upright, he declared, “Dip dip!” which is also what we say when he dines on food with a dipping sauce on the side. He launched right into happily dipping the tube in the paint and pressing down onto the white paper, then back to the paint again, all while talking to himself excitedly.

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I was impressed that he sought out blank portions of the paper for each new stamp of the tube, so that he filled the sheet very evenly without my having to reorient it in front of him. Not every press made a perfect heart, but he picked up on the idea that that’s what we were making.

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Since Travis had enjoyed a visit from Grammy that morning, we decided to make this a gift for her. We added a pipe cleaner heart with glue, and presented it proudly for display on Grammy’s fridge.

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Upcycled Train Toys

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This craft might seem like an odd one for a vegan family, but fret not – no extra eggs were purchased in the making of this train! My (non-vegan) mother-in-law was kind enough to give me an egg carton once she’d used the eggs inside, allowing me to test out this fun idea from Hands On As We Grow.

To set the craft up, I cut the pieces of the egg carton apart, and poked two holes in each with the point of my scissors. I then presented the pieces to Travis, along with a pipe cleaner.

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For all the effort, Travis was less into the “train” than I thought he would be, despite helping me thread a couple of the carton pieces onto the pipe cleaner.

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I thought for sure he’d love to load his little Duplo people into the train for a ride, but he much preferred to fill it with mini pom poms from our craft bin. From there, he seemed unsure what to do with our creation.

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I’ve been fostering his imaginative play lately, and love seeing his inner world come to life as he grows, so I prompted him with the idea of “make believe” from Daniel Tiger. “Let’s make believe the carton is a train!” I suggested. Suddenly he got it, and began chugging it around our living room floor.

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What fun ideas can you think of for re-purposed egg cartons? Please share in comments below!

Memorial Day Boats

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Happy Memorial Day to all! Unfortunately our actual Monday is cloudy, but that didn’t stop us from enjoying the sunshine over Saturday and Sunday. The pool opened for the summer at our apartment building, so Travis and I used the opportunity to craft toy boats for the water.

Travis doesn’t drink juice; so far he doesn’t know any beverage exists other than water and almond milk, and I’m happy to keep it that way for a while! But if I have a craft that calls for juice boxes, I prefer to buy R.W. Knudsen or Apple and Eve.

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I use the apple juice boxes to make apple cinnamon oatmeal for a few mornings in a row (cook the oats in a mix of half water/half juice, and sprinkle with cinnamon before serving), and then we have empty boxes to play with.

In the morning, Travis “helped” me make the boats, very busy with his safety scissors and scotch tape while I cut triangles out of red and blue paper (I chose those colors in honor of the holiday). Easier than gluing, I just taped the two triangle portions together, and then taped one “sail” to each straw “mast.” I punched a hole in each of the juice boxes and popped the straw in – voila! A little sail boat.

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Travis was delighted to try the boats in a basin of water in the kitchen right after we assembled them, and we added Duplo people for extra fun.

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Bonus points – he was having so much fun sailing his boats that I had time to peruse the New York Times, a rarity!

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Then it was time to hit the pool… Travis was more cautious in the water than I expected, because he loved swimming last summer. But I guess it’s been so long he needed time to – literally – get his feet wet first. He preferred just to stand on the top pool step and push his boat around.

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We were joined by friends though, including a girl Travis’ age who loved throwing a boat in, and two older boys who came up with all sorts of games for them – blowing at the boats to “sail” them, using the straw sails as squirters, and tossing the boats far away to see who could swim to them fastest. So it seems we’ll have to return to this craft in future Memorial Day weekends, as the fun extends beyond the toddler years!

Zip-Top Bag Painting

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Ever wish you could let your toddler paint without the mess?

I imagine we’ve all raised our hands! So this method is for you. Zip-top bags are actually how I introduced Travis to paints, around 15 months old; squirt a few different paint colors into large zip-top bags and seal. Let your child smoosh the paints around with their fingers, experiment with drawing shapes, or discover what happens when two or more colors run together. The game is particularly nice with colored construction paper under the bag, so that moving a line of paint reveals a line of colored paper underneath.

Today, I upped the ante, with Travis nearing his second birthday. Our “theme” of the week this week was the sun, and I wanted a fine motor painting activity, but wasn’t in the mood for a mess.

I cut out two suns, one white and one orange, and placed in zip-top bags.

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I then added a few globs of yellow paint and sealed the bags shut.

Now it’s up to your little one! Provide him or her with anything that rolls (old-fashioned clothespins worked great), and teach them to spread the paint around by rolling.

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Travis got the idea, but I had to help him spread/roll far enough for the paint to reach the edges. I also was low on yellow paint, so our sun received a bit of orange decoration!

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Once it dried, we hung the sun in the window, a nice pretend glow on a dreary, rainy day.

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Bubbles Bubbles Bubbles

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You quite simply can’t go wrong with children and bubbles, no matter the age. My favorite are the soap-free, sugar-based bubbles from Gymboree, since I don’t need to worry about stray bubbles popping near Travis’s eyes or mouth. These bubbles also have the uncanny ability not to pop while you catch them on your fingers, toes, or the ground.

Our favorite place for bubbles is in the tub, but in the interest of privacy, I didn’t want to take photos during bath time! So one sunny afternoon this week we brought the fun outside. It was quite windy, which meant Travis had to chase down the bubbles, quite different from when we blow them indoors! He seemed to enjoy the exercise involved, even if the pay-off of catching a bubble was not as apparent.

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Once he tired of running after bubbles, he wanted a turn with the wand! He first asked to blow bubbles himself about two months ago, and still hasn’t quite gotten the hang of it.

What I love is his reaction when he lifts the wand to his mouth, attempts to blow, and nothing happens. Instead of getting frustrated, he says “I missed!” or “We tried!” – the two phrases I use when accidents happen around the house or events don’t go as planned. I hope that by saying these phrases with a light tone and a smile, Travis will learn how to manage his emotions when things go wrong, and to see that sometimes life is about trying but not succeeding, and that’s okay.

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Sorry to get a little heavy-handed in a blog post about bubbles! Needless to say, we tried and succeeded perfectly well with this activity today in terms of fun and joy.

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Exploring Pasta

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Various toddler books and websites promote the idea of pasta exploration as a sensory game, but I’ve hesitated to do any pasta activities with Travis ever since one attempt in January (18 months old), when he put a dry pasta shape in his mouth and then looked at me in horror. I was flabbergasted, as he has never been a mouther, and this confused attempt to eat pasta was literally the only time in his life I worried about him gnawing on something inedible.

So at 22 months, I decided to give dry pasta another go, with various goals in mind.

The first was simply for the sensory experience, providing him with a large basin and scoop. He quickly lost interest (a little too old now, I think), and decided it would be more fun to throw the pasta.

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Here’s one of those moments to keep your parenting cool! I turned his curiosity into a lesson on dynamics, telling him pasta could be loud or quiet, and we wanted our pasta to be quiet i.e. gently placed back in the container. When he got a little too toddler-y on me (those pasta shapes were just so intriguing skittering and breaking across the kitchen floor…) I moved the game to the rug.

My second goal was to have Travis sort the pasta by shape, so I provided him with 3 types I thought were different enough: rigatoni, fusilli, and rather fun tennis rackets (racchettes).

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Despite having learned his colors and shapes very early, Travis shows no interest in sorting, and ignored my attempts to encourage him to sort today, but I took the opportunity to discuss the differences between the shapes (curly versus straight, wide versus skinny), and I know he absorbed it on some level.

Once we moved to the rug, though, things got interesting. Travis became very concerned with clean up, and sang himself the Gymboree clean-up song while moving pasta pieces from the rug back to the box, which I’d left on the floor.  He enjoyed this version of the game for quite a while.

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He then stumbled upon the discovery that one of the shapes I’d selected (rigatoni) could fit on his finger and voila! He started having the pieces talk to each other like puppets (acting out Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus, in fact). I was laughing hysterically, and joined in the fun.

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Who knew? Rigatoni puppets. Sometimes it takes an almost-two-year-old to have the best idea.