Tag: cornmeal

Corn Meal to Explore

Leave a comment

Snesory Cornmeal (7)

It’s getting too cold for outdoor sandboxes, so today I made one for Veronika indoors… with corn meal! I simply dumped an old container of corn meal on a pizza pan, set out a few scoops, and let her begin to explore.

The scoops themselves seemed to delight her with their bright colors, First she just wanted to play with these…

Snesory Cornmeal (1)

…but soon found her way over to the corn meal.

Snesory Cornmeal (2)

Unlike anything gloppy, she had no hesitation getting fingers in dry corn meal. She picked up little light fingerfuls and watched it rain down into a cup, then dumped them out and started over.

Snesory Cornmeal (6)

What fine motor skills! Next, I added cars, because you can make great tracks through cornmeal. If you have any toy construction vehicles like dump trucks or diggers, this is the perfect way to use them. But for Veronika I added a few favorites: a fire truck, school bus, and mail truck.

Snesory Cornmeal (3)

She loved vrooming them in the corn meal, especially once she had a thin layer of it on the floor.

Snesory Cornmeal (10)

I let the happy play continue until we had to leave the house.

Snesory Cornmeal (11)

To clean up, I dusted off her pants, swept the cornmeal into the dust bin, and that was that!

Snesory Cornmeal (9)

Cornmeal Play

Leave a comment

cornmeal-play-1

Making finger sketches for F week inspired me to pull out the cornmeal later in the week for good old messy fun.

My original idea was to set up a dinosaur stomping ground, adding a layer of cornmeal and Travis’s collection of small plastic dinosaurs to a baking tray. I thought he’d enjoy making dinosaur footprints, and the fact that the cornmeal looked like Jurassic desert sand. Surprisingly, he was uninterested… until I added a small cone of paper to be a volcano.

cornmeal-play-2

This piqued his interest, but he soon discovered that it was much more fun to sprinkle the cornmeal outside the baking tray than to stomp the dinosaurs inside it – a reminder that toddlers will make of games whatever they choose! He loved “sweeping” the cornmeal, and was happy doing so for quite some time.

cornmeal-play-4

Finally the dinosaurs entered back into the game, with Travis burying them in a separate container under a layer of cornmeal.

cornmeal-play-5

He started using the “volcano” as a funnel/scoop to bury them, which I thought was quite inventive on his part!

cornmeal-play-6

The game turned out to be such a hit, even if not in the way I intended, that he asked to play again later in the afternoon.

cornmeal-play-3