Hypnotize your friends with this simple paper plate craft. Here’s how we made this colorful and groovy paper plate spinning wheel.
Tag
colors
Button In A Haystack Sensory Bin
It has been Legomania in our house as of lately. My daughter is obsessed with building and has completed most of her instructional booklets.
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It can be hard to find the pieces that you need while digging through a bucket of Legos.
Button Color Match Turkey Craft
We have been packing in a lot of fall fun & activities lately. We visited a corn maze recently.
In the maze there was a series of questions at each checkpoint in the maze leading to the maze’s end. All of the questions were about turkeys. My daughter was excited every time we found a checkpoint. We asked her a question and would try to figure it out all together. She thought it was especially funny when she found out that the red thing dangling from its neck was called a wattle. She still found it funny last night when we made a turkey craft.
Our turkey craft matched up colorful buttons with the coordinating feathers.
What you will need:
Construction paper:
Buttons
Glue
Googly eyes
Directions:
Cut out shapes for the turkey feathers out of construction paper & then glue onto another piece of paper.
Cut out a shape for the turkey’s body.
Cut out the turkey’s feet & beak & glue them onto the turkey. Cut out the wattle (still funny) & glue it to the neck.
Glue the turkey body over the feathers & add a pair of googly eyes.
Sort out the colored buttons that coordinate with the turkey feathers.
Have your child glue the buttons onto its coordinating color.
Our turkey came out adorable, wattle & all. I can’t wait for more turkey crafts.
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Button Soup Counting Activity
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We have a lot of buttons in our house, a lot of buttons. They are great for fun & colorful crafts. My daughter loves to craft with them & she loves to play with them too. She likes to separate them into color piles & use them in games of make believe. One of her favorite things to do is to make pretend soup. This gave me an idea. We could turn our game of pretend into a fun counting activity.
We made a recipe which incorporated counting, measuring, separating colors & following directions.
Here is a printable version of our Button Soup Recipe.
We set up a large empty bowl & another filled with water. I told her to measure & add 4 cups of water to her empty bowl. She carefully measured out her scoops & added them to her bowl.
We read off the numbers & colors of each ingredient. She dug through her pile of buttons & counted and pulled out each color.
She mixed up her soup enthusiastically & in the end added the whole bag of buttons after finishing the recipe.
This was a fun activity. You can change the recipe to add different ingredients & more measurements for a lesson in measurements as well.
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Foam Shapes For Imagination & Creative Play
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It is funny how before you have a child, you take for granted the little things like having a few moments of privacy while you are on the toilet. It is very rare for me to be able to use the bathroom in private, so it was no surprise to me when my daughter came barreling in on me today when I was on the toilet.
Mai: “Mama, mama!”
Me: “Yes Baby!”
Mai: “Come look, I made Mickey Mouse.”
Me: “Ummmm, Ok, give mommy a minute.”
I could sense my daughter’s excitement, so I got out to the living room as fast as I could to see what it was that she was so excited about.
“Look Mama!”, she said to me pointing at the coffee table & beaming with pride. There on the table were 3 golf balls arranged in such a way that it resembled the shape of Mickey Mouse.
I thought this was amazing. I loved that her young mind was able think & create in this manner. This is something that I want to cultivate in my child & watch as it grows. I wondered what other creations might be brewing in that little brain of hers. This gave mommy an idea for an activity that we could do together. Since it turned out to be a dark & rainy day & all of our outdoor activities were cancelled, it seemed like the perfect thing for a boring rainy day.
I grabbed some different colored foam sheets from our craft bin & cut several different shapes of varying sizes and colors. I cut out circles, triangles, ovals, diamonds, squares, rectangles & crescent shapes.
We laid them down on the floor. Immediately Mai jumped into them.
First she was just excited to share with me the shape names & the colors. I then grabbed 3 circles & copied her previous pattern with the circles & showed her that we could make Mickey Mouse with these shapes too. This intrigued her. She started grabbing at the shapes and laying down different patterns explaining to me her thought process as she went. “Look Mama, I make a club house.”
“You most certainly did. It is beautiful.”
I always like to play alongside her as well. As much as she likes to create, she like to learn new things just as much. She studies and absorbs everything & often is happy just to watch me as I do an activity. This is how she learned all her US states at only 2 years old. She simply would watch as I did a United States puzzle & named off each state as I placed them.
With my shapes I decided to start with a bus. The road that the bus is riding on was Mai’s idea.
Together we made pyramids, fish, a Christmas tree, a princess castle & decorated a birthday cake. It was wonderful to watch & listen to her as she used these shapes to create colorful & imaginative images. It was an easy & fun rainy day activity for us to share.
Lessons From The Car Seat
It is not always easy to leave the house with a toddler. As soon as you have a child it becomes a huge production to go anywhere. You have to make sure you have their diaper bag or back pack… snacks (check), juice boxes (check), change of clothes, diapers, books, crayons (check,check,check & check). And this is just for a trip to the supermarket.
With the weather getting nicer, we have been taking more day trips on our weekends. This will continue through the summer with trips to the zoo & beach. It is easy for our active little ones to get bored while riding in the car. It is not always easy to keep them entertained from the front seat.
But, like most things in life, every moment can be a learning opportunity, even if it is from a car seat in the back of the car.
I love to keep engaged with my daughter as I drive. There is always a teaching moment with our young ones.
Lessons that you can teach from the road:
1. Directions – As we drive, I always like to tell my daughter when I am taking a turn whether we are going left or right. I signal to her with my arm and repeat “Right, mommy is turning right.” She will repeat it after me & is getting better at differentiating her left from right.
2. Imagination exploration – On many of our journeys, my daughter will look around and point out things she sees during our ride. A few months back, she started making up little stories to go with the sights she was seeing. One rainy day as we were driving she made up this story about us driving in a submarine because of the rain & she was pointing out the fishies that she saw swimming up. “There is a mama fish & dada fish & baby fish.” Now, mommy jumps in on story telling time too & together we weave fun tales as we travel.
3. Eye spy – This is a good one. Mai, where is the yellow sign. “Right there!! Right there!” Do you see a red car? “There’s a red car!” This works great for shape, color and object recognition. My daughter get so excited and you can hear her pride as she points out what mommy asks for. Of course, I can’t see what she is pointing at unless we are stopped, but I am sure that she is pointing to the same things that I spy.
4. Counting -Counting exercises are another fun way to pass the time in the car. My daughter and I will take turns going back & forth counting off our numbers. We used to do this with the alphabet too, but now that she knows her ABC’s we practice on our numbers.
5. Music lessons – My daughter likes to sing. She has gotten pretty good a few songs. She can sing ‘Daisy, Daisy’, ‘My darling Clementine’ & ‘Oh Susanna’ word for word. It melts my heart. It is a great way to learn new words and music can be extremely influential to our children.
How do you keep your children entertained while on the road? Share your favorite stories from the car seat.
DIY Toddler Learning & Playing Cards
I know most mommies are biased about their children. We all think our children are the most beautiful, the most brilliant, the funniest kids in the world. I am no exception. I find my child absolutely fascinating. She is so bright and continues to get smarter everyday. She is very proud of the new things she learns and likes to tell us and show us how much she knows.