watercolor snowflakes

Disclaimer: If you try this activity, do it with coffee filters.  M's mom didn't have them on hand, and was not lugging the two-year and two-month olds to CVS to get them, so ours are made on regular white printer paper. They're still very pretty and if your child uses as much water as M does, it won't matter anyway. 

This is a "fun" activity I did a few times in first grade back before the Common Core sucked all the fun out of first grade. I would even hang them on the classroom windows before the fire department sucked all the fun out of that. But it works well as an at-home activity where we can still have fun and still hang things on our windows. 

I gave M only blue and purple paint for this because if I didn't we would have brown snowflakes. An old ice cube tray worked well for holding the paint. 

I cut out some snowflakes for us and M painted them. 

If we had coffee filters they would have sucked up the watercolor and allowed it to spread, making some cool designs and more evenly colored flakes. Like I said though, this worked too. 

I also used to do something similar to this for Earth Day with coffee filters and blue and green watercolors. It makes a very neat looking swirly Earth.  If you don't have watercolors on hand you can also try washable markers on the coffee filters then use a spray bottles to wet the filter, the colors should spread. 

mixology 101

I'm always looking for ideas to keep M busy while I cook dinner at night. A few nights ago I gave him two bowls of water and a medicine dropper. 20 minutes of fun. It helped that he's been fascinated with droppers since Baby G came along. 

Today we tried something similar but if added a drop of food coloring into the water and we experimented with mixing colors. 

M enjoyed seeing what colors we could make but he enjoyed squirting the dropper more. He also stirred and eventually tried pouring. 

Admittedly, it didn't last as long as it did the first time (novelty is everything with this kid) but we did have fun and only made a semi-large mess :)

salt dough beads

Last week we made some salt dough to play with then made a few items to bake in the oven and keep. 

I know I've posted about salt dough before but the recipe I use is:

1 cup flour

1/2 cup salt

1/2 cup water

Although I always end up using a bit more water than that. I've been meaning to make some large beads for a while. In fact, Santa almost brought a set of wooden ones but then went with something else. 

Anyway, we made five round salt dough balls, painted them, and added a clear coating. 

Yesterday M got to stringing. One thing to keep in mind, make the holes larger than you think you need. Our holes definitely closed up a bit in the oven. It's a lot easier to make them bigger pre-cooking than post-cooking, as I was attempting to do. We used yarn to string them. 

We will try it again. As it ended up, M liked this but I had to help him because the holes were too small. If they had been the right size he could have easily done this one independently. 

shape hunt

This was a completely last-minute, thrown-together idea that M ended up loving.  I can't say I'm 100% surprised since sometimes I'll put a lot of effort into things he spends 5 minutes doing.  Funny how that works....

We've been trying to keep M busy in this very cold weather we've been having.  The other night I spent 20 minutes playing a game M kind of created himself that was a cross between chase and hide-and-seek.  Anyway, M took a rest the other day and woke up about an hour before dinner time.  Sometimes that can be the longest hour of the day.  We needed something novel...

I quickly cut up some paper into shapes (circles, squares, and triangles) and colored them.  During the Christmas season M loved finding our elf each morning so I thought a "scavenger hunt" of sorts would be fun for him.  I hid the shapes (we did the circles, then the squares, etc.).  He loved searching for them and collecting them as he found them.  M knows those three shape names but still occasionally mixes them up so it was a great reinforcement for IDing those shapes.  Really, you could do this with anything (shapes, letters, numbers, words, etc.)  You could even add some kind of sorting element after they're all found.

Our version ended up being quick, easy, and filled up about a half hour!

As always, some photos...

shapes-

found one-

hidden triangle-

obstacle course

M loves to run, jump, and play. Something we're working on at two and a half is following directions. Those two things made an obstacle course a pretty great morning activity on a rainy Monday. 

You could set this up any way with whatever you have around your house. It took me about 5 minutes to get it ready for M.  Our course included:

- crawl under the blanket covered table

- step over the golf clubs on blocks

- throw the frisbee into the box

- go through the tunnel

- hop on the colored circles down the hall

M loved this and did it several times. It also gave me some ideas for future activities (I loved the colored spot hopping). Another key piece was that some things were either new or a little hard for M. The frisbee part was hard but he tried again and again with a smile on his face. We will definitely do this again with different variations on the obstacles.