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.