truck paint

M loves vehicles of all kinds - cars, trucks, buses, trains, etc.  As I've mentioned here before, he also loves painting.  We combined the two today, as seen on a number of blogs I've looked at over the past year.

We started with M choosing the colors he wanted to use.  We're working on color names so it makes for good practice.  He chose five colors today and I put them on the paper in globs.  M dove right in.  In fact, the activity was really half truck and half finger painting for us.

After I showed him how to use the trucks to make tracks he got into it.  I put out two trucks that I knew would be easily cleaned off.  A lot of our other trucks were too big or were matchbox type so I thought they'd be more difficult to clean off.  These worked great but only gave us one type of tracks...

Our final project was a mix of finger paint smears and tire tracks.  

I imagine it would be a fun thing to do with plastic animals if you could find some with distinctive footprints.  M liked it but it ended up being kind of a quick activity.  I think if we had had more vehicles or animals or toys to make different tracks it would have lasted longer.  We did end up doing two sheets and then had fun giving the trucks a bath :)

mix and pour

I loved this activity because the idea came from M.  Every year since I was little my mother and I have decorated a gingerbread house before Christmas.  This year was the first year M could participate.  We did a train instead of a house because he loves trains.  He got really into the decorating, which made it really fun.  However, during the course of the decorating he discovered that he could pour the little candies from one small dish to another (and then into the back of the train).  He ended up totally consumed with pouring the candy into different bowls.

And so we have this pouring and mixing activity....super easy to set up, one of M's favorites, and (maybe) the first independent activity we've had so far.

We started off like this with various bowls and measuring cups.  Some were filled with small snacks (we used Cheerios, banana puffs, and Goldfish).  Leave some empty.

Then M was let loose with them.  He poured and mixed and had lots of fun.  I started off playing with him but then I was able to clean the kitchen up a bit and load the dishwasher while he played quietly by himself.  He had a great time:

Here is my warning: If you don't want a mess of small snack foods on the floor, skip this one.  If my husband had been in the kitchen while we did this it wouldn't have lasted long.  However, we have a great clean up crew that ensured that no Cheerio or Goldfish stayed on the floor for longer than 2 seconds.

If When we do this one again I will give him a spoon to practice scooping.  If you have an older toddler you could get into mixing them together then sorting them back to the original bowls.  You could even use objects like buttons or pom poms or fruit loops if you want to stay edible, and get into sorting by color or size or shape, etc.