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. 

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-

bird snacks

We have bird feeders in various places in our yard.  We get a lot of birds because we have woods behind our house.  M always checks out the birds in the morning at the bird feeder outside our living room window.  We have some kind of Japanese(?) tree right outside and the birds seem to love it there. M loves filling the bird feeders with his Papa.  He also enjoys yelling at the squirrels.  

I This morning we were talking about the snow storm that's coming this weekend and how the birds would have trouble finding food under the snow.  I found this activity during a middle-of-the-night playtime feeding with G and I loved it.  A lot of times when I find an idea on a blog I'll then Google it because chances are it's on twenty other blogs and might have different variations.  Most of the first versions of this that I found called for using unflavored gelatin.  Call me weird but giving birds jello seemed odd.  We used honey and bird food.  Seems more natural to me.

We started with a bowl full of birdseed that M enjoyed playing with for a few minutes before we started (sensory).  I didn't measure anything so I can't really tell you how much we used.  I'd guess we had about two cups of birdseed.  I eyeballed adding in the honey.  I was really trying to get a sticky consistency like play-doh but I think we ended up with a bit too much honey.  Then we spread it out and used a cookie cutter....

Our mixture was a little too soggy so what ended up working best for us was filling the cookie cutter instead of actually cutting a shape.  One we did that it held its shape fine.  We put them on wax paper and use a wooden skewer to make holes for string (which are difficult to see here).  

They're currently freezing in the freezer.  Either this afternoon or tomorrow morning we will string them and hang them from our Japanese tree.  Photos to come...

Valentines

M doesn't go to daycare so we didn't have any little friends to make Valentines for this year.  Instead, we made some for a few of our relatives.  These were fairly easy to do and M had a pretty good role in helping to make them, which is always my goal.

We started by gathering a bunch of our pink and red construction paper sheets and painting them.

Next I traced M's hands on cardboard and cut out several of each hand from the paintings he made:

 Last, I cut out some hearts and glued a left and right hand onto the heart.  We had extra hearts so I made a decoration for the door to our basement as well.  We tend to hang a lot of M's art there:

On the back of each I wrote them out and then M "signed" them with crayon.  There's always something I don't get a picture of!

rainbow snow

M loves the snow.  He's been outside to play it in a handful of times this year and tends to stay out as long as we'll let him, followed by screaming and crying when it's time to go in.  This morning when M saw the snow he was dying to get out into it and he wasn't too happy when the dogs went out without him.  Since I was not ready for a 9am romp in the snow we brought the snow inside to us and had some fun.

I filled a 9x13 glass casserole dish with snow.  It's great snowman snow and made snowballs very easily, which M loved.  I also got three small containers, filled the each with cold water and added a drop of food coloring to each.  I gave M a big mixing spoon and a cooking brush to "paint" with.

At first M was pretty surprised that the snow could change color.  Pretty soon he was painting and eventually dumping the water into the snow.

We used yellow, red, and blue water which worked well because it mixed into green, purple, and orange so at point we had a pretty good rainbow of colors going on...until it turned to a peach colored slush.

We made snowballs, a snowman, and built some towers that M enjoyed knocking over with the spoon. Eventually about half the snow had melted leaving a coating of water on the dish.  The snowballs that were left could easily slide and spin on the wet surface, which M really enjoyed too.  All in all it served it's purpose- pushing our journey outside back a few hours.