window blocks

M has these great foam blocks that we use all the time (we're big fans of blocks).  Today we came up with a new use for them that M had a lot of fun with.  We used water to stick them to our slider and make pictures...

We got a small bowl of water to dip the blocks in and then we stuck them to the glass.  We made a tower and then some letters.  M's favorite part was the dipping...

but he also caught on to the sticking part.  He was also a fan of splashing which is why we only used about a cup and a half of water.  However, I put paper towel under the bowl and when doing this again I would definitely use a towel (or two).  If you have anything made of that foamy material it's a great activity because the pieces just wipe off at the end.

egg carton caterpillar

This is an oldie but a goodie so I'll keep it brief....

Take an old egg carton and cut it in half.  Turn it upside down and paint/decorate it.  We used our favorite Crayola paint:

Our My favorite part of painting these days is that we use one color at a time and M has to tell me the color word for the new color he wants to use.  His favorite colors are blue and red so even though he can say all the colors, he typically will tell me that everything is either blue or red - except when we're painting and he has a real reason to tell me the right color!

Anyway, let the caterpillar dry then add eyes and a pipe cleaner antenna :

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!

magnet cut-outs

This is basically a mom project but M has enjoyed playing with the product so I'm including it here.  I originally intended to make some of these magnet cut-outs of friends M doesn't see all that often.  He loves looking through his photo book and naming people he knows so I thought this would be fun for him too.  I haven't actually gotten to that point yet but I did make some of M and our immediate family. He loves pulling them off the fridge and putting them back on.

I started with these magnetic sheets.  They work just like the magnetic strips except they're 4x6 size so you could just attach a regular sized photograph to make it magnetic:

Next, I cut the picture down and cut a similarly shaped section of the magnetic sheet.  Then I attached it to the magnetic sheet.

I did end up wasting some scraps this way but since the backing of the magnets have one sheet on adhesive this was the best way I could figure to do it.  After the trimmed down photo was on the magnetic sheet, I cut around the people to make the cut-out.  Very easy and a big hit with M!

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.  

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 :)

Santa ornaments

These ornaments might be one of my favorite crafts we've done so far.  This is kind of a mom-activity since M really didn't have much of a part except for lending his hand for tracing.  However, I bet older kids could try the painting or at least mix the dough.

This is another salt dough activity.  We used salt dough once before.  You basically need one part salt to two parts flour and then about the same amount of water as salt.  For example:
2 cups flour
1 cups salt
1 cup water*
I ad the asterisk because I usually add the water gradually based on the consistency.  For this I only used a 1/2 cup of flour to a 1/4 cup of salt.  We ended up with three ornaments.

The first step is to trace your child's hand and then cut it out.

Mix the ingredients for the salt dough then knead it until it's mixed.  Roll it out flat and use a sharp knife to cut hands using the traced handprint.  I added the holes using a plastic straw:

Let them bake at a low temperature (we baked them at the lowest temperature our oven would go which was around 200 degrees) for one hour.  I flipped ours once so they baked for 30 minutes on each side.

After they come out paint them so that the four fingers are Santa's beard and the thumb is the long part of his hat.  Add a string to hang it:

I wrote M's name and the year on the back of each.  I want to put something on them to preserve them a bit better but I haven't yet.  This is a super cute gift that doesn't cost much to make.  You could even add little tags to the string.