Learning To Be a Mom: Toddler Time

Showing posts with label Toddler Time. Show all posts

A few months ago we emptied our big container of black pepper. I held on to the empty container because I knew someday I would think of something to do with it. Then one night I was trying to make dinner. Husband was still at work and Little Brother was demanding attention. I did a quick scan of my cupboards to see what I could find to entertain him while I finished dinner. I spotted that empty pepper container and some spaghetti noodles, and it reminded me of something I had seen on Pinterest. So I pulled out a few noodles and showed Little Brother how to drop them into the holes. He sat and played with them for a solid half hour while I finished dinner. It was awesome!! Plus it was a great way to develop his fine motor skills.

Sweet Girl got in on the fun by taking the extra noodles and using them to make letters. It's always nice to have a few minutes of peace to get some work done, and it's an added bonus when it something educational or creative.

Okay, I'll admit these aren't real turkey feathers, but since Thanksgiving is right around the corner it seemed like the perfect opportunity to pull out the feathers. I've had these feathers forever. They get pulled out for random projects here and there. When I taught school, I had the kids write Thanksgiving words with the tips. For Little Brother I thought it would be fun to put them into a sensory bin.

We had so much fun playing together. We talked about colors and texture. He loved it when I tickled his face with them. My favorite was when we dropped them from up high and watched them float down. Sometimes it's those really simple activities that are the most fun.

Little Brother and I had fun playing with our new insect sensory bin while Sweet Girl was off to preschool. I found these cute insect finger puppets on amazon, but you could also look at the dollar store. (To be honest the only reason I didn't get the ones from the dollar store was because the bugs in their collection were too creepy for me. I need less scary bugs like ladybugs and butterflies.) I buried them in a tub of leftover Easter grass, you never know when you're going to need that stuff. Little Brother managed to take a small amount of Easter grass and pull it apart until it looked like I had given him three full bags of the stuff. I'm still finding strands of grass all over my house.Little Brother loved when I made the butterfly fly around or made the grasshopper jump up his arm. What little boy doesn't love digging through the grass looking for bugs? And this way you know they at least aren't touching real bugs, cause that's gross.

For a few weeks now I have been saving the caps from our milk jugs for this activity. Fortunately we go through a lot of milk. I also saved an old diaper wipes container. I showed Little Brother how to drop the milk caps in through the opening of the wipes container. It kept him occupied for a surprisingly long time. Every time he got one in we clapped, he loves clapping. It was really fun. It just goes to show that one man's trash is some mom's way of entertaining her baby.

Little Brother has a love of music. I think he was born to be a drummer. We decided to branch out from drumming on the table, and everything else he can get his hands on, to playing the guitar. I used some rubber bands of different colors and different thickness so they would make different sounds. He had a great time banging on the rubber band strings.

Sweet Girl even joined in on her recorder. Looks like it's time to start our family band.

This is an activity I have seen several times on Pinterest. I found this cute little flower tray at the dollar store along with the little tongs. I poured a bunch of poms poms of different sizes and different colors in the middle and told Sweet Girl to sort them any way she wanted. It took a little practice for her to be able to pick them up with the tongs, but she was pretty good once she got going.

This activity was great for a lot of reasons. First it helps with math skills of sorting, colors and size. Plus it is great for those fine motor skills.

By the way, don't you love the Princess Sofia dress? Sweet Girl loves her dress ups.

It turns out that raising 2 kids does not leave much time for blogging about 2 kids. I don't know how all the mommy bloggers out there do it. By the time we run errands, eat play, clean, and repeat, there just doesn't seem to be time to update the blog. At least we are still finding time to explore and learn together.

This is Little Brother. He is so stinkin' cute. We are just starting to get into organized play/learning activities with him. The most important thing is to pick things that he can safely put into his mouth. I found these letter sponges as I was going through my old teaching supplies, and I just pulled them out for him to explore. He loved squishing them and, of course, chewing on them. It was a great time to just talk to him too.

Last weak Sweet Girl and I practiced counting and numbers. Sweet Girl loves letters. she knows almost all their names and a lot of their sounds, but she has almost no interest in numbers. When she sees numbers mixed in with her foam letters she either thinks they are letters (5 is S and 3 is E), or she ignores them and sets them aside. So, I have been trying to find some fun activities to get her interested in numbers and counting.

I pulled out our flannel board and made some ice cream cones and scoops out of felt. I made 5 cones so we could start practicing counting to 5. Let me clarify for a moment, Sweet Girl can count. In fact her counting is one of my favorite things about her. She can get all the way to 11, followed by 16 and eleventeen. Eleventeen is as high as she can count, which I think is pretty impressive. I've never counted clear to eleventeen before. Anyway, she can count, she just struggles with counting things. She doesn't quite grasp the concept of pointing to objects in an order and saying just one number. She usually just keeps counting and pointing all over until she decides that's enough.

For this activity we lined up the cones and then took turns placing scoops of ice cream on them and counting them. Sometimes I would tell her how many scoops to put on a cone and we would count them as she put them up. It was a lot of fun, and who doesn't love playing with a flannel board? I wish I could say that after 20 minutes of playing she is now a super counter, but that's okay because now we get to keep playing with them.

I love those activities that don't take a whole bunch of time to put together or a whole bunch of materials, and still end up being super fun. This was one of those. I have seen the basic idea for this activity on Pinterest, but we tweaked it a little to fit our needs.

Lately Sweet Girl has been learning her colors and shapes, so to help her practice we played this matching game. I pulled out some stickers I had on hand and drew matching shapes and colors. Don't you love my artwork?

Then it was Sweet Girl's job to match the stickers to the right shape and color. She had so much fun that when she filled all the shapes on the paper she made me draw more. She has since requested this activity three times. She loves her stickers.

She was so proud of her work.

Linking up At:

Look! I'm posting something! To give you a little update, I felt really miserable with this pregnancy for October, November, December and the first part of January. I felt pretty good about those days when I actually got up and made dinner. Husband was so good to me. He would come home from work to find me laying on the couch asking him to please do the dishes, entertain Sweet Girl and make something for dinner that wouldn't smell too strong. Things have gotten a lot better since then, but I have found it hard to get back into the swing of blogging. So I'm starting slow, which is good because Little Brother is due any day now and once he comes who knows when I'll have time to write again.

Here is an activity we did recently. Sweet Girl has fallen in love with letters. She can name most of them and loves to go around reading letters everywhere we go. I wish I could take the credit for her knowing her letters already, but I really think it was all of the episodes of Super Why she watched on PBS while I was laying on the couch wishing I were dead this winter.

Anyway, I gathered up our letter magnets that I got from Walmart forever ago, and then just covered them in cornmeal. Sweet Girl had a great time digging the letters out. We named them and made their sounds (she doesn't know sounds yet), we also talked about their colors (colors are still a little hit and miss).

I had a good time playing with her because the texture of the cornmeal was pretty cool. A lot of the cornmeal did end up on the floor, but that's why we do these things on the tile. Easy clean up.

It feels good to post again. I'll try and do it again soon.

Sweet Girl and I love to walk through the seasonal aisles at the stores. I love to see all the decorations. Last Christmas we visited every single store with a Christmas section and just admired their displays and decorations. Well, Halloween isn't quite as good as Christmas, but there are still some really fun things to see. One day we found these cute gel pumpkin window clings at Walmart. I just couldn't help myself. We had to get them, and I'm so glad we did, because Sweet Girl had so much fun.

We started by just exploring their texture. I'll admit I loved squishing them as much as Sweet Girl did. We talked about their colors, and then got down to the real business of sticking them up on the door. As soon as they were all up, Sweet Girl started taking them down. As soon as they were all down, she started putting them back up. This kept her going for a solid half hour plus other bits of time over the next few days. For $2, we had a lot of fun.

I'm a little slow getting today's post up because I have been busy bottling apples. This is my first attempt at it. So far so good, except the smell of apples on my hands is a little overwhelming. It will be nice to have some yummy apples all winter long. I can already taste the apple crisp. Anyway, Sweet Girl and I have been fun playing with apples over the past couple weeks, and here is our concluding activity, the apple sensory bin! Probably not a big surprise since I obviously love and do a lot of sensory bins. There are just so many ways to do them, and they keep Sweet Girl entertained for awhile.

For our apple sensory bin I used black beans as apple seeds. I made apples out of sandpaper and bubble wrap, and threw in our felt apple bean bag and the pom poms from our other apple activities. I wanted to have a lot of different textures for Sweet Girl to experience.

At first Sweet Girl just loved grabbing handfuls of the apple seeds and then letting them fall through her fingers.

Later she started using a scoop. As she picked up the different apples we talked about their textures. We have had a lot of fun with apples, and now it's time to move on. I'm not quite sure where we are going next. Maybe pumpkins. Any suggestions?

Linking Up At:

Today we continued our apple learning activities with apple tree one to one matching. One to one matching is a great pre-counting skill. I made a tree out of construction paper. Don't you love my artwork? I used red pom poms as my apples, and red mini cupcake papers to show where to put the apples.

I glued on five of these cupcake papers to help Sweet Girl practice counting to five. That darn number four still eludes us. As we played we counted and talked about apples and trees and the color red.

Linking Up At:
It's Playtime

This apple scooping activity was so fun this afternoon. I set out a small basket of these red and green pom poms and a cake pan. (It was supposed to represent a pie tin, but my pie tin is glass and I didn't want it to brake.)

Sweet Girl got right to work scooping the "apples" into the pie tin. We talked about their colors and about making pretend apple pie. She is getting so good at scooping things!

We pretended to eat the apples and make loud crunching sounds. This apple came a little too close to being eaten.

The apples went back and forth from the basket to the tin and back again. These apples kept us both entertained for about half an hour. It was a great afternoon. I am so excited now when we have time to fit in a Mommy and Me school activity. Life just gets so busy, but it almost always ends up being my favorite part of the day.

Linking Up At:
No Time For Flashcards

In the spirit of Halloween, and trying desperately to believe that it's fall despite the 90 degree temperatures, I made Sweet Girl a felt jack-o-lantern to play with on our flannel board. I wish I were good enough to free hand it, but I am a terrible freehander. I have ruined enough projects to know that by now. Instead I used patterns that I found online. I just cut them out and pinned them to my felt and cut them out again.

I made three sets of faces for Sweet Girl to play with. I was worried she wouldn't recognize what they were since they are funny shapes, but she actually picked it up without me having to really explain it to her. For the most part the faces she made didn't exactly resemble faces, but the most important thing was that she had fun.

A couple weeks ago Sweet Girl and I went to see the farm animals in town for the local rodeo. It is a tradition from when I was a little girl, and I love carrying it on with Sweet Girl. She loved to see the animals. We talked about each of their names and the sounds they make. I thought this would be the perfect time to put together a little farm sensory bin.

To make this farm sensory bin I bought a little tube of farm animals for $3 at Walmart, and some raffia to serve as the hay. This is not the fanciest looking sensory bin, I wanted to add something but could never figure out what to add, but we had so much fun playing with it. I don't think Sweet Girl has ever gotten so into a sensory bin before.

At first we just played with the animals and reviewed what they are and what they say. Then Sweet Girl started exploring the raffia. She threw it in the air. We marched on it and felt it with our feet. We laid down to "sleep" on it. Sweet Girl does such a cute fake sleep.

Sweet Girl practiced her fine motor skills by standing the animals up on top of the bin, which was not easy because they really don't stand very well.

It just turned out to be such a fun activity. Just goes to show that kids don't always need fancy. Lucky for me because fancy is not my forte.

Linking Up At:

With the start of preschool and Husband back to work (He works in education so he has the summers off. It's so nice!) I have been having a hard time fitting in Mommy and Me School. We still do activities and we play and go on outings, but it's hard to plan a specific activity and do all the things to make it blog worthy. I don't know how you working moms do it. I'm having to learn to let some things go and just do what I can do. With that said, here is our Mommy and Me School activity from yesterday.

Sweet Girl and I loved playing with the contact paper for our contact paper fall collage on Monday. I started thinking it would be fun if we could somehow make it into an apple tree. I have been wanting to start doing some apple activities to celebrate fall. I just wasn't sure how to make it work until I saw this cute pumpkin window cling from Kids Activity Blog.

To make my tree I cut out a treetop from green construction paper and then just cut out the center and replaced it with contact paper with the sticky side facing out. Then I taped on the trunk and stuck it on our back door. I cut apples out of green foam, I would have preferred red, but I had green on hand.

Sweet Girl loves apples. We talked about apples and pretended to eat them. We talked about green. I swear someday she will know her colors! We also counted them. When Sweet Girl counts she says "1,2,3,5,6." I don't know what happened to four, but we are working on it.

Linking Up At:

About Michelle

Popular Posts

Search

Label Cloud

Followers

About Michelle

Popular Posts