Popsicle Stick Matching and Slot Game

We've been doing lots of activities to work on the boy-o's fine motor skills after hearing that many 2 year old no longer have properly developed fine motor skills from spending so much time playing on phones and iPads. He doesn't get any screen time yet (TV either) but it still concerns me that this could even be a thing, so we do lots of sensory stuff to work on his fine motor skills anyway!

He really likes to match things, and he's quite good at it actually. So our newest game is to take a pile of coloured Popsicle sticks and hand him a colour, and then he finds all the other sticks that are the same colour. (Not colour blind-check!)

I converted an old ice cream bucket into a slotted sorter, and once he's matched up the colours he pushes the Popsicle sticks through the small slots on the lid into the container. Once he slides them all in he likes the sound of shaking the bucket and then asks for them to be dumped out so he can do it over again.

The slots in the lid are just barely bigger than the Popsicle stick, so he has to line them up just right and push them to get them through. For little ones who are just beginning to work on motor control you could make the slots much bigger.

This fine motor activity is great because he'll sit there for 30 minutes sliding the sticks in, dumping them out, and starting over again. There is no mess to clean up and the sticks can store inside the ice cream tub for next time. It simultaneously works on colour recognition, matching skills, and fine motor skills. Eventually I'll get around to decorating the bucket, but for now, it works just the way it is! It's the first toy he's gone for the last couple of mornings after waking up, so it must be a keeper!

Moon Dough/Cloud Sand

After posting my last recipe for play dough, I had several people asking me about Moon Dough (also sometimes called Cloud Sand) so I figured I'd try that out with the boy-o today. You can buy Moon Dough from most toy stores, but really for what you're getting it costs a fortune! Moon Dough is spectacularly easy to make at home, and when stored in an air tight container it lasts for many re-plays.

Not only is Moon Dough super easy to make, it only requires two ingredients (three if you want to get fancy), but it's a wonderful in-expensive sensory activity to do with your little. Moon Dough acts very similar to wet sand, but has a much softer and velvety feel to it. We added a tiny bit of food colouring to the oil when we made ours, and since oil and food colouring don't mix well we ended up with flecks of blue colouring in the sand rather than all blue sand which made a really neat effect.

 

Moon Dough (like sand) can be quite messy, so we played with it in one of our trays and we put a smock on the boy-o. We had him strapped into the highchair and put the metal tray on top of his highchair tray. It worked out really well and sweeping the spills off the tile floor was quick and easy. 

We added a few Tablespoons and some dishes from his kitchen to enhance our play with the Moon Dough. The boy-o loved scooping it up and dumping it into another container and then dumping it out and starting all over again. He played well by himself for a bit while I finished up making supper, and then I joined in for a bit too. He loved watching it "snow" when I dropped it between my fingers making little flakes of it fall.

Moon Dough Recipe:

Ingredients:

- 2 cups all purpose flour

- 1/2 cup oil

- Food colouring (optional)

Directions:

1. Add a few drops of food colouring to oil if desired and mix.

2. Add oil mixture to flour and using your hands work the Moon Dough until the oil has touched all the flour and made a crumbly mixture that sticks together when pressed firmly together. 

3. Play!

4. When finished store Moon Dough in an air tight container for another day of fun.

Another great rainy day activity or boredom buster!

Super Soft No-Cook Play Dough

Play dough is one of my favourite kid's toys to play with. I love squishing it and making little sculptures with it, and then rolling it all back into a ball to play with again another day. The boy-o had never played with it before so I figured it was definitely time to make some for him to try out. I wasn't sure how well he would like the texture, but since we've been trying to focus on sensory activities the last little while, it seemed like a great time to test it out! Making your own play dough is also so simple and cost effective that once you try out this recipe you'll never bother buying it again!

The Cream of Tartar is the secret to making super soft play dough that will still that way for months.

No-Cook Play Dough Recipe:

Ingredients:

- 2 cups all-purpose flour

- 2 TBSP vegetable/olive oil

- 1/2 cup salt

- 2 TBSP cream of tartar

- Up to 1 1/2 cups of boiling water

- Food colouring

Directions:

1. Mix the flour, salt, cream of tartar and oil together in a large bowl.

2. If using food colouring, add desired amount to the boiling water.

3. Slowly add water into dry mixture and only add enough to combine all the dry ingredients together.

4. Allow play dough to cool down for a few minutes and then remove from the bowl and knead with hands several times until the dough becomes workable and the stickiness is gone. If dough is still too sticky add more flour.

5. When you're finished playing, you can store your play dough in a sealed container for up to 6 months. (6 months!)

As I predicted the boy-o was a little unsure about the texture of the playdough, and did his little dance routine where he sort of pokes at something new really quick and then hops around it, and then pokes at it again, and does some more hoping around. (It's pretty adorable and hilarious to watch...) But once he saw mama and daddy playing with it and we grabbed one of his hands and stuck it in the play dough he warmed up pretty quickly.

        

Once he got comfortable playing with it we brought one of his trucks into the mix. We drove the truck back and forth over the play dough looking at the tire tread marks that it made, as well as whether it rolled better on the play dough or on the floor. 

  

Then once he was comfortable playing with his truck in the play dough we added in some of the plastic play knives from his kitchen to cut the play dough with and carve pictures and letters into it. In total he sat and played with it for about 30 minutes, and if it wasn't dinner time I'm sure he would have happily sat and played even longer!

This play dough will keep for about 6 months in a sealed container though, so we'll have many more opportunities to play with it another day!

Sorting with Rocks

While I was playing with the boy-o in my parents backyard the other day with rocks from their garden (possibly his favourite thing on earth...) I noticed a black plant tray that was sitting on their driveway and had a great idea. I was thinking back to the pompom and muffin tin activity we did a little while ago, and figured we could make up something very similar with the plant tray and his beloved rocks.

Although there was no colour dimension to the activity this time, there was still differently sized rocks, as well as the auditory pleasure of dropping the rocks into the tray. The boy-o could literally sit and play with rocks for hours, so this activity was of course a huge hit! He loved piling the rocks into the cups and moving them around from one to the other. This activity worked on fine and gross motor skills as well as playing around with textures and sounds.

He even tried to pick up the tray and drag it over to Grandpa to show off his work when he was all done! There was almost no clean up involved in this activity, and the rocks will be there waiting for us the next time we want to play with them.

Our First Indoor Softplay Experience

We had some really miserable weather the other day with a cranky boy-o trapped inside and we were pretty desperate to find something to do with him that would get us out of the house. If we were still living back in Toronto we could have met up with some of our baby friends for a playdate, but sadly we don't have any baby friends here so that wasn't an option. (oh, how we miss you all!!) So I started looking up indoor playgrounds or soft plays. We had never been to one before, but decided to give it a try to see how it worked out for us.

It was $3.50 for the boy-o to play which was quite reasonable, and even though there still wasn't really any kids his age there, he had a great time and it allowed him to burn off some energy without making us totally crazy! He was a little overwhelmed at first and unsure about what to play with, but he slowly warmed up. They had a special toddler area which was great so I didn't have to worry about him being accidentally flattened by an older kid. They had a huge ball pit, a toddler trampoline, a car-coaster, a marry-go-round, and some stationary cars to rock back and forth on as well as a tiny slide. It was a great way to spend some time playing with the boy-o. 

They have a no outside food/drink policy in effect which I totally understand because they want you to purchase your snacks there. The offerings they had were quite reasonably priced, but none of it was even remotely healthy which annoyed me since you couldn't bring in your own fruit etc. We only stayed for about an hour because by that point the boy-o was exhausted, but with their limited snack selection we wouldn't be able to stay much longer than that anyway since I don't want feed him that kind of junk. So it was great for a short stay and play, but we couldn't make an afternoon of it. It'll be a good trick to keep in mind for the next rainy day!

Nature Collage: Sensory Play

I saw a friend post this idea a little while ago on her blog: the Natural Momma in Me, and I knew that I had to try it out with the boy-o too! I really love the idea of making a nature collage and since the boy-o has been staying at Nana and Grandpa's during the day the last month or so, he's been spending tons of time outside in their back garden playing with rocks, plants and dirt so I was pretty sure he would love making it too.

To start off with we wandered around my parents garden collecting little leaves, flowers, petals, and bits of plants with different textures and smells. We made sure to get some lavender because the boy-o really likes to sniff it. One of these days I think he's going to sniff it so hard it'll end up going up his nose... but that's another story.

Once we got home we examined our pile of collected plant bits and I attached some Mack-Tack to our balcony door with the sticky side facing out. This was going to be our canvas for the collage. The boy-o was pretty interested in the sticky feeling and kept trying to pick it up. I showed him how to place the flower bits on the sticky surface to hold them there, and he got down to it!

He had a bit of trouble getting some of the leaves to stick since our Mack Tack was pretty cheap and not as sticky as it could have been, but with a little help we got all of the bits up and completed our wonderful nature collage! When we were all done I took a second piece of Mack Tack and placed it sticky side in so it was like our plant pieces were laminated between the two and now we can hang it up next to some of the boy-o's other masterpieces!

This was a super easy activity, that was not only very cost effective, but there was minimal clean-up required. It provided the boy-o with an opportunity to explore the plants around him though and experience some different textures as well as some different smells. This could be an interesting activity to do once each season and then compare them together to see the different kinds of plant bits you could forage.

Wordless Wednesday: Alphabet Soup

Sensory Play: Pompoms and Muffin Tins

It's been a while since we've tried out any new sensory play activities, so I wanted to share our latest exploration with you. I've discussed the immense value of sensory play before and shared some helpful tips on how to make your own sensory toys like sensory bags, sensory bottles and a sensory tube; and of course don't forget the awesome-ness that is Magic Mud.

For a quick sensory activity that doesn't require much clean-up, the pompom one is something I'd recommend. I took a large package of multiple sized and coloured pom poms and dumped them out on the floor. The boy-o had some plastic cups from his play kitchen and I gave him two differently sized muffin tins--an extra large one and a super small one. He had a great time moving the pom poms from one tin to the other and dumping them out. He loved the soft fuzzy feeling of them, and actually spent the rest of the evening clutching onto one of them that he wasn't willing to part with! We sorted the pom poms by colour and by size into the little cups, and when we were finished we put the pompoms back into the bag for another day.

This simple activity helped to work on hand-eye coordination, fine motor skills, sorting skills based on size and colour, and poms poms are wonderfully soft and fuzzy to touch. We also did the same activity using the dyed pasta that we made. Although the pasta was all the same size, so lacking in that sorting category, it made a lovely clinking sound when dumped into the trays and when being moved from one muffin spot to another.

Get creative and see what other materials you can use! What's your little's favourite item to sort and engage in sensory play with?