Mrs. H

Wacky Wednesday

Well, it’s another Wacky Wednesday around here… with more comedic (and dramatic) presence from Boo.

She sneezed – like three times in a row. I said “Bless you!” And She said, “Oh my GOODness! So many sneezes!” Yup. So many. Allergy season never seems to end in our house.
Ready to go somewhere, backing out of the garage. “Here goes the car! We’re moving, Baby Brother.” I glanced in the rear view mirror just in time to see her smiling at him, and him actually looking back at her and smiling across the car. My heart melted.
Commentating her actions (again, for the bazillionth time in her short life). “I open the door by by myself. Bump my toe. Ouch. Be careful, Becca Boo!” I love it when she calls herself Becca Boo. Super super cute.
In response to one of the million silly things her Pappy did this last weekend: “Oh PAP-PY!” (Often with a shake of her head included.)
Looking at one of her Sesame Street placemats at the breakfast table: “Hmmm has how nany sides?” (proceeds to count until she just can’t count any more going around and around and around the hexagon… couldn’t remember where she started) “Is a octagon? No, no probly not. Mommy? How nany sides it have?” (pause when I decide to let her figure it out on her own) “Looks like bees on honey. Is hexagon?” Yup. It’s a hexagon. I love her problem solving abilities. If I can’t go around and count the sides, just look up at the honey jar on the table and relate the picture to what you KNOW is a hexagon. The folks over at Gretchen Bee Ranch will be proud to know that their honey label helped Becca start recognizing hexagons by sight instead of having to count the sides. Thanks, ya’ll!!

I keep seeing posts from Play at Home Mom LLC and Kids Activities Blog and Living Montessori Now that involve sensory play. And honestly, I do a fairly good job of letting Boo experiment with a variety of textures and such, but sensory bins are something I’ve really only just pinned on Pinterest (follow my boards here), but not created. Ok, so I made one. I was really proud of it. It was this Sesame Street XO cereal, and I put hearts and pink and red stuff in it for Valentines Day. I was so proud. And then I actually pulled the Valentine’s Day stuff out and put a bunch of green stuff in the same cereal and it was ready for St. Patty’s Day! But since then, well, it’s still Becca’s “Green Stuff” in the family room. And, I would seriously think before I’d consider feeding my child the Sesame Street XO cereal, ya’ll… b/c the stuff is STILL intact and has not even come CLOSE to disintegrating yet. Kinda gross. But it’s still in the same condition it was in inside the box. Anyway, I digressed. All of that to say, I haven’t done much with having Becca dig her hands in things… so this week we are busting out of our normal mold!! I started with a bucket of dried beans. I stuck twelve purple “shineys” (pom poms) down in the beans, and just presented her with this tray:

She immediately started digging in, and started singing her alphabet song. I’m not really sure where that came from, but it inspires me to want to try a sensory bin with letters hidden in it – SOON!

Then, I went and got this ice cube tray and gave it to her to see what she would do. Without being prompted, she began to fill the holes with beans. She really enjoyed taking the beans in and out of the stars. I was surprised how focused she was on the beans, not the pom poms. But, I think it’s because she’s played with them before – the beans were new.

Then, I gave my first instruction of the activity (other than helping her put the lid below the tub b/c she was very frustrated when not everything would fit on her tray…. she had learned that rule well!), and asked her to take the beans out of the stars and see if she could put one pom pom in each star and use them to help her count. One to one correspondence is a skill for a much older child, but she can do so many things that are more advanced than that… just not one-to-one correspondence counting. So, we are working on it. And it really helped to practice putting one pom pom in each star! She also then discovered that one was still hiding, because I told her she should have one for each star. The hunt was on, and she had so much fun digging for that last piece of buried treasure!

All in all, this was a fabulous activity, and a great into to sensory bins for me – the preparer. I’m excited to set up more sensory bins for her soon… and you know I’ll share, so check back! 🙂

Total Prep Time for Mommy: 2 mins (dump beans into bowl, grab pom poms and poke them in, set up on tray)
Total Play Time for Becca: 15 mins (I think she would have played longer if not distracted by guests.)

Sticky and Pokey

According to Becca, this activity was fun, but “sticky and pokey”… so “enter at your own risk.” HA! I saw this idea on a pin somewhere (now I can’t find it) and it reminded me of a project I had my second graders do at one point. When I bought our super cheap marshmallows and toothpicks, I bought the flat toothpicks, thinking we’d reduce the number of pokes. She still got poked… and the flat toothpicks don’t work very well for stabbing marshmallows. Live and learn. But, we had fun building a house and then “huffing and puffing” and trying to blow it down like the big bad wolf. Of course that didn’t work, so we resorted to tearing into it, and then she decided that they were spiders and had a ton of fun playing with her marshmallow spiders. You just never know where an activity like this is going to lead a little creative mind! 🙂

I’ve decided to add, at the end of each post, the total prep time required by me, and the amount of time she stayed occupied. Keep in mind that the way I introduce activities is that I do them hands-on with her the first (and sometimes second and third) times just to make sure that she understands the rules and that I can see if she is struggling. The goal is for ALL activities to become independent activities eventually, so that I can work on prepping/introducing new activities, and also because little brother will be coming along behind and I’ll begin to work with him and will need time when Boo is independently working beside us.

Total Prep for Mommy: maybe 3 mins (open marshmallow bag, dig around and find a throw-away small plate – the longest part of the process for me, pull out toothpicks, put all on a tray)
Total play time for Becca: 25 mins (Daddy got home from work. She probably was about done, though. Might have made it 30 mins.)

Reusable Stickers

This blog post contains affiliate links. I appreciate you purchasing items from this post! Thank you in advance.

The kids are blessed with a Granny who sends them boxes of fun random items at random times. And at one point, in one of Becca’s boxes came one of Melissa and Doug’s most creative (in my opinion) products that inspires creativity in kids… it’s the Reusable Sticker pad. You can get your own here on Amazon (affiliate link). The one I’ve linked is the one Becca has – the habitats one, shown below, but there are others available as well.

She still needs help peeling them off the pad, but her hand-eye and fine motor coordination skills are almost such that she can do it all by herself… and she’s sooo proud of her pictures every time! 🙂

UPDATE: Have a child who really loves safari/zoo animals? Check out the fun project we did today, using this reusable sticker pad and her chunky puzzle! (Get your puzzle here) She started playing with her puzzle, so I went and got the stickers, and she would find the sticker that matched the puzzle piece, make the animal noise, and then place it on! She had so much fun! I also want to get her these Toob animals so that we can further extend our safari play!

Activities to Fill that Last Hour…

I think every mom has their own hour of personal hell that they go through every day, and it’s a constant struggle to find something – ANYTHING that will make that one hour a little more livable. Often, that thing becomes the tv. I know. I’ve been there and done that. But I’m trying desperately to fill that last hour before Daddy gets home with something productive, something that keeps her hands busy, all while also trying to keep the baby fed and content, fix dinner, and constantly remind her why we can’t go outside – because the heat index is over 104.

So here are some fabulous ideas that I have taken from Kids Activities Blog and modified to make them my own. (Here’s the link to her post so you can go see the original ideas!)

The first one that Becca has fallen in love with is with the colander. This colander I picked up ions ago in the Target dollar section, and it was a favorite bath toy for quite a while. Then it just sorta became a holder for more bath toys. Now it has purpose once again! She LOVES threading the pipe cleaners into the holes (the holes are too small for straws, as listed in the blog above). The first time I introduced the activity, she played for 30 full minutes before moving on to a different activity! Woohoo! (And it’s great for her hand-eye coordination and fine motor skills, too!) The larger picture in the collage came with help from Mommy – we made ears and hair for her hat. She LOVED it! I love the giggles that came from this fun play time, and it was fun for me to play with her doing something other than running cars on a mat, again. For the millionth time. 🙂

Another idea that she had on the blog was putting ribbon in a bottle. I love that idea and can’t wait to try it, but it got me thinking – what else could she put in a bottle… until I realized it was recycling day and the bottles were already gone! So, I began thinking about buttons, and decided to try a button sorting activity with her. I discovered that I gave her too many small buttons for her patience/attention span, and instead of just digging my hand in the button box, I SHOULD have carefully selected some really cool ones for her. Live and learn… and make changes for next time. But, she did love the button sorting, and now that she’s done it with supervision, she should be able to replicate the result on her own.

While I was upstairs digging in the button box, my eyes fell on these number cards from a Go Fish game I bought at Dollar Tree and laminated for durability. So, I pulled them out along with our stand up pocket chart ( buy yours here), and put one in each pocket, and had her sort the numbers and put them in the correct row. In all of her brilliance, she has trouble putting things in rows. Her brain just doesn’t work that way. She wants to put things in piles, not lay them out next to each other. So this is a definite skill to work on – as well as the fabulous hand-eye and fine motor coordination skills of putting cards into a pocket chart. She loved it. My only complaint was that there aren’t enough pockets to include the numbers 11 and 12, which also came in our deck. So, I had her just do them on the table.

The trick to all of these activities is figuring out what your child needs to work on, and making it fun. Becca repeatedly asks for “Mommy, can we play games?” She sees them as fun games because THAT IS HOW I HAVE PRESENTED THEM TO HER. She would actually RATHER play games than do lots of other things. I have to encourage her to keep doing her other types of play when the games are also available. Now granted, these activities don’t always occupy and tame the savage beast for very long, and we still have meltdowns. We still have time outs. Because that’s life with a two year old. But these activities seem to be helping, and that’s why I’m sharing them – so that hopefully they can help someone else, too!

Side note – if you’ve read my other posts, you’ve probably seen Becca wearing this shirt in pictures before. Yes, it does get washed. HA! It’s just a favorite of hers that she often selects when getting dressed. 🙂

UPDATE!

We tried stuffing ribbons in a bottle. She enjoyed it, but really struggled to get them in – definitely a great test of her fine motor abilities! I highly recommend trying it. As you can see, we used a bottle with a wider mouth (like a Gatorade bottle) instead of a water bottle – that would have been impossible for her. And still, I had to help a lot. She had fun with it, but got frustrated quickly – we only played maybe five minutes. We’ll try it again soon. I just need to figure out how to get out all the ribbon we stuffed in… I think I need a dowel rod…