Academics – Page 18 – Butterbees and Bumbleflies

Shadow Play

This week as we begin this mini-series of Dr. Seuss activities leading up to his 111th birthday on March 2nd, I thought I’d start out with a little activity that you can do regardless of weather – since I know many of my readers are not down here in South Texas!

Becca LOVES to play with our flashlights. She’s seriously flashlight obsessed. She’s always asking for it and wanting to spotlight things. And, she really enjoys Dr. Seuss’s book, The Shape of Me and Other Stuff (aff link – thank you!)… so, this activity idea was born in my head!

I started by showing her my hand on the wall. She really wanted to hold the flashlight, but didn’t understand the concept of holding something between the flashlight and the wall. It was a great lesson on listening to directions, as well as discovering – the shadows looked better the closer the item was to the wall, and the closer it was to the center of the flashlight beam! She tried all kinds of her brother’s toys, and enjoyed looking at her own shape on the wall. At one point, she finally laid the flashlight down on the floor, and the shape of the toolbox appeared on the wall. She was fascinated. So then, she started setting the light on the floor to discover what else would show up on the wall. It was a really fun activity, and kept her occupied for a good 10 minutes – with zero prep time on my part! Gotta love that!

EXTENSION IDEA: After you do the initial shadow play, you could easily create a basket of items to look at taking the book and finding some of the items he talks about to put in the basket. This would easily create a shadow sensory station! Just set it up in a darker area of your home so your child could do shadow play with the items when they need or want an alone-time activity. If you have a “quiet place” for your child to go when they need to escape, this would be a fabulous activity to have there.

Painting – With Cars

On my own, I never would have thought of taking Becca’s cars and running them around on paper… after running them through paint. But there is a really neat place here in town called Artworks Studio that has a great “open art” play time. Our MOPS group went to it and one of the activities was painting with a car. Becca LOVED it. So, I decided to recreate that activity at home with some of her cars – and her monster truck. Note that yes, we did use acrylic paint, and yes, some little bits of it stuck permanently to the cars. That wasn’t a problem for us. If you want to maintain your cars, be sure to use something washable like a fingerpaint. We had a really great time with this, and then were able to take one of our sheets and immediately turn it into something super useful – I punched flowers and butterflies out of one of the pages and ran them through my Xyron Create-a-Sticker Sticker Maker (aff link – thank you!) and Becca was able to use the stickers on a birthday card to send to my grandma. So it was really neat to mail out some of her art the next day afterward. Usually we keep it around to use for our 2016 calendar. Here are a few pictures of our fun… and yes, Becca painted her hands. I just didn’t fit those pics into the collage. This silly girl… can’t paint anything without totally painting her hands!

I’d love to have you follow my Facebook page, where I share fun ideas from lots of bloggers, as well as run a special series each day at noon where I share favorite books to help build your home or classroom library. Please note that the way Facebook selects pages to view on your timeline is based on your interaction with that page. Be sure to click on over to my page frequently to see what Facebook might not be showing you, and click “like”, “comment”, and “share” on my posts to ensure that Facebook will show you what’s going on on the page! The more you interact, the more that should show up on your news feed! www.facebook.com/butterbeesandbumbleflies

Super Simple Playdough

Happy Valentine’s Day!! If you’re like me, this day has snuck up quickly – quicker than usual, it seems. And somehow I recently realized that I haven’t made any play dough since Christmas. Yeah. We go in phases of play around here, and we’ve been out of a play dough mode for a while. But, Becca’s been asking for some, so I thought I’d make her a wonderful surprise and make glitter play dough! So, I looked online at a million different recipes and decided that I guess I’m just lazy. Or maybe I’m stuck in a rut. But whatever it is, I’m just not willing to try a new play dough recipe. I like mine, and I’m stickin’ to it!

Maybe you’ve been looking for an EASY recipe, too. So many of them require the stove or an electric skillet. And honestly, this was the first time I made my recipe without the electric skillet, and I felt so silly that I had ever used it in the first place!! Here’s what you need to do to make my Super Simple Playdough.

In a bowl, mix together 1 cup of flour, a little less than 1/2 cup table salt, 2 tsp cream of tartar, three packages of your favorite Koolaid for vibrant color (I used cherry for this to make it red. Fyi though, if you do grape wanting to make purple, only use one pack b/c three comes out almost black), and then if you want, stir in some glitter, too.

In a larger mixing bowl, heat 1 1/4 cups water and 1 overflowing Tbsp of vegetable oil. Make sure it’s boiling when you pull it out – I heated mine for 3 minutes. Dump in your dry ingredients and stir well. You’ll have a sticky mass in your bowl. Let it cool for about an hour. Then it’s ready to be played with! No adding extra flour or any stovetop mess! Super simple.

Store it in an airtight container, and it’ll be great for play for a couple of weeks. After that point, you’ll need to add flour if you want it to not be sticky… or just throw it away and make a new color/scent!

So if this Valentine’s Day you need something fun to occupy the troops… pull out a few packs of cherry Koolaid and make some play dough! 🙂

NOTE: If you don’t have any Koolaid on hand, food coloring works just as well – add it to the boiling water. You can add a drop of essential oil to the water for a scent if you’d like. If you have a child who is eager to dive in and doesn’t mind the CAUTION – HOT! dough, you can throw a little flour on the counter and let them go ahead and dive in to kneading the dough as soon as it is mixed!

Bubble Painting

Well, once again, the link that I had to credit this idea to has disappeared from my Safari tabs, and Googling has not produced the blog post that I originally saw. So, as with most things, please know that I’m not the original genius who thought this up… I’m just the Mommy who made it happen in our home and is now sharing with you so you can try it too!!

Bubble painting is super simple and fun – just add food coloring to bubble solution, and blow bubbles onto your paper! The bigger the bubble, and the longer it sits before it pops, the better the marks will be. Also, we learned that the yellow dries pretty lightly, but the blue turned out good. So, definitely use white or creme cardstock, and when you add your food coloring in, you might want to make darker colors like purple or green. Becca had great fun just spreading the soap solution with the bubble wands, too – there’s just no limit to the fun that can be had with this! You could even try one of those bubble blowers that makes lots of bubbles in one cluster, and see how those painted. There’s just a never ending list of fun things to try when painting with bubbles! I’d love to have you try this with your kids at home, and then share your photos with me! We’ll definitely be doing this activity again and again.

Can easily be done indoors with activity trays, or outside if it’s a nice sunny day!

Just think how awesome these are going to look added to your collages for your 2016 calendar!

Mini Engineering Challenges

Today’s subject is: Engineering!

Becca LOVES to build, and create. We do little Engineering challenges all the time with her. But rather than put them all on individual posts that would take me years to end up sharing, I decided that once a month, I’ll do a post of our Mini Engineering Challenges, and load you up with several engineering ideas all at once. Most of them, the pictures speak for themselves, but I’ll give you some little descriptions below each picture just in case you need some hints on how to make this work.

A fabulous way to get your child with sensory issues or irrational fears to overcome their fear of small places and/or the dark, is to help them create an animal cave! Lay down a soft blanket, use some pieces of furniture, and create a covered space they can crawl through (don’t enclose if they have sensory issues/irrational fears!!), and have them think about various animals that live in a cave, and pretend they are one of those animals. (Suggestions: bears, bats, possums, armadillos, etc)

This activity is super fun and simple. If your child isn’t able to write large enough yet, you can do the glue for them. Then have them use marshmallows to build their name! Works great with the regular white ones, or you can use the seasonal ones like we did. You could use jumbo marshmallows for a younger child, or for better fine motor practice, use mini marshmallows!

Becca loves building towers with cups! These cute seasonal ones came as a set from Dollar Tree. Or you can use styrofoam or solo cups as well! there are just so many options for how to build with cups – and again, it’s great fine motor practice – stacking without knocking them over is HARD!

We love marshmallows around here! We originally did this with smaller, mini marshmallows and rounded toothpicks. NOT a good plan. I highly suggest using seasonal or jumbo marshmallows, and definitely use the pointed toothpicks. Remember – this isn’t about the final outcome product, it’s about the process, and not only does this encourage their little engineering minds, it also is great fine motor practice as well as fabulous for hand-eye coordination.

Duplos and Legos are all over our house. So it’s only right that I include some Duplos in our Mini Engineering Challenge post. This time, (as is typical with Becca) she was attempting to build a “Tall, Tall Tower.” We love her LEGO DUPLO My First Construction Site Building Set (aff link) because not only does it include some great bricks, it also includes some really fun trucks and construction guys. It’s super fun to build when you can really make the construction guys build it!

If you follow me on Facebook, you may have seen this post a while back. Sometimes as a work-at-home mom, it’s so easy to get bogged down in work and housework and just making sure everyone is fed and clean, that it’s not easy to come up with activity ideas on your own. So… that’s where my friend, Colleen, has a great solution for you (and me!). Please do check out her book, Raising Creative Kids – it’s probably the best $5.99 you’ll spend for your own sanity. She has some fabulous activity starter ideas that will really help ALL ages of kids fill those minutes/hours/days when your Mommy brain is just DONE. You can purchase her book here, from my affiliate link, which is to the right.

For more great ideas like these, be sure to click “like” on my Facebook page, where I share not only my own ideas, but also ideas from other bloggers that will help you fill the empty hours of your day with fun activities that will get your kiddos thinking and moving! I also run a special series each day at noon where I share favorite books to help build your home or classroom library. Please note that the way Facebook selects pages to view on your timeline is based on your interaction with that page. Be sure to click on over to my page frequently to see what Facebook might not be showing you, and click “like”, “comment”, and “share” on my posts to ensure that Facebook will show you what’s going on on the page! The more you interact, the more that should show up on your news feed! www.facebook.com/butterbeesandbumbleflies