Academics – Page 28 – Butterbees and Bumbleflies

Traveling Art

So, in a continuing effort to give you some more fabulous travel ideas, this is an easy one you can make with stuff you might already have at home, or it could be a fun excuse to head to Target… 😉

You’ll just need a plastic wipes container, a notepad, and a box of crayons! (Oh, and a little bit of adhesive.)

Open the wipes container.

Attach the notepad back to the top of the container.

Dump the crayons in…

and WAH-LAH! Traveling Art box. Great for the car, (if you trust your little with crayons around the car seat…) or great for a restaurant while you’re waiting for your meal (though many restaurants have kid’s menus that can be colored, lots don’t, and it’s small enough to easily throw in the diaper bag!).

Total time to make = about 2 minutes. 🙂 My kind of project!

Ideally, you’d have a blank notepad without lines. I’m still in search of one I like. You could also use sticky notes, but I’d rather use a cheap notepad than spend my precious sticky notes… and also, sticky note stacks start out too fat for this particular wipes container. I love that an entire box of crayons fits, though!! 🙂

Poster Painting

When it comes to crafting, I don’t need much bravery. But when it comes to PAINT + My Toddler…. this Mommy needs more bravery than can possibly exist in one human. But, every time I get up the courage to haul out the paint, it ends up being a super fun time, and I’m always glad that I did it. So, for those of you who need bravery like me, and for those who love to let your little ones paint… here are some fun ideas to experiment with different textures.

Supplies we used: red and yellow washable tempera paint, lots of newspaper (to cover the wood floor), big sheets of white butcher paper, and bubble wrap, dryer balls, a toy car, and a square metal votive holder for painting with.

She first just finger/hand painted, but then she really got into using the car, and then the dryer balls. I was surprised that the bubble wrap wasn’t high on her priority list – since she loves to play with bubble wrap.

Her finished art actually ripped because she decided to walk on it, and put too much paint all in one spot. Still, she was super proud of her art! Once it is totally dry, I’ll cut the paper into a couple of different sections and use them as cards to send to the Grandparents.

To keep myself from over-correcting her, and to truly just let her do what she wanted to do, I did my own painting right next to her. It was super fun, and helped me to relax and just laugh with her. When she was done, she decided to paint most of her body (I had her just in a diaper for this activity), so I carried her to the tub amid a burst of giggles, and we got her all scrubbed up. She enjoyed her impromptu bath, and was so proud to show Daddy her artwork when he got home.

Pumpkin/Halloween Center

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A few weeks ago, I posted about play with orange colored rice. (Here’s that post) And then a few days after that, I took the purple rice I had, and added lavender essential oil. I’ve heard that it has calming properties, and thought – what better thing to add to Becca’s rice? Well, so I added a couple drops too many and the whole house smelled like lavender for two days. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.. just unexpected. To try and combat the strong lavender scent, I mixed the purple rice with the orange, and then let it sit for about a week or maybe even two before we used it. Now, it has a nice lavender scent, but isn’t overwhelming.

I love our water table – such versatility. You can get yours here (aff link). It works great for centers like this because I can fit several activities on the different layers.

I will give a qualifying statement to this post – like I did on my Apple Theme Center – if you are just starting to do sensory activities with your kids, you might not want to take the time or have the energy to put together an entire theme center. THAT IS OK!!! Just pick one or two of these and start there! 🙂

So here’s the big picture – the overview of everything. This center has a high emphasis on math and art, where my Apple center was a combination of Language Arts and Math concepts.

First we’ll look at that sensory rice. Isn’t it pretty? And it fit so well in the top of the water table. I added some fall cookie cutters – they are super fun to sink down and bury in the rice – as well as a variety of sizes of pumpkins that I had collected the past couple of years at Dollar Tree. She definitely likes the cookie cutters the best. She likes to hide them and then dig around to try and find them.

Another fun activity is the pumpkin coloring activity. We went to Michaels and picked up a white craft pumpkin, and I actually introduced this activity with her BEFORE putting it in the center. We talked about how this pumpkin is MADE for coloring, and remembered that other pumpkins we have around the house that are decorations were NOT made for coloring. We also remembered that crayons are only for coloring on paper (and this pumpkin) – not on the table, the couch, the hearth, or any other surface. So I felt confident that I could put this activity in the pumpkin center and allow her to pull it out and take it anywhere to color, without getting crayon everywhere. So far, she has done great with it, and will occasionally just go grab it and go to town coloring! It’s really starting to look cool, and she can definitely take ownership of this and next week, I’ll let her select where she wants to put it to decorate our home!

I also gave her a little pumpkin ice cube tray that I had bought at Dollar Tree – and I added the numbers 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 to reinforce counting by twos. My thought was that she could put one little pumpkin in each space, and count them by twos. She had another idea all together – which reinforces the differences in the way she thinks vs the way I think… and makes me glad I didn’t limit her thinking by telling her what to do with it. She put two grains of rice in each pumpkin on either side of the two, four by the four, six by the six, and up. She actually sat there and counted out ten grains of rice two different times to fill up the “10” pumpkins. Not quite the skill I was hoping to cover, but she kept saying 2,4,6,8,10, so it did end up reinforcing the skill after all.

In addition, I gave her a mesh bag that she could practice putting her pumpkins into (for a gross motor skill of holding a bag open and coordinating the drop to put them in), along with these little black bags for sorting (definitely a much more fine motor skill – these bags are LITTLE). I got this “fall scatter” (shown below) at Michaels for super cheap. She had fun sorting them by color and shape, holding them up to the lights to look through them, and of course, making patterns. (Note: we ended up having to put the acorns away because she kept wanting to pretend she was a squirrel and put the acorns in her mouth, which is of course not safe. She hasn’t done that with the pumpkins. Not sure what it was about the acorns – other than her desire to be a squirrel…)

We also used the cookie cutters, plastic pumpkins, and pumpkin scatter to sort small, medium, and large, and talk about “big, bigger, biggest” and “small, smaller, smallest.” She informed me that NONE of the pumpkins were big, so it wasn’t correct to use those words about these teeny pumpkins, so then we said they were “teeny, teenier, and teeniest.” That was super funny, and giggles ensued.

Sticky Football Field

As you know, I’m always looking for ways to make Sunday afternoon football games more interactive for Becca – since she’s not as interested in staring at the screen as we are! So, in my ever-continuing love of all things contact paper, and knowing how much she loves putting her hands on the sticky tree we made, I thought – why not let her walk on it?

Here’s what I did – I printed off two end zone signs for our favorite team (#WEARETEXANS), and printed off the sideline numbers (you could easily print them for both sides – I just did one). I laid out the contact paper on the floor, and taped it down with painter’s tape (don’t use masking or you’ll leave residue on your floor!). Then I laid down one end zone sign, and Becca placed the other. I put down the 10 and 30, she put down the 20. I put down the 50, she put down the 40. Until all the numbers were down. Then we counted them by 10s. Then, we ripped green paper for grass, and sprinkled them all over the “field”, and she began to walk on it. She LOVES the stickiness on her feet! She says it feels cool. It’s also super fun to run cars on because they make a great sound, and she loves to roll the football across it because that makes yet another cool sound!

You could also extend this by cutting yard lines, and putting a center logo on the field. We just didn’t do that this time. 🙂

Total Prep Time for Mommy: About 10 minutes – since I had to type up the yard line numbers, and print out end zone logos.

Total Play Time for Becca: About 20 minutes at a time every day, all week. Very worthwhile activity! She has been recognizing the numbers and counting all week, too. 🙂 Sneaky mommy.

Four Seasons Button Trees

On Thursday, I showed you our fall button tree. Well, Becca loved that activity so much, that I decided to take it a step further, and do a little mini-lesson on the four seasons. She’s well aware of them, and points out the different seasons – especially when we watch Peep and the Big Wide World on Netflix Kids. (If you haven’t watched these science videos with your kiddos, they are fabulous for age 2 all the way up through ELL grade 1!) But, I also found this little music video on YouTube that is cute and puts them all together nicely. Becca was even singing it later in the day.

Then we sat down and looked at our trees. I had the fall tree there, but also three other blank trees. I had already purchased/gathered buttons for the other seasons, and she was most eager to do winter. She loved the snowflake buttons we’d gotten at Michaels, and was super excited about putting them on. Then when we did the spring tree, she got tired of placing individual buttons where she wanted them, and started grabbing whole handfuls and laying them over the branches – which I glued where she placed. She was pretty much done by the time we got to the summer tree, but she put on the bigger buttons before getting down to go play. I added the rest of the green buttons, and I’m really pleased with how they all turned out.

My ultimate plan with these is to get a canvas from Hobby Lobby or Michaels to attach them to, and display them as art in our home. You could easily do the same, or plan to matt and frame them – you’d just have to use flatter buttons. Our snowflakes are very 3D because they had loops on the back instead of button holes.

You could also maintain your child’s interest longer by only doing one tree in a day. I was excited about seeing them finished, so I did Spring, Summer, and Winter all in one day. You could easily make it a week-long activity by showing the music video, watching some Peep episodes, and checking out library books about each of the seasons. Especially if you are introducing this topic for the first time. Becca is already familiar with the concept of the seasons – it was more about creating the art than anything else for us.