I found a list of activities for children on Pinterest a few weeks ago, and took note of a bunch I plan on doing with my kids and/or students this spring and summer. One of those was spaghetti painting. The mom that blogged about it had left over cooked spaghetti and let her kids dip it in paint and rub it around on the paper. Sounded like fun to me, so when Daddy had left over spaghetti the other day, we did just that!
Bee ALWAYS paints her tummy.
I poured paint in rainbow order and put spaghetti in each color. I showed them how to pull it out and drag it across the paper.
Our set up.
This is what I got when I asked Gracie what she thinks of it.
One of Gracie's paintings. I'm planning on putting them all on Artsonia. Jerry has a pretty cool one too.
Of course, after painting always comes a bubble bath!
If you have children, perhaps you've seen the show, Timmy Time. It's a spinoff of Shawn the Sheep (Timmy is Shawn's nephew), but I personally like it even better than Shawn the Sheep. It's more for the preschool bunch than older kids/adults like Shawn. None of the animals talk, they all use their typical sound but can somehow understand each other. For example, the owl teacher said "Hoot, Hoooo-oot," to give instructions. Below is a video of the opening theme song.
Cute, right? We've been watching a lot of Timmy. They have good morals and the girls giggle through the whole episode. In one episode, the kids learn about trains and Timmy pretends to be a train. The cat feels left out and tries to one-up Timmy by making a train out of a box and stealing the other kids for her own train. They go back and forth, one-uping each other until the other kids give up on them and play something else.
Ok, that's the background story for our post. Daddy cleaned out JR's room the other day and condensed two diaper boxes and a wipes box. He put them by the door so the next person to leave could take them out to the recycling. The next thing I knew, Gracie pulled a box out, stepped into it and started walking around the room chanting "Mew Mew Mew Mew" (say it like a train!). I laughed and she asked for string to make it into her own train car.
Of course, as soon as Gracie had one Bee and Jerry needed one too!
Gracie has been asking to do marble painting for a while now. With everything packed up, I had no idea where the marbles were hiding. However, with the conclusion of school yesterday, I was able to bring my bag of marbles home from work for them to play with. Surprisingly (or not), Gracie did one painting and was done but Bee did several and was very into it!
The boys decided to have a wings night, so the girls decided to get the kids together and have a night too. Above, Bee is pretty excited to not be the smallest person in the room. Richard was less impressed with the situation.
We let the girls do some bubble painting by blowing bubbles in a mixture of water, liquid soap, and neon food coloring. Then they laid a piece of paper on the bubble, which left a pop print on the paper.
Shirley did great with it. Gracie tried it twice and was ready for a bath.
As we were packing our stuff up to go home Gracie put Richard's boots on (big Richard, not Baby Richard, obviously).
I go to the dollar store a lot. I have so many ideas and things that I want to do with the kids, it's the only way I can afford to do even a fraction of them. As I was perusing the store the other day, I came across their display of flashcards. I thought to myself that Gracie is not ready for flashcards, but maybe I'd get them for the future and try to develop an interest.
She completely amazed me. One set is Winnie the Pooh, and there is a picture of a character cut in half. The kid is supposed to match the top and bottom of the picture. I thought it would be way out of Gracie's range right now, but she jumped right in!
On a side note, is anyone else having trouble loading video? I've been having trouble with Blogger for a couple weeks now. They all load fine to Facebook, but not here...
I believe it was Tot School that blogged about using empty parmesan cheese shakers and uncooked spaghetti noodles to work on fine motor skills. Gracie has LOVED this activity. I broke the noodles in half so they would fit all the way in the containers, as she like to open and close the top of the shaker. She's a little tough on the fragile noodles, so I'm thinking I'll transfer the rest of our parm into this shaker, wash out the Sam's Club (i.e. HUGE!) shaker that is in the fridge, and use pick up sticks instead of noodles. The idea's the same, though and I'm sure it'll be a hit.
I found this adorable bug collection kit at the dollar store. It came with the cute plastic container, with a lid that opens on one side and has a magifying glass on the other side. It also has plastic tweezers and a small bug net. I showed Gracie how to pick things up with the tweezers, and we have been working those small motor skills ever since! In addition to filling the bug container, she poors it into other containers, like her stacking cups and I also showed her how to sort them in an ice cube tray too. She has had more than a dollar's worth of fun and learning already!
Sometimes when she missed with the tweezers, she'd get a little frustrated and use her fingers to put it back into the container, but she did great overall.
I've seen lots of sites about making giant bubbles, and always wanted to try it but never really known how to do it. I tried one way that I found online and it didn't work at all. When I was at Toys R Us the other day, I found myself looking at a big bubble wand and wondering if it would really work. Imagine my surprise (and delight) to find this post on Childhood Magic when I got home from the store! I had leftover cotton cording from our clothesline activity, so I cut that into two pieces-one twice as long as the other. When we were at Fleet Farm getting supplies for our water wall I also picked up eye screws and two dowels.
Most big bubble recipes call for glycerin, but I have yet to find a local source to purchase glycerin so I just used regular dish soap and Karo syrup-which is what I use for our bubble solution. It's a bit tougher than regular bubbles so I thought maybe it would work out. The bubbles worked well, but not many of them actually made it off the wand. I'll look around more for glycerin. Maybe it works better. We did have a lot of fun though!
When I read this post, I thought "Gracie would love a water wall!! But, we live in an apartment so oh well." The I started thinking, there's no reason that living in an apartment should stop us from all the fun that is to be had. They're only young once, right?! I just needed to get creative on how to get it accomplished without a permanent yard to put it in.
I started by going to Fleet Farm and asking for pegboard. I was originally thinking plywood, but when I thought of pegboard, it seemed like a no-brainer. I wouldn't have to drill any holes! It would be much quicker to make it, and we'd be able to get right down to the fun part! I decided to spray paint it white, but that's not really necessary. I was going to paint a header too, but realized my paints were in my bedroom where the baby was sleeping. Oh well. I also used a spray on sealer to try and prolong it's usefullness.
I gathered a variety of plastic containers from around the apartment, hammered a hole in each one with a phillips screwdriver, and bolted them to the pegboard with wingnuts. My thought was that eventually Gracie will be able to move the containers around on her own if I used wingnuts instead of nuts.
Now all we needed to do was enjoy! I'm brainstorming ways to make a little funnel-like aparatus for the bottom so I can make the water go right back into the pool. . . I'm sure something will come to me!
Not surprisingly, Gracie was a little more interested in watering her flowers.
While new ideas are fun and exciting, there's something to be said of the classics. Like a pots/pans drum set with wooden spoon drumsticks. I wasn't sure if B was going to appreciate the noise, so I kept her off to the side at first.
When she started dancing along, I figured she wanted in!
(sorry about the angle of the cat in that shot...I tried to crop her out.)
