I can’t really take much credit for this activity, since we printed off someone else’s idea, but it was such a good and entertaining activity, I saw no point in reinventing the wheel. To see this great activity at the source, click here. It comes from Mr. Printables, and I had a pin that sent me on a goose chase to find the original owner, but I’m glad I did (when in doubt, do a reverse image lookup, haha). Anyway, head on over to his (I’m assuming it’s a him, since it’s called Mr… but I actually only know that he had a printable that I liked and nothing more) site and download the printable.
I modified what they had a little based on the supplies we had at our home, so I printed off his pattern, then traced the shapes onto colored cardstock. For the asterisks in the eyes, I just used a marker (that didn’t seem like a fun shape to cut out. Marker was way easier!) Then I “pre-drilled” the holes and handed my kid a lot of 6 brad’s. (Bonus! More pincer grasp practice!)
As you can see, I totally cheated on the cardstock. I printed 1 sheet of plain white paper and glued it to the back of a capri sun box (so that the color doesn’t shine through). Then I used the same white paper to do the background of the teardrops and the eyeballs.
For the record, she wasn’t determined to keep this one on a sad face, that’s just the best picture I got of her holding it, go figure. We made all kinds of faces and talked about how different parts of our face move when we feel differently. Sometimes I’d say make a mad (or happy or worried) face! Then I’d show her on my face and see if she could see what moved.
When we were talking about what activities to do this week, we noticed a common thread occurring. We both picked out activities that had to do with feelings. Maybe it’s the change of season, or maybe it’s just part of growing up, but it sounded like a good time to talk about feelings. And when we got to talking, we decided that it wasn’t something exclusively for preschoolers. Even newly-christened-toddlers are learning emotions in full force!
But my littles can’t handle some big grand activity on emotions, it’s all so new and undiscovered territory; However, they can definitely mirror your expressions and try copying your face. So, we just did that on purpose for an activity. That’s a lot of what this whole experiment is about – doing things with intention.
Really, it’s super easy and you’re probably already doing some form of this activity with your babe. I have found it easiest to either turn the camera around on my phone so you can set baby in your lap, or do the same but with a good old fashioned mirror. Letting baby see your face and theirs at the same time. You can just make faces across the dinner table, or even from any place your kid can make eye contact. It just ends up more fun when you can snuggle and when they can see themselves. Note: babies love seeing themselves!
Anyway, the post is short and sweet, but it is definitely fun to make faces on purpose. Try smiling and pulling silly faces and winking (don’t expect them to even come close on that one, haha). Definitely stick with happier emotions if your kids are still little like me, because they don’t understand the difference between pretend sad and real sad.
Since this is a fairly common practice even subconsciously, I’d love some feedback if anyone has actually thought about playing monkey see expressions with their kids!
first off, I have to give a disclaimer! We try to do activities that don’t take lots of prep time, but this is not one of those activities! And it would have been much longer if I didn’t beg for and receive a Cricut for Christmas (No perks received for name dropping).
I was looking over ideas for the week of activities I could do with my preschooler, and she was looking over my shoulders. When she saw a Cookie Monster beanbag toss she begged to make it. And asked about every hour on the hour. So, while she was at school, I worked hard to get it done and surprise her with it after school.
First, I pulled out my Cricut and paid the $1.99 for a cookie monster template (time was of the essence, so something premade was a must). It had a solid black mouth, but it was easy enough to cut it out. Especially because it cut out placement lines, so it did a lot of the cutting for me. I’m not all that familiar with my Cricut yet so that kinda surprised me. But it helped, so even thought it was a surprise, it was a good one.
Then I used the cricut to cut out circles in the felt. It didn’t go all the way through, even on the deeper setting, but it did make it easy enough for me to cut out the circles and get them to actually look like circles. And they’re all the same size, so once again, even though it wasn’t as expected, it was helpful. Once I got them all cut out, I blanket stitched around them (you could easily glue them, but I know how rough my kids are and that I’m pretty quick with a blanket stitch so I wanted them to last and maybe even survive the inevitable wash I foresee in their future). before you get them completely sewn, add some batting (beans might be better if you don’t intend to wash them. there isn’t much weight to the batting so they’re harder to throw.
Then I added the “chips” with a simple tack stitch. I know that a) it would have made more sense to sew these on first. So if you’re sewing them, do that first, and b) one little stitch isn’t gonna hold them on long, but it’s all I had thread and time for and I don’t really care when they come off. Obviously, hot gluing them on will work splendidly here, and if you are hot gluing, I really would add them after you get them together. You could also use permanent marker (I considered this but I had already pulled out the brown felt) or buttons (I might use buttons later. But don’t tell my button-collecting mother. She would say it is a waste of buttons. If you do buttons, sew them on really well. We do not want any choking kiddos).
Then I glued Cookie Monster’s face onto a cardboard box (if you want the game to last, laminating it is a good idea), used an X-Acto knife to cut out his mouth, and utility scissors to cut a window out of the top of the box for easy grabbing once the cookies are all in, and set it where my preschooler would see it when she got home.
She was pretty excited, and she made sure that everyone in the family had a turn throwing the cookies (seriously, you know how hard it is to avoid the “tossing cookies” idiom?) into Cookie Monster’s mouth. It is hard to make them all in, even for the adults, so once my daughter got bored she was just as happy to cheat (she giggled knowing it was cheating), and just feed Cookie Monster on her own for a while. My toddlers were all for that option, and they all played together happily for quite a while.
I’ve been reading a lot of child development resources lately, both to know some good activities for this blog and to better serve my kids (which is the point of doing activities for the blog… so, yeah), and in passing there was a mention about how metal bowls are great sensory tools because of how easily they make noise. I found that fact interesting and decided to test it.
I had already celebrated the childhood pastime of turning pans into drums, so I decided to put a ball into the bowl and roll it around and see what happened. I found that hard plastic balls made the best noise, and it didn’t take long for the kids to think so, too.
As you can see, the ice cream toy was experimented with, too. That was a toddler addition. And it did roll, so they liked it. Obviously not as well as an actual bowl, but the point is letting toddlers experiment and learn, so there really isn’t a way to go wrong.
The preschooler got in on the action, too, so although this activity is definitely geared toward toddlers, and I don’t know if it really would have been fun on her own, she enjoyed rolling the ball in the bowl. And since that was over the toddler’s ability to really get the ball going, really, it worked out well that she helped. I’d say maybe an older toddler would be able to roll it herself, say 2-ish? And if they’re rolling it themselves, my unprofessional guess is that it works on bilateral movements. It’s a fancy word that keeps popping up in developmental contexts, meaning that it works with both sides of the body and helps a kid learn to use their limbs together.
(yes, I know. Halloween jammies in September. I mean, I would classify myself as one of “those people,” that like Halloween – the cutesy side of Halloween. I don’t like creepy – but also, they were on sale at Walmart, and all of my girls needed new jammies. so, it’s a win-win. Especially for Minnie Mouse jammies. And my preschooler wishes Halloween could be every day, so she had no complaints! Seriously, costumes, fancy things, spooky things, and candy!?! You just read off all of her favorite things in one holiday! Needless to say, we’ll be sporting Halloween jammies in May, too.)
I wasn’t fast enough. When you have twins and a busy preschooler, you find yourself saying that a lot. Today’s reason? I left the lid on the rice bucket open too long and my kids got into it. So I had a handful of rice that I didn’t consider safe for human consumption, but it still had some use to it… somehow. So I tried to think of what I could do with the rice. Usually it ends up as heat packs, but I don’t need a heat pack right now (they’re all freshly re-filled) and I DID need an activity for 2 busy toddlers, so when I walked past the teeny tiny containers that always come with storage containers but are hardly useful, I thought about making a few noisemakers for the girls. It took all of 2 seconds (really, grab the stuff and shake) to make and the girls loved them!
When I grabbed the colors I was thinking I was grabbing pink and teal, but honestly the dark blue and purple I ended up getting were pretty. I added 3 drops. It might have been a little overkill if I wanted lighter colors, but I wanted to make sure I had enough to color all the rice, and past experience said that was more than you’d think because the rice just sucks up the color. I didn’t have to add any color, I know; but I figured that a) the rice wasn’t edible anyway, and b) why not? Colors are fun.
I taped them closed. Never trust a toddler to keep a lid on! I was not in the mood to clean up colored rice all day. The colors actually turned out well, although this picture is slightly too exposed to really show it.
I considered making 4 instead of 2 because the girls kept stealing them for each other because the containers are small enough to fit in one hand, so they’d shake each container in one hand but then their sister would steal them back, etc. But they got along well enough passing them back and forth that I didn’t worry about it.
They really liked the cause and effect aspect of shaking the containers; liking that when they shook them something (noise) happened. And adding the colors made it fun, but also meant I could talk about how they were different – one was blue and one was purple. I mean, they really didn’t care, but maybe subconsciously they’re building new synapses. Truth is, I like color.
I know, “Magic Milk” is kind of an old hat, but when I was browsing through activities, my preschooler begged me to see it. I decided it was all over the internet enough that I wasn’t going to post about it, but the first time we did it was not enough. She has begged me to do Magic Milk every day for a week since our first time so I decided if she loved it that much, I’d actually count it as an activity.
In case you haven’t heard of magic milk, it’s pretty simple. you pour just enough milk on a plate to cover the dish-like portion of the plate (aka pick a plate with a lip or a raised edge), add drops of food coloring to the milk (don’t mix it in. We chose red, green, lime green, blue, and teal. And by we, I mean my preschooler), take a toothpick and dip it in dish soap (that toothpick is now “magical”), and hand it to your kiddo, and let them touch the milk with it.
p.s. I added too much milk. If I had poured less, the lime green color would have stayed closer to the top of the milk. It still mixed in, though, so besides the fact that I wasted a little milk, it wasn’t really a big deal.
If I understand it right, the fat of the milk likes the soap, so it tries to get to the soap and pushed the watery contents away in an effort to get to the soap. I’m guessing that is why soap gets things clean… it bonds with the fats so that they come off the plate.
Preschoolers don’t really care about the science of it, yet, but they do think it’s pretty fun to do. And bonus point: working with toothpicks helps pincer grasp! In case you haven’t noticed, we work a lot on pincer grasp at our house… and if you have looked into it, you might notice that we need more work because my preschooler is still holding things at the stage below where she is supposed to be (with a backward hand hold instead of the pincer).
I’m sure we will do this activity again. I know it wastes milk, but if you’re the type that milk actually has time to go bad (my type before I had 3 growing young’uns) then it’s not wasting, it’s recycling. And if you’re the type that I am now, you’re buying so much milk that you don’t really notice the difference.
I confess that the idea for this activity really came spur of the moment. I’d been keeping these coins as a prize system for a certain stubborn preschooler who needed a little motivation to go potty, and we had finally gotten past the need for a reward system (translation: Mommy is over rewarding something that should be standard procedure by now), so the jar was just sitting on the shelf, waiting for me to come up with a different need for plastic tokens. When I walked past it today while cleaning my house, I thought, eh, “I’ll let the toddlers play with these.If I’m watching them (the coins are easily inserted in mouths while backs are turned), I bet they’ll have fun!
It was definitely more of a hit than I anticipated. I ended up sitting and watching them play with these coins for easily 20 minutes, but probably close to a half an hour!
They even took turns reaching into the jar! Bonus skill! I guess I could say I planned that, I mean the jar is only big enough for 1 little hand to fit inside, and there were about 12 coins total so enough for them to still have something to do and hold while the other is putting coins in or pulling them out. I totally didn’t though. Maybe they did so well at taking turns because it was right as they woke up from a nap. Either way, I was kind of impressed and in awe at how well and how long they played with something so basic as plastic coins in a half-pint jar. I guess it just emphasizes the fact that play can happen with just about anything. No need to spend big green or hours of time. Once you start looking for ways to spark intentional learning experiences for your kids, the whole world takes on a new unexpected light.
I will definitely say that has been my favorite part of this activity challenge: anticipating the joy of a toddler, intentionally playing with or introducing something new to your children, embracing little moments – all of this has made me start looking at even simple things things with a new light.
My kiddo has been begging me for jell-o lately! I decided when she did this last time that it’d be a great activity for her and I to do together. I mean, what kid doesn’t love using a whisk and watching water change colors? I know, I know; it’s super basic, but she really loved it. And when dinnertime came she was proud that she contributed.
I am trying to decide if I feel like she’s ready for making cookies. whisking a liquid is way easier than whisking cookie batter. I think for now, we might just stick with Jell-O.
P.S. this stuff is actually Sonic Ocean Water gelatin! I loved it, and I wish I had it in candle form (or Scentsy, let’s be real. Open flame is not a good idea at my house). ***No affiliate link, no reward for linking to it; just thought it was a nice change from the blue raspberry name-brand stuff.
I mean, unless you want your kitchen a sticky disaster…
I saw this idea on Pinterest and I really wanted to buy some colored tape! I know, it’s a total splurge, especially when the whole point is to let babies play with it, but I could just see them having so much fun with it! I mean it definitely needed some tweaking and it definitely needed supervision to prevent tape getting wrapped around necks, but masking tape tears easily so I wasn’t that worried.
So I found some on Amazon (no, I’m not an affiliate, I ordered this at full price, I liked it, and I’m passing that info on) and I couldn’t wait to find a way to use it! I don’t know why I’m so much in love, it’s just tape. But colors make me happy.
Knowing I don’t have a radiator to put it on like in the picture, I searched my house for a safe place to put it. I didn’t want to risk losing paint on any walls or furniture, and my house is in a constant state of construction (for wayyyyyyy too long!) So I decided I’d use my vinyl deck rails. If you want to do this activity I highly suggest you consider the best place. I’m sure you can find some place in your house, but with the last warm days looming over us, the deck had an extra pull, anyway.
I remembered how chaotic it was when I set up the spider web so I definitely waited until naptime to set this up, and of course I put it in rainbow order. Not only because it’s so visually pleasing but because it makes a hidden learning experience. Especially when I got my preschooler involved!
This activity kept them entertained for a surprisingly long time! They’d run off for a second or two and then come back and rip off another patch of another color. And when they’d get a whole strip, they’d play with that strip, on their hands, on their shirts, or even just getting it stuck to their feet.
I would definitely call the activity a win! And now I have a lot more tape in fun colors to do it again! I’ve got cubbies in my front room that I think would be a good indoor place to play. Or even the fridge. I’m sure there’s a lot of ways we can adapt this activity. If you do it, please send me some pics!
Fall is supposed to hit us like a slap in the face tomorrow, so we’re outside battening down the hatches and enjoying the warm day before it gets crazy cold in an unfair end of summer stint. I am not ready for cold.
One of my daughter’s absolute favorite things about outside are dandilions. She loves that they’re yellow, she loves that mom doesn’t get mad when she picks them (picking them is encouraged actually) and she loves that they are fun to blow on. I know some people hate them with a passion but they’re actually so good for nature that I never bother fighting them. Granted, my neighbors are all farmers so if they’re bothered by them then they’re spraying for them anyway. In fact, one neighbor has a huge beehive on his property so they’re actually encouraged (bees love dandilions)! I don’t have to feel guilty for leaving them in my yard for my daughter to enjoy.
These might be the last of the season so we enjoyed the moment. She picked them and we talked about making wishes (her new favorite concept, actually, though I don’t think she really understood how it tied to her flowers) and she blew them away!
I love that she finds so much joy in something so simple. What are your thoughts? Do you love them or hate them? Feel free to let us know in the comments.
you could spend tons of time or you could spend just a little time, but its about enjoying being together.
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