It’s emotions week for us. Today I did yoga with my toddler. Since she is only a toddler I chose to start with only 5 poses. The poses are inverted sitting, resting, sea lion, train, and downward dog.
I was amazed at how much my toddler loved doing this activity. She actually sat still for longer than she has ever before. If you know my child you know she id constantly moving and getting into things so any time I can get her to sit still it is a miracle.
My toddler’s favorite pose was the inverted sitting pose. She thought it was so fun to sit with her legs up the wall.
Resting pose is as simple as it sounds. Lie flat on your back with your hands resting beside you.
Sea Lion pose is one of the hardest I chose to do with my toddler. Lay on your belly and lift your top half up on your arms. Make sure you are leaving your legs resting on the floor and bending back at the waist.
Train pose is another fun one. Sitting with your back and legs straight move your arms around in a circle like they are your wheels.
The last pose is one I think is the most well known yoga pose. Downward dog you form a triangle with your body and the floor. Legs straight, bend at the waist and place your hands on the floor.
Your child’s poses might not be 100% correct, but know they will get better over time so don’t be a perfectionist on them. This is supposed to be calming, not stressed because they can’t get it right away.
Anyways, have fun. It is so much better when you don’t place too much expectations on it.
Today is the first day of our special Emotions week. I decided to get my preschoolers to form emotions with playdough.
My sister was amazing and made me the face to use for my face border. Once I printed that off I found out that if you trim printer paper a little it fits into a gallon size bag.
Once I placed the paper in the gallon bag I let my preschoolers have fun with the playdough and allowed them to create their faces.
The bags I used did have some problems. The playdough didn’t stick very well to them. I know sone bags are smoother than others so maybe if I tried an off-brand it would stick a little better.
In all it was a great way to talk about feelings with my preschoolers. They understood a lot of different emotions too.
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.)
This is a simple game you can play with your child. It teaches patterns, which is part of early math.
To start you need something to create the pattern with. I used different colored cups. Place the cups, or what you are using to create the pattern, in a pattern on the table. Assign actions to the items. Let the child perform the actions. Then mix them up and see if they can perform the actions.
I can’t say my preschooler loved this game at first, but has asked to play it multiple times today.
I assigned actions like clapping for the blue cups, patting for the orange cups and stomping to the purple cup. What other actions can you think of for this activity?
Let me know in the comments.
I mean, unless you want your kitchen a sticky disaster…
Today we played Color Scavenger Hunt. To play you have your child search for different color toys. Once they find a toy of the color they are searching for they place the toy on a piece of colored paper.
The supplies you need are construction paper of different colors and toys.
My child loved this game, though it took her a little to understand what I was asking her to do.
This is a game that is meant for older toddlers since sorting is learned around 2 years old. If your child doesn’t understand the concept at first don’t be afraid to revisit this game at a later date.
As you can see we had more yellow toys than any other toys, but yellow was also the first color we searched for and my preschooler was helping more for that color.
The first time you play this game will be more of a scaffolding to play. In other words you are walking right along the child and point out the different toys and the colors they correspond with.
The subsequent times you play you can stand back a little more, but just enjoy the ride with your child while they learn math precursors. That’s right it is an early math game since part of math is sorting into numbers. Enjoy!
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.
My kids love to play in boxes. I think all children love playing with boxes. Give a child an expensive toy and they tend to want to play in the box.
With all the diapers I have bought over the years there is always a box every couple of weeks. The fun thing about boxes is that it could be anything.
It could be a boat, a cradle for a baby, or even a robot’s head. The possibilities are only as limited as you and your child’s imaginations.
Another option is to give your child something to color with and let them loose on the box.
Be prepared for your boxes to be destroyed, whether by accident or on purpose. Don’t let your kids play with any boxes that you want to keep.
As I stated earlier, you can play with your kids and the boxes or let them play by themselves. This is a great activity they can do with self directed play.
Today I decided to work on bilateral coordination with my Preschoolers. Bilateral coordination is important for anything that your child does, whether it is walking or writing you use your bilateral coordination.
My oldest has always struggled with this so I tried to come up with an activity that we could do without too much hassle. A quick call to my sister and I was in business. (I seriously have the best sister for listening to my whims, and I am not just saying that because she is going to be reading this)
The idea behind the activity is simple. Have your child shred cotton balls into a bowl. Once you feel you have enough place glue on the ghost and let your child put the pieces of cotton ball on the ghost. Then let your child practice their cutting skills to cut out the eyes and mouth from a piece of construction paper. Finally glue the pieces on top of the cotton and you have your completed ghost.
Using the pincer grasp on the cotton balls to pull them apart is a great way to practice the bilateral coordination that I talked about earlier as is using scissors. These will be important skills for your kids to have their entire lives, so practice often. And if your child is struggling, keep practicing.
If you like this idea my sister made this great ghost printable that you can use for your child’s art project.
I don't really understand cookies but I have some programs that use them for security purposes. I'm trying to follow legal requirements and tell you that. Consenting to these technologies will allow all of the features to run smoothly but I don't use them personally. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
