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Dear reader

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.

Dear Readers,

Today I tried to do slime with my preschoolers. I say tried, but the stuff I used didn’t work as well as I would have liked. I added more after a little while trying to see if I could get it to set a little firmer so the slime would be less sticky and it worked.

I feel like the slime mix I used was a little disappointing, and took forever to get right. I finally got it right, but in the process I also got slime everywhere because I wasn’t able to watch my kids as closely as I would have liked when they were playing with it.

I do want to try a better recipe next time, and not try the fast shortcut method offered by the one solution I bought at Walmart. The girls did have fun with it though, despite it being so sticky.

I suggest you either submit to the fact that there is going to be a mess if you make slime, or make it beforehand. The kids will pester you to help, which I ignored at first, but then let them play with the slime I thought I had finished (it needed more solution so it stuck to them way too much.).

In all it was a good sensory activity, and maybe when they are older I will make it again and let them help me make it. Next time though I will not use the cheap glue and the “quick” solution.

Dear reader

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.

Dear Reader

Have you ever heard the song “One of these things is not like the other’s, One of these things just doesn’t belong.”? That is what inspired this game. The great thing is that your kids will love it and you are able to sneak in some learning with it.

Being able to sort out the things that match and don’t match is a beginning math concept. I was surprised how well my preschooler was able to grasp this concept.

She could see that something was different between most of the options that I gave her, until I started venturing into the not so obvious differences. She could see that the cars were different than the little people angel, but struggled to grasp that the soft toys were different than the hard toys (this may have been my fault for using a stuffed horse and a plastic horse with the teddy bears).

My preschooler loved this game, and I got bored of it way before she did. She kept coming up to me through out the day asking to play again.

There are a lot of paper worksheets that have this activity for a child to do, but I figured, why not use what I have around the house? There are so many more options than the pictures give you. You could do colors, shapes, textures, taste.

In the end, I did enjoy doing it. I just suggest you have a lot of options gathered so you can just sit and play with your child. If you don’t you may end up running back in forth because they figured out all your choices in the first 5 seconds.

Dear Reader,

My daughter has really been struggling with scissor skills. It fits right in with all the fine motor stuff she’s been working on in OT. The fact is that if given the choice between big movements and small, this girly will choose big. And it goes further than movements. I’ve got an active, grand-movement-only type child. Nothing should be small in her mind. So slowing down and working on stuff she has to concentrate on is a major task for her. That’s why I looked up a list of scissor skills and made up scissor-cutting worksheets, and I’m working on a series of activities to use them.

From my fairly thorough internet research, scissor skills development includes:

1. snipping at the paper (cutting off small chunks)
2. cutting fringe (think the bottom of take a number papers. Or this activity)
3. cutting straight lines all the way through a paper
4. cutting zigzag lines all the way through a paper
5. cutting out shapes and objects
6. cutting out wavy lines

Please don’t count me an expert. An internet search doesn’t equal an OT degree. But I at least know we can work on those skills! So, I got to work creating the pages, and then we worked on making crafts with them. Today’s craft, as seen above, is a lion face. I made one with my daughter (you can see the difference in the skill level… at least I hope, haha), gave here a Styrofoam plate and a dry erase marker (I am sure it works just as well – if not better with a paper plate and washable markers, but we went with what we had) and showed her my example and she drew her own lion face. As mentioned above, she’s not big on small movements, so coloring is not her favorite thing. I think coloring on a different object than paper, and with a different medium, made it entertaining enough, but there is definitely a strong scribble game going on. And then, on to the part she wanted to do: Cutting the fringe mane.

After I cut the strips and she cut the fringe, I showed her how to curl the fringe. She had no patience for it, so we kinda did a few and then left it. Then, on to gluing. I found it easiest to glue the strips myself with liquid glue so that they got a little soggy and pliable before I handed them to her and had her put them around the plate. you need to curve/fold/bend them. obviously, because you’re working with a square paper and wrapping it around a round plate. Praise getting it on the plate because it’s harder than it sounds for preschoolers. Honestly, it was a challenge for me as an adult, so of course it’d be hard for preschoolers.

As far as skills, I’m pretty impressed. I mean I know it’s not “hey look at my super talented kid and what she can do.” but it was fun. And real. And she did pretty well for her relatively first craft. And I’m gonna do other similar projects because we need more scissor practice.