Tag: Preschool

Dear reader,

We needed something fun at our house as we are about to hit major harvest season and be pretty busy, so I searched through multiple ideas and found a picture that turned a clothespin into a catapult. It seemed basic enough, so my thought was, “eh, why not.” To be fair, I probably would never bother if we haven’t been challenging ourselves to play with our kids intentionally.

I could easily reverse engineer what I saw in the picture, as it used a block of wood, a clothespin, a large popcicle stick (we always called them tongue depressors. Is that still a thing?), And a lid from a juice container.

The picture had the clothespin glued into the middle, but as we (my husband and I) tested it out before we showed our daughter, it was incredibly pathetic, hardly doing anything except shoot straight up; and not that far, either. So we pulled it off (as best we could. I gave up on the last piece after the clothespin broke and I had to go get another one.

Moving it to the end helped a ton. It gave much more leverage to the clothespin. Tossing anything heavier than the marshmallows turned out to be a disappointment, too, but marshmallows worked pretty well. So we showed the catapult to our daughter, and all took turns shooting the marshmallows to the target plates.

As far as catapults go, this one isn’t that great, but it was super easy, and my preschooler can operate it herself (although it definitely helps if I hold the base). If my preschooler were a little older, I would make a few other types of catapults and we could have a science day trying them all out and comparing them and then learning what works best and why.

But for now, we are just having fun. And there will be more chances to experiment. Interestingly enough, her favorite part wasn’t shooting the catapult… it was collecting the marshmallows. And it gave all of us a nice reprieve from picking apples, harvesting green tomatoes, and all the adventures of storing food for winter.

Dear Reader,

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.

Dear Reader,

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.

Dear Reader,

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.