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…
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.
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.
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.
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:
snipping at the paper (cutting off small chunks)
cutting fringe (think the bottom of take a number papers. Or this activity)
cutting straight lines all the way through a paper
cutting zigzag lines all the way through a paper
cutting out shapes and objects
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.
***Update: Since this article, we have created quite a few block activities and decided to make a printable dice game pack for you! Get that free download here.***
Dear Reader,
Today we played with dice. You can make your own, use what you have, or improvise with this one. To be simple all you have to have is a 6 sided die or two. You could make a list of six activities for your child to do, Or use an activity dice.
I made mine, but the girls had fun anyways.
The activity is pretty simple. First you start with rolling the dice (one for the activity and one for how many times you do the activity). Second you do the activity on the activity die the number of times it shows on the number die.
The activities can be simple, stomp your feet. Clap your hands. The possibilities can be endless, or as endless as your imagination ( I had to wrack my brains to figure out some and came up with some like do the cha cha.)
This gets your kids moving and you can even practice counting with them. A big bonus is that they usually like tossing the dice too.
My kids loved this for a while, then little sister wanted in and she didn’t know how to share. Cue crying. Oh well, definitely worth trying again.
This is more of a parent guided activity, you could also join in if you wanted.
I don’t know how it’s been for you lately, but my preschooler has been on one! She has been nagging nonstop and even yelled at her occupational therapist (we’re working on her pincer grasp. She struggles with fine motor skills. In my personal opinion, that is because everything she does is at 100 mph and she has no time to slow down and focus long enough to master said fine motor skills. This girl was born with a fire underneath her). I wanted to make an activity we could do together to hopefully reset the ‘tude she’s been dishing lately, so I made an activity that would hopefully let her slow down long enough and enjoy some time with me. I’m sharing it free with you (you’ll still need to grab a few supplies) in hopes that your kids will enjoy it, too. Scroll down to grab the freebie.
You’re gonna want to grab a few coffee stirrers (we call them hot chocolate stirrers) and save a milk lid for this activity, so plan ahead. But once you’ve gotten what you need, all you have left to do is to print out the page, cut the little figures apart (pretty important if your kiddo is easily distracted like mine. Not so important if that kiddo is older or less distracted), and sit down and build. I am pretty confident that an older preschooler would be able to enjoy themselves with little assistance, but younger kids definitely need some help figuring out how to move the pieces just right. It requires a bit of hand-eye-coordination and spacial relation. Bonus! This activity also works with the pincer grasp (we are becoming very familiar with those types of activities)!
Anyway, download the page and let me know how it goes!
Life has been rough here the last little while, resulting in my surgery the other day. I really needed something simple and easy to occupy my kids, and having a dance party is the perfect thing.
Dance Party is a favorite activity here. It gets my kids active and I can basically just put it on and let them do the rest.
I find YouTube to be the easiest supplier of dance songs, but if you have dance music CDs (I know, old school but I grew up with them so I still have a few lying around) or even a playlist on something you can use those.
As I said this is mostly a hands off activity but if you want to join in you will more than likely get your kiddos to do more dancing. It will also keep them involved longer if you are joining in and bonus you get some exercise too!
If you want to involve yourself more you can and it will probably make the time last longer too, but it is your choice.
I’ve had a longstanding date with my friend’s raspberry patch set for about once a year. She only calls me when it gets desperate in her patch and she’s struggling to catch up; her main goal is to fulfill all the demand that others have for berries from her patch and I usually take about half of the berries I pick. This year has been a great year for raspberries and she said she had more than she could handle, so I bought extra from her. That meant I’ve been busy working raspberries for the past few days. Since my preschooler helped me pick the berries, I figured she would also be interested in helping me process them, as well.
Obviously, this activity would have to be tweaked if you don’t have a food strainer, but you could easily mash berries with a potato masher! It just doesn’t involve a cool crank, too. My food strainer is called a Victorio, but based on the internet search dive I just took, they must have changed their name? either way, it looks like this. My preschooler could both turn the crank handle and mash the berries, and it was kinda fun watching her get so excited at something that is really technically a chore. She loved making “squished berry juice” and I loved both the help and the time with her. All in all, she lasted quite a while! Equal to about 4 quarts of raspberry juice/pulp. We added a little sugar and canned it that way.
I’m adding the activity scales here even though it’s not the end of the post because if you’re only reading for the activity, the rest of this is a little dry, but since this blog is also a chronicle of my gardening/canning adventures, I need to include the following information (mostly for me…)
All in all we had 6 gallons of berries (6 large clam shells) and it made:
2 batches of jam with lemon peel pectin (aka 8 cups of berries, 6 cups of sugar, an entire bag of my homemade lemon pectin – about 10 tablespoon cubes but they were old and nearly impossible to separate from the bag, hence the large batch, and 4 T lemon juice (it just needed the lemon). It set pretty well, but I understand why they tell you to do it in small batches. Some of the jars are extra firm gel and some are barely set).
2 gallon ziplocks of whole frozen berries (filled 2 xl cookie sheets and 3 regular sized (they’re Pampered Chef large size)
3 1/2 quarts of raspberry juice (it required a whole cup of sugar to make it not so tart) and then I went to the store and bought a regular sized clamshell of strawberries, a large clamshell of blueberries, a whole bag of grapes, and a small clamshell of blackberries and that plus the remaining raspberry juice (and half a cup of sugar) made another 2 1/2 quarts so I processed it all together – 5 quarts, 2 pints – and although the canning guides said 1/4″ headspace, I think I really needed a whole inch of headspace because they bubbled out everywhere and 3 didn’t seal (2 ended up in my fridge but I didn’t notice the 3rd until I didn’t wanna trust it),
pulp for fruit leather (filled a quart bag but its currently still in my fridge. I’ll update when it’s leather). I used the strainer and only ran it through once, so it’s really just pulp and seeds without any liquid. The liquid was bottled in the quarts above).
My oldest has been struggling making the different letters. Her occupational therapist suggested to have her make the letters in different ways. Today’s activity was tracing the letters with glue.
This activity is pretty self explanatory. All you need to do is write the letters you want your child to trace on a piece of paper. Then you give them a glue container and tell them to trace the letters.
I will admit that I went a little extra and colored my glue, but you don’t have to. I just knew that my children would fight over the glue if I didn’t differentiate them.
This is an activity you will want to monitor, unless you want glue all over everything that is. My children loved this activity and did pretty well at tracing. Make sure you have a lot of letters to trace if you want this activity to last longer than a few seconds though. My child finished in under a minute and was asking for more.
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