Summertime Sidewalk Painting

Last summer we had a lot of fun making sidewalk paint and using it on our patio.  I had completely forgotten about this great activity, but apparently it stuck with M, who asked me about it a few days ago. 

Here’s the oh-so-simple recipe:

1 part cornstarch to 1 part cold water
5 to 6 drops of food coloring for each color you want to make.

We used 2/3 Cups of both cornstarch and water.  And we ended up with two good-sized containers worth of paint (a bit bigger than an applesauce or jello snack container).  It went fast, so we definitely could’ve used more!
Just mix the water slowly into the cornstarch.  If you are using a whole box of cornstarch, you’ll need to use a whisk or maybe an electric mixer.  Pour it into your individual containers, then add your food coloring and gently mix it in.   Food coloring will stain clothing so be careful!!  It did wash completely off of our driveway with the first rain, so no worries there, although you could always use a dab of washable paint for color in place of the food coloring.

We used regular old paintbrushes and some foam brushes to paint with.  It’s fun to watch the watery paint dry quickly in the sun – it becomes so vibrant as it dries!  Pretty, pretty, pretty. :)

M drew a pirate ship.  Obviously. ;)  And some other things I can’t remember.  I drew our family and the earth and sun.  It’s really hard to resist getting down and having fun with this sidewalk paint – we had a wonderful time doing this together!
Have a beautiful day! :)

Farm Yard and Dino Land Play Sets

I’ve been on a mission lately to increase M’s interest in non-battery-operated toys.  It’s been a tough job.  I’m not sure how it happened that he became so addicted to toys that “do something”, I only know that it was a turn for the worse.  After receiving several hand-me-down toys from cousins in January, all of which are battery operated, he just hasn’t been as interested in expending any energy or imagination when playing.  He will push buttons and watch toys light up, make sounds, and move, and somehow being entertained has become more pleasant than actually playing.

I could go on and on about this topic, but I will save it for another post, another time.

In an effort to engage his imagination and creativity in play again, I (very)  quickly put together some play sets for him using fabric I’ve had lying around in my sewing cart for ages. 

I’ve mentioned in other posts that I’ve been trying to have something interesting waiting for him when he wakes in the mornings so I don’t have to hear any whining before my first cup of coffee. ;)  Often, it’s something like playdough or a new sensory bin, but one evening I made a farm playland for him and had it ready the following morning.  I included his farm animals and barn (Target) and some Duplo blocks.

It started off like this:

Then became this:

And eventually ended up like this: He had gotten out more blocks, a zoo, a truck, and some books and was sitting in the middle of his farm, reading books to a little plastic duck.  Hello, imagination! :)  And I realized something a bit bigger might be better.  So, off we went to the fabric store.

I purchased a yard of green fleece, and put it on the floor when we got home.  He spent 45 minutes, I kid you not, mowing the green fleece grass with a little toy tractor.

I cut a larger pond out of some blue fabric from my stash, and we used the other pieces I’d had for the smaller version to make more hills ( by putting fabric over an upside down bowl, or over large blocks), and a chicken yard.   

I wish I had a better picture than this… in fact I think M may have taken this picture: but you get the idea.  He loves his new farm yard! 

I should mention that none of the fabric has been hemmed or sewn together.  I simply grabbed what I wanted and cut it to roughly the size and shape I needed for a pond or hill or dirt field.  I’m not worried about pieces unraveling - fleece doesn’t unravel, and the other pieces were just leftover scraps from old projects.  This way he can rearrange the layout of his farm if he wants to.

This was such an enormous success that the following week I used the same green fleece, added some new pieces, and made a dino land for him:

There’s a cave (a small crate from Dollar Tree turned on its side with brown fabric on the floor and covered with some other green fleece):

And a volcano (note the dino skeleton at the base of the mountain, hee hee): 

This was a huge success too, and M had a lot of fun playing with it.  It was definitely worth the 15 minutes it took me to cut fabric and put it all together for him. 

I won’t say it cured him of his preference for toys that “do something”, but it did help him see how much fun a little imagination can be!  Baby steps, right? ;)

Have a beautiful day! :)

Homemade Foam Stamps

M loves those little capsules that have foam shapes in them.  I’m sure you know what I’m talking about – you put them in warm water and wait, oh, about an hour, for the capsule to dissolve and reveal what was all squished up inside.  They are a patience-practicing activity, although I’m not entirely convinced that the gratification of finally seeing *what it is* is really worth the amount of  patience spent, but I digress…

The truly irritating thing about these little guys is that once you know what they are… the fun is over.  They lie around the house making me crazy with their purposelessness.

The million or so peanut butter jar lids that I have don’t make me crazy, because I know sooner or later they will have a purpose. :)  

I tried gluing these little foam guys onto our saved lids with regular craft glue, but after it dried it peeled right off the plastic.  I would’ve tried super glue, but, no kidding, all 3 tubes of super glue that we have are glued shut.  I couldn’t budge them and gave up.  So, I ended up using mounting foam.  I got this in a strip, like a roll of tape, at Dollar Tree a few weeks ago.  It’s useful for all kinds of things.  I liked it for these stamps because it makes them stick up a little farther and makes it easier to just ink the shape instead of the whole lid (if that makes sense?).


We tried them out and they were a success!  M loved using them.

Of course cleaning up was the real test… we had used paint for stamping with them and I just gently washed them under running water, pressed the sponge down to get most of the water out, then let them dry.  They stayed put together very nicely!  $1.00 for a new set of stamps isn’t bad!


Have a beautiful day! :)

Sticker Collages and matching ABCs

We are leaving soon for a week long trip to visit my parents.  It will be fun once we get there, but the drive… oh, the long long drive… not sure that’s going to be as much fun. ;)  We’ll be in the car for about 6 to 7 hours for 2 days; somewhere around 12 to 14 hours total.  This does include some frequent stopping, which I feel is necessary for a small child.  If it were just hubs and me, it’d take about 11 hours and we’d do it all in one day.
Anyway, as you can imagine I’ve been trying to come up with good car activities for a 3 year old.  (If you have any input about this, PLEASE leave a comment!)  I want things that aren’t too messy, are engaging and interesting and novel for him, and won’t involve my turning around every 2 minutes (my neck aches just thinking about it) to help.  I do have a few things planned that we can do together for a while, and for which I’ll move to the back seat to be next to him, but I’m hoping he’ll be able to do and enjoy some activities on his own (besides dvds and cd books and coloring).
I had an idea about how to use stickers in a new way (new for M), and made up some little pages for him to do.  I’m not sure if this will be something I’ll have to help him with or not… I may decide to do one of them at home with him some time this week before we leave so I can gauge how easily he can do it on his own.  I thought I’d post these in case anyone else thinks it’s a good idea too. :)
I put together some little sticker scenes using half a sheet of construction paper.  These are foam stickers and we have a TON of them.  After I had the scene how I wanted it, I labeled each sticker with a letter, then wrote the same letter on the paper in the space where the sticker should go:
When it’s put together it will look like this:

Here are some more I put together.  I snapped pictures of some of them before I actually wrote the letters on them…
    The last one has some layered stickers.  I’m curious to see how he’ll do with that.  Can you tell that’s supposed to be a kite in the sky?
To store these, I put the papers in a pocket of the bag we’ll be taking with us, and all the stickers in a ziploc bag.  I labeled the back of each page with a shape, then labeled the back of each sticker with the appropriate shape. 
Let me know what you think!  These were fun for me to put together; I hope M has fun with them too.
Have a beautiful day! :)

Homemade Ball (or bean bag) Toss Game

 If you look closely you can see the ball in midair close to the box.

We are getting so very, very tired of winter here.   I let M go out whenever I am reasonably sure he won’t freeze, but it just isn’t enough.  He needs some gross motor fun inside, and I admit I’m not the best when it comes  to this kind of thing.  I’ve said this before… I’m a sit-in-one-place-and-do-something-quiet kind of girl, and I have a lot to learn about nurturing and appreciating M’s wild side. 

So, I made an attempt last Thursday, and was successful. :)  I found an old box, traced the top of a large cottage cheese container onto it, and cut out the circle.  Then I pushed the cottage cheese container into it and set the whole thing up on our loveseat.

I found these cute soft balls (similar to a bean bag, but with some sort of stuffing inside; they are very lightweight) at Dollar Tree.   Apparently they are supposed to look like Easter eggs. 

I put a piece of masking tape on the floor and we took turns standing at it and seeing if we could toss the balls into the container.  I thought M was doing great, but he was frustrated that whenever he managed to get a ball into the container it rolled right back out.  So we set up the laundry basket on the loveseat and did it that way.  Ha!  He enjoyed this a lot and was thrilled that it was ok to throw something in the house. :)

So, just go get your laundry basket and a ball and have fun!  If you want to make the same thing I made, make sure to cut your hole a tiny bit smaller than the outer rim of your container so the container won’t slide all the way through.

Have a beautiful day! :)

Crocheted Cords

So, somewhere I saw these great crocheted cords as part of a group of Waldorf-style toys. I am totally addicted to crocheting, and whipped a couple of these up for M. He LOVES them, and has had so much fun with them. A lot more fun than I imagined he would have!

We’ve played falling-over-laughing tug of war with these about a million times. He loves for me to make one into a ball or “butterfly” (see pic above) and he will throw it at targets. Sometimes we tie them onto things and he does this: That’s him in midair. :) Jumping over the rope is a lot of fun! He also tries to lasso me sometimes. Basically he just throws the whole rope at me and cracks himself up. :)

They’ve been a great addition to his play; I plan to make more! They are super-simple to make, if you crochet. Just take several strands of yarn – I used 4 strands of worsted weight – and, holding them together, crochet a chain to your desired length with a large hook (I used an M I think). Leave the strands on either end, no need to weave loose ends in!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Music Time – Printable Christmas Song Pages!

I am making an effort to bring more music into our days. Several months ago I made a songbook for M using a simple 3-ring binder:
I found clipart to represent each song, which I put at the top of each page. I printed out about 25 songs to start with and since then I’ve added many more.


M has a small stash of instruments:
Some are homemade… we don’t claim to be very fancy here. :) He has a harmonica, jingle bells, tambourine, a shaker I made for him from a soda bottle with beads and buttons etc., a triangle, and a metal bowl with a wooden spoon that he uses for a drum. You can just imagine the music we make. ;) He loves to sit with the song book in front of him and hand out the instruments. He has become very good at knowing which song goes with which picture.
We sit around and play “music” (I use that word very, very loosely) and sing our songs every once in a while. However, it’s usually put away and we really don’t think of it very often. Of course when the songbook was brand new it was a different story, but now… well, it’s been neglected of late.

Christmas seems like the perfect time to bring it back out and make sure our home is music-filled! I’ve typed up some of our favorite Christmas carols, and will have the song book along with the instruments set out on M’s activity shelves for the rest of Advent and the Christmas season. They may well stay there permanently. :)

Click on the image below to download our Christmas pages and make your own song book!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Super Easy Sticker Scenes

We have had some great fall and farm themed puffy stickers lying around the house for several weeks now and I’ve been waiting to use them because I just wasn’t sure what to do with them.  Then I saw this in the Oriental Trading Co. catalog:And I thought, that looks so easy to make!  So, I made some. :) 

There aren’t a lot of fall and farm stickers, so I didn’t make a full page sticker scene.  I thought about doing that and adding it to M’s homemade sticker book, but decided against it.  Instead, I made them with ziploc bags.

Simply cut construction paper however you want, then layer it using double stick tape.  Make sure it will fit into your bag, and pop it in.  Seal the bag so all the air is out (as much as you can).

A close up: These are quart-size bags.  Stickers go in the back:I made these last weekend and put them on M’s activity shelves this week.  They were super simple to put together, and quick too!  I’m pleased with how they turned out and I hope he likes them too. ;)

Have a beautiful day! :)

Manger Tutorial

As we do the Jesse Tree during Advent, M will put one piece of yarn (hay) in the manger per night.  On Christmas Eve, baby Jesus will go in the manger on top of the hay. 

I have received a couple of emails with questions about how we made our manger.  It is so simple, I’m almost embarrassed to show you. :) 

First, start with a small cardboard tube:

Cut it in half lengthwise:

Cut one of the halves in half again, width-wise:

Trim both of the small pieces just a little bit.  Then staple one to each end of the large piece:

Look, a manger! :)  I cut a square of brown felt with pinking shears and glued it to ours:

It’s not the most elegant manger ever, but it works!  You could also use a square or rectangle box for the main manger part (think a box from a bar of soap), and cover it with paper or fabric, or paint.

For baby Jesus, I simply cut two flesh-colored pieces of felt in a peanut shape, sewed them together (you could use glue) and stuffed them with a bit of fiberfill.  I drew a face on him, then swaddled him in square piece of blue felt and glued everything in place:

It works for now.  When M is a bit older, we may do something a bit nicer. :)  You could use a baby Jesus from a Playmobile or Little People set if you have one!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Bob the Builder Game Cards

M loves Bob the Builder… obsessively. It’s really a great show – very positive about working together. It’s full of encouragement and confidence building and even forgiveness when something goes wrong or a mistake is made.

So, in our house the Bob talk is non-stop lately. I remember someone saying you can use something your child is interested in to help them learn about anything.

Well, I made these for M this week… Name cards for some of the trucks with glass pebbles to match the letters with. I found some flat glass ones at Dollar Tree (um, of course!) and wrote the letters on them with permanent marker. M loves it and gave me a list of names for other trucks that he wants me to make. Hee hee.

I also made these game cards: I printed two sets and we used them for a memory game today. He LOVED them and was so excited. I’m going to use them to teach him how to play “Go Fish” too.

Of course they are printable. :) If you have a Bob the Builder lover just click on the image above and you can download the set. There are 17 cards in all. You’ll need to print 2 sets of course. The names of the trucks are printed on there too because moms can’t always remember important things like that! ;)

I want to make some more activity pack type things with these lovely trucks since he’s responded so well to these two. Any ideas??

Have a beautiful day! :)


**UPDATE** The original version of the game cards had an incorrect name for one of the trucks in it. It's been corrected and the new version is now linked up. 11/13/09

Quick Traffic Light for your Little Driver

M was driving his little spiderman truck around the house this morning, and occasionally he would stop with a blank look on his face, totally staring into space. I finally asked him “what are you doing? (meaning, are you OK?)”. He said, “I pushed on the brake and stopped because the light is red.” “Now it’s green again, bye Mommy!” :)

Now, it really is ok to let your kids just do their thing and not interfere, but whipping up a little traffic light for him seemed like such a simple thing and I was in the mood. So… here’s what I did. No pictures for most of it, yet once again. (Sorry!)

• Empty your close-to-empty tissue box
• Take it apart and put it back together inside-out.
• Tape it up with packaging tape.
• Use your coffee cup to draw 3 circles on red, green, and yellow construction paper.
• Tape them to the front (what used to be the inside of the bottom) of your box.
• Give it to your kid.
• Watch him drive up to it and stop. Hope he knows he can pretend the lights change. :)

Have a beautiful day! :)