Easter Basket Counting Game

This is a pretty simple game…. place the baskets in numerical order from 0 – 10 (obviously you can do 0-9 or 1-10 if you prefer), then place the correct number of eggs in each basket.  Here’s what the playing pieces look like:OR place the egg with the correct number of flowers painted on it in each basket.  OR turn it all into a file folder game and do both.

I decided to create a file folder game.
   
I laid the baskets out on the inside of my folder and taped them down with small pieces of double stick tape along the top and bottom edges.

Then I laminated the entire folder with contact paper.  (Note:  I tried adding a pocket for the game pieces, but it just wasn’t working for so many pieces.  I ended up putting them in a zipper baggie which I stapled to the back of the folder.)

Next, I took a very sharp pair of scissors (you could use an exacto knife) and made a slit in each basket.  I had to be careful to go only through the top layer of contact paper and the basket, and not through the file folder itself.  This turned the baskets into little pockets for the eggs.
M counts out the correct number of eggs and then places them in the appropriate basket/pocket: Then, if he wants, he places the flowered eggs in the correct baskets:
Despite the lengthy instructions for putting this together, it actually only took about 1/2 hour.  Let me know if you use it… we are really loving it!

The printables can be downloaded here.

Have a beautiful day! :)

The Art Box – March 22, 2010

 

Whew!  We are home again and slowly getting back to normal.  Our trip to visit my parents began on the 12th and we were back home on the 20th.  My apologies for not responding to emails and comments and those of you who linked up last week… we were cursed with a painfully slow internet connection all week.  I did only what was absolutely necessary online.  Hopefully I will get around to going through a very full inbox sometime this week.  We also brought home some sort of cruddy cold virus, so be patient with me! :)

M colored a lot of pictures for Nama (my mom) and made some collages too, but I just wasn’t up to getting pictures.   I did snap a shot of this cute vase he made:

And this necklace for Auntie M:

Link up your Art Box posts below!

Have a beautiful day! :)

 

Easter Egg Games

Last Easter (pre-blog) M was 2 1/2 and crazy about opening and closing plastic Easter eggs.  He could not stop playing with them.  He was also obsessed with trucks at the time and the idea of flat tires.  Every day he hoped out loud that we would get a flat tire.  Nothing would have made him happier. :)

Well, these loves/obsessions/fantasies of his all came together in my mind one day and I put together a little game for him, which we have been playing all year long.  Seriously.  Our plastic eggs were never put away, and my husband and I now groan whenever M mentions the “flat tire game”.  It is actually pretty fun…  at first.  52 weeks later, it can get a little old. ;)

It has been such a hit that I’ve thought about posting about it before now, but decided to wait until it’s kind of normal to have plastic eggs out and about.  And I’ve changed it up a bit too, with new clip art, which makes it into a brand new game in the mind of a now 3 1/2 old.  (I wish I could share the trucks and flat tires clip art, but I have no idea where I found it!)

This is what the game pieces look like:

And here’s a color cube (with playing instructions) to go with them: (If  your plastic eggs are not these particular colors, there’s a black and white version that you can color in.)

Put the game pieces in the eggs; there are 20 chicks and 5 other animals.  The other 5 animals (cow, elephant, giraffe, zebra, and lion) each get their own egg.  You can give each chick its own egg too, or put several in one egg and just a couple in another, etc.   It depends on how long you want the game to last and how many eggs you have on hand.  Place the filled eggs in a basket and mix them around.

To play, each person takes a turn rolling the color cube then selecting an egg of that color.  Open the egg and see what you have.  If it’s a chick, yay!  You get another turn.  Put the chick in front of you and discard the opened egg.  If it’s an animal whose life doesn’t really begin in an egg, your turn is over and it’s the next person’s turn.

Count the chicks at the end and see who has the most!

We’ve played some variations of this, which are just as much fun.  Those variations are explained in the .pdf file.

It's a good game for counting, learning to take turns, and learning that some animals hatch from eggs and others  are born from mamas.

Click here for the printables.

Have a beautiful and fun day! :)

The Art Box – March 15, 2010

There’s no photo of the art box this week.  I had *someone* standing beside me waiting, not-very-patiently, for me to fill it up.  It had all the usual stuff, plus some little sparkly gel pens from Target’s dollar spot, and a rock.

The rock was the cause of all the excitement surrounding the filling of the art box.  He found this rock last summer and gave it to me (I know, I’m a lucky girl!), and it’s been sitting on the kitchen windowsill ever since.  Someone (if it was your child, let me know!) made some pet rocks for The Art Box not long ago, and it looked like a lot of fun.  M definitely agreed.

 

Then he made a pretty picture with his gel pens.  You can’t see it very well here, but it’s very sparkly.  And we discovered that each one smells like a fruit!  The yummiest is the purple – it smells like grapes. :)

 

  He painted a picture for Daddy: 

 

One for Mommy that was made with his little spiky balls from Walmart:

 

And one for “all of us” (including M):

We are still enjoying the art box, although some weeks are more interesting than others.  I find that if we have a slow week where he’s not feeling artsy, the following week he more than makes up for it.

If your child did any self-directed art, link it up below!  I love seeing all their creations, and all the great supply ideas you moms come up with!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Tot School – March 14, 2010

M is 41 months old.

I’ve been giving this some thought, and in the ongoing struggle to find balance, I’ve decided to limit my tot school posts to every other week, or two per month. We’ll see how it goes… bear with me!
We’ve been taking it very easy on “school” stuff lately. We’ve had beautiful weather and have just been enjoying the magic of being 3 years old. :) Here’s a bit of what we have done…
FINE MOTOR SKILLS:
M just loves cutting pages, so I created some quick shape ones for him. He cuts out the shapes then finds the same sized “blank” spot on the second page. To add a bit of excitement this time I had him use tape instead of a glue stick. He LOVED it! He definitely needs more practice with the tape, so we’ll be doing more of these!
A backpack of lacing buttons, animal shapes, spools, and little discs, from our toy lending library (still loving that we have one of these!).

Placing marbles on the suction cups of the back of a dinosaur-shaped bath-gripper-thingy.
LARGE MOTOR SKILLS:
Playing in the jump-o-lene with cousin S. Do you like his cheesy smile?
A great find at Dollar Tree – a target game with sticky balls so we can work on our aim.
A huge foam USA map mat (the kind that has foam squares that lock together). He stands on Minnesota and jumps to Florida a lot because that’s where Grandma and Grandpa currently are. :)
LITERACY SKILLS:
I set up M’s ABC train cards in the pocket chart, leaving a few out. We went through the ABCs until we came to a blank spot. Then he decided which letter was missing and found it in the pile on the floor. He did great with this, and it was fun to switch the game up a little bit from what we normally do!
SENSORY: The sensory bin has been full of very hard and very soft things. You can mainly see the soft things in the picture – cotton balls and pom poms. There are also small and large glass pebbles, glass marbles, and some plastic crystals, along with a scoop and a couple of small containers.
SCIENCE:
We found this cute book at the library:
Bird Talk, by Ann Jonas. Basically it tells a little bird story using only “memory phrases”. These phrases are what people who study birds use to remember the various sounds that birds make. For example, a chickadee says “chick a dee dee dee”. A robin says, “cheerily cheer-up, cheerily cheer-up”, etc. It’s a cute book and we have a lot of birds around, so we’ve really enjoyed it. I found this fantastic website, enature.com, and we were able to look up and listen to the actual bird sounds… it was a lot of fun and we were surprised at how accurate some of the memory phrases were, and a little bewildered about how they came up with some others. ;) I really need to spend some time exploring that site, it looks like a great resource!!
Go here to see more Tot School posts!
Have a beautiful day! :)

Books of the Week – March 13, 2010

Alistair’s Elephant by Marilyn Sadler was our favorite book this week. Sorry the picture above is blurry. I couldn’t find a picture on Amazon or pretty much anywhere else. It’s a cute book about a serious little boy who has an elephant follow him home from the zoo. All he is worried about is getting rid of this silly elephant so he can get back to his normal, neat and hard-working life. :) M’s favorite part, which he has talked about non-stop, is when Alistair thinks it’s raining and it’s just the elephant showering him with his trunk. Really, how can you not know an elephant is following you home? :) Apparently there are more Alistair books and we are definitely going to look for them.

A good, non-fiction book this week was Close, Closer, Closest by Shelley Rotner. Each page of this book has 3 pictures of an object (strawberries, comic book, peacock feathers and lots more). The first picture is what you normally see, the second picture is a close up and the 3rd picture is a magnification of a small area of the object. It’s really a neat book and M has asked for it several times.
For more good kids’ books, click on the button at the top of the page and check out the blog carnival at Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns!
Have a beautiful day! :)

Craft Time! Cardboard Tube Crocodile

Crafts are back (somewhat)… yay!  I’ve really missed doing these things with M, we just did SO much when he was younger.  I had something artsy or crafty planned every day after naptime.  Hm.  Come to think of it, I miss naptime too…
We started with a paper towel tube, a toilet paper tube, some zig-zag scissors, green paint, googley eyes, glue, and 4 feet outlined on the back of a cereal box:

Cut a slit down the side of the t.p. tube, going about halfway down.  Then wrap it around to form a point at the end and tape:

Put the long tube inside the end of the short tube and tape together:

I drew a triangle on each side of the other end of the long tube:And then helped M cut along the lines with the zig-zag scissors.  Apparently there is no after picture of this.  The zig zags make it look like crocodile teeth.
Paint it all green:

Cut out the feet, paint them green too.  Then glue on the googley eyes and let it dry for the rest of the day:(That’s an old flexible plastic cutting board that we use for messy projects.)      
Then  glue on the feet:
Look, a crocodile!  Paint the inside of his mouth red and the tiny little teeth white IF you feel up to it.  If not, leave it like ours. ;)
We actually read a book about a crocodile around the same time we did this craft – Lyle, Lyle Crocodile, by Bernard Waber.So, I think this means I can link up to the awesome stART carnival (story + art = stART) at Michelle’s wonderful blog!  Yippee!
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! :)