Crayon Rubbings with Wikki Stixs

On our recent family trip, the kids became enthralled with crayon rubbings at a few of the museums we visited.  Today, we discovered that you can use the homemade wikki stix we made to do our own crayon rubbings!

Step One-  Form a shape.

Step Two- Put paper on top and rub.

Step Three- Admire!

I love the endless possibilities for which you could use this!  Letter/word formation, shapes, whatever theme or holiday you're studying, free drawing...  There's a lot of potential for hours of fun!

Garden Play Table

Liliana loves to dig in the dirt.  She doesn't have the patience to wait for plants to actually grow, but she likes to pretend.  We had been letting her "garden" in one of our empty flower beds, until we discovered 3 snakes like to hide in the pavers surrounding it.  While we're all about embracing nature, we are soooooooooo not cool with snakes.

So Liliana got her own garden play table.

You're looking at a sand/water table half filled with dirt from the snake infested flower bed* and the other half includes:

• Rocks to use as pavers
• Watering can
• Pumpkin seeds 
• Gardening tools
• Fake flowers
• Pots
• Sticks

*So I'm using a shovel to dig up the dirt to put in the table.  My neighbor sees this and comes outside.

Neighbor- "Are you doing yardwork?!?!"

Me- "No!  I'm making a garden themed sensory table."

Neighbor- "Ohhhhhh.....I was going to say!  You hate doing yard work."

It's true.  I detest yard work.  Sensory tables on the other hand....well, let's just say I'm willing to go near a snake infested flower bed and get dirt under my fingernails for Liliana to have a fun learning experience for a few hours.

She loved it!  LOVED IT!  I'm going to give her a few more days with it like this, and then add some plastic vegetables and a cash register and she can play Farmer's Market.

Hope you all are enjoying the beautiful weather too!!!

Squishy Bags

Dollar Store hair gel in a Ziploc bag...

plus neon food coloring and some glitter (OMG Glitter!!! <3)...

Makes a Squishy Bag.

Put over a white piece of paper for practice drawing letters or just plain sensory fun! 

With Micah, I would say a sound and have him write the corresponding letter (good practice for spelling later).  With Liliana, we just let her play with it.  After they get bored, I'll add in some foam ocean characters for them to squish around.

You could also use two different colors of gel to practice mixing colors or put the bag in the fridge for a bit or heat the gel a bit for a different type of sensory experience.

Listening Activity

I was looking for a listening activity online for a lesson I was teaching at church and had trouble finding anything decent so I made one myself.

The lesson was for 3-12 year olds, so there is a WIDE range of difficulty in the sounds.  Liliana (3) got some easily, Jeremy (30) missed a few...so I'd call this good for all ages.  Pause at the white screens if you need more time to think.



Learning to listen closely is a skill that doesn't come naturally for little ones...or some grown ups ;-) but is an important foundation for all other learning!  Have fun!

ABC Rice Hunt

1.  Take Rainbow Rice (or use your sandbox if you don't have a rice tub.)
2.  Hide in foam letters from a Dollar Tree puzzle.
3.  Send your child on a letter hunt, finding the letters and putting them back into the puzzle.

This easy and cheap activity is not only a great sensory experience, but it also develops letter recognition and spatial sense!  Liliana was saying things like, "Micah- I found a M for you!" and "Only 4 more letters left to find."  Puzzles are not her strongest activity because she doesn't have the attention span for them, so combining it with a sensory activity kept her focused.  She hid/found them all 3 times!!!  On a funny note- She found the letter b and told me "I found a 'CK-CK-CK' letter T for Anna!"  Hmmm...close sweetheart.

Pouring Practice

Not every project I do with the kids is a success and some are disasters!  I was going to post today about making gingerbread houses from scratch, but that project failed.  Miserably.  The gingerbread itself turned out fine, but the icing was way runny and I realized that I had tossed out all the candy laying around our house, so we were going to have to decorate with dried fruit.  We gave up.

But we did have fun doing the part we did!

So instead, we worked on our pouring skills today.  Liliana loves to help herself to milk and juice, but she could use a little practice with it.  Our kitchen has carpet in it and she once poured an entire gallon of orange juice on the floor and then sweetly said "Oops!  I missed." 

We had the kiddy pool in our house already from the rainbow rice, but you could easily do this in the bathtub.  I grabbed a bunch of stuff from our kitchen and recycling bin.

I put water in the pitcher, and she set right to work. 

She did GREAT!!!  So well that I was thinking to myself maybe we should let her pour her own drinks more often!

Then she did not so great.

A good half of that missed.  And then....well....I saw this coming, which is why she was in her swimsuit.

She ended up splashing around for awhile until she got cold, and then her barbies took a turn going for a swim.  I will definitely be doing this again with her though because it kept her thoroughly entertained, was really great practice, and actually wasn't too difficult to clean up. 

Success!

Rainbow Rice

Boys and girls are very different.  This isn't a new realization to me by any means.  :-P  But it was sooooo evidenced by today's activity.  Micah and I made a batch of rainbow rice last night (instructions below).  So I put out the rice in a tub for him to play with while I showered (Liliana was at preschool)....I come downstairs and he's using the kid sized pots and pans I had given him as "jails" for the "bad guy rice."  And the toy whisk was a "super spinner that sucked everyone into the vortex."  He went on for 15 minutes about the purpose of the toy spatula in the fight against evil but it all went totally over my head.  Silly me!  I thought he would have used the pans to bake pretend cupcakes.

(Update-  Oh way too funny!  Liliana just got home from preschool and went straight to the rainbow rice for the first time and was playing really nice, and I asked her what she was doing and she said, "I'm making a cake!"  Called it.)

So, Rainbow Rice.

It's super easy to dye rice and pasta and then way fun to use it for art projects and sensory tables! 

Get the BIG bag of rice from Sam's.  We got the 25 lb. one for $10 and dyed about half of it.  It seemed like a ton when we were doing it, but I'm going to go ahead and do the other half now because once it's poured into a tub, it really isn't much.

Micah was so totally pumped about digging his hands into the rice!

Scoop into ziplock bags.  Add food coloring (maybe like 7-10 drops) and a splash of rubbing alcohol.

Shake.

Lay out to dry.

Done!

The rubbing alcohol evaporates making the rice/pasta safe to play with...but while drying, your house will smell like your alcoholic Uncle Herb is visiting and on a bender.  Just a warning, so you don't decide to do this on the day your church Bible study is meeting in your home or anything.  ;-)  The scent goes away really quickly.

A note about sensory tubs-  You can use ANYTHING for a sensory table.  It doesn't have to be elaborate.  Put some water/rice/sand/playdough/beans....not all at the same time :-)....in any sort of container and you've got a sensory tub.  Our rule is that the kids have to sit in the kiddy pool while they play, so that helps contain the mess.  I also try to start out with just the plain filler (rainbow rice in this case)...then after they get bored running their hands through it, etc. I add in something new (pots and pans).  Later, I'll switch out the pots and pans for sand toy scoops, etc. to keep them interested as long as possible before switching to a different filler.

There is a ton of research about how important sensory activities are for kids!  Sometime I'll do a post about it because Liliana is a total "sensory-seeker" and I've been doing a lot of reading on sensory disorders and activities....but in the meantime, get creative and have fun!!!