The Joyful Keeper: activities

Showing posts with label activities. Show all posts

Tuesday, 15 July 2014

Tots on a Tuesday {counting and lacing with bottle tops}

For a while now, I have been collecting lids from milk bottles, and from milk cartons and baby food pouches. They just looked so USEFUL.

Do you not find yourself doing that? Thinking "I can't throw that away, I'm sure I could use it for something?". Someone else in this house is worse than me, and often the things HAVE been useful, many moons later, and for a random variety of things.

Call me Madame Cholet and be done with it.

You don't know what I'm talking about?

Well, if you have a tot, let them enjoy this.

Back to my lids.

Here in the UK there are generally 4 different lid colours on milk cartons, depending on the type of milk. Blue is full fat, green is semi-skimmed and red is skimmed. (In the US, you call them all different things). There is also a brand that has a purple lid, and one shop sells it with an orange lid. I have quite a lot of them, and was sure I could use them.

I finally settled upon a good use, whilst I have been finding fun ways to do counting, as well as working on fine motor skills. I thought they would make a super duper lacing "bead"!

I have a tool, for punchiing holes - it's a craft tool, but you can easily find them online.

I first of all punched a hole in the centre of each lid. You want to do this on a self-healing mat, or on a solid chopping board that you don't mind having little circles all over!

I wanted to make this an activity where I could check that they had done it right, so I made some laminated cards with numbers on them, and then punched a hole in the bottom of them.

I then got some yarn, and tied a length onto the bottom of each card. If you get a piece of tape, and wrap it around the end of the piece of yarn, it makes it like a lace, and easier to thread through a hole. Of course, I had to make the yarn match the number on each card. Pretty rainbows!

This is me taping the bottoms of the yarn - Elijah snapped the picture!

Once all the preparation was done, I got them to line the cards up in numerical order.

This is Elijah lining them up, all very neatly and precisely, as is his way!

Then, they got busy lacing the lids onto the yarn - the right number of lids for the number, on the "lace".

(Look at that concentration!!)

This is Simeon, with his own lids to play with! Getting a non-blurry photo of this boy is HARD - he's always on the move!

This is Elijah ~~trying out for the British Skydiving Team~~ showing off his handiwork!

He does love to pose with any work he does!

Don't they look pretty?

They had great fun doing this, and it added another way to reinforce recognising numbers, ordering numbers, hand-eye co-ordination, and fine motor control. You could do the numbers and limit them to being the colours of the bottle lids, and then you would have a colour matching activity, too!

If you don't have a printer and laminator, you could easily do this with pieces of card, and some coloured pens.

Personally, I love my laminator. Sad, but true!

Oh, and here's how I store my activities.

Little zip-lock bags, which I bought from Amazon.

So, there you have it. My "wombling" tendencies have turned my milk bottle lids into a useful tool!

Oh, and just as an aside...

Someone's on the up and up - now the fun really begins! Another "tot" on her feet!

Tuesday, 27 May 2014

Tots on a Tuesday {play dough shape mat}

Today, I found a super duper activity for my tots to do. I realised, recently, that Elijah loves playing with any left over icing I have (the fondant variety) when I have been cake making. He sits for ages playing with it, making all sorts of little creations.

When I came across an idea, based on play dough, I realised he was going to LOVE it.

Better still, to capture MY interest, it included BUTTONS!

My interest is always captures by activities with the potential of teaching about mutliple concepts, and this one totally fit the bill.

It involved using a printable, from Learning 4 Kids, which you can find here.

First of all, ELijah had a turn doing it. I thought he did a really great job, filling in the shape of the bear. Then he had fun putting buttons on, too. We talked about what colours they were, how many, which colour there were more of, what size they all were, and how many holes were in the buttons.

It's funny, because they ALL appeared at various points, wanting to play with the play-doh!

This was Elijah's completed bear (it did end up having "claws" added, after the camera was gone - a manly bear! )

ELijah "posing"

THen, Simeon had a go. He REALLY loved playing with it, and tried very intently to fill in his shape.

I thought this was a very admirable attempt, for a 2 year old!

His big brother (erm, the 12 year old) helped him a bit, then he added some buttons, too (Simeon, that is.)

Would you just look at the level of concentration?! He enjoyed trying to count as he stuck them on, and although the buttons DID end up on the floor later, they all had fun with it.

I think that the lady who shared the free printable used them for alphabet themes, this one being "b". I was thinking, however, that I could print other shapes of my own, and make more colours of play-doh, to have some variety.

This is one we will being doing again, for SURE! Fun had, all round!

Oh, the recipe I used for playdoh was from The Imagination Tree, but I missed out the Cream of Tartar, as I didn't have any! I could have done with more food colouring, as it didn't come out very blue (yes, that's supposed to be blue...). . I know for next time. Cuz, there's gonna be a next time!

Tuesday, 6 May 2014

Tots on a Tuesday {I-Spy jars, with a writing prompt idea thrown in for free..}

Today, I want to share with you something I made, as per the request of my lovely friend, Christine.

It's an "I-Spy" jar.

The principle behind it, is to have your children say what they can find in the jar. The jar is filled with rice, along with little objects, hidden inside. I also dug out some glitter and added it in, because it made it more fun! Crucially, you super-glue the lid on, so make sure everything you want is in there.

No super-glue = mega-mess alert...

I had tremendous fun, picking up all the random odds and ends my children keep littering the floor with, and spiriting them away for using in my I-Spy jar! Seriously, I was like some kind of crazed woman, who, instead of finding things and thinking "that's going in the bin", thinking "ooooh, I could put that in the I-Spy jar"!! I collected so many that I have enough to make more than one jar. Except, well, I don't have another jar at the moment. I have, in the waiting, a one-legged Playmobil person, a tiny platypus from a Kinder egg, and a wooden seagull, along with other flotsam and jetsam!

I decided to theme the jar - this one is "colours". I tried to put in something of each colour, for them to find.

Here's a few of the things I put in.

There are loads of ways you could use this. You could give clues "I spy with my little eye, something that's like a rabbit's tail". That would be the white pom-pom in there. Or, "I spy with my little eye, something round, the same colour as a carrot".

I plan to make a little "tick chart" with all the items in there, listed, with a check box beside each one. I will print, and laminate, so they can use dry-erase markers on there. Then, it will help with motor skills, learning to tick them off the list.

You could do shapes, vehicles, numbers, animals - anything you can find in "mini" form, you can put in there! Little, laminated pictures, could also work, making it more of a challenge, because they would need to be facing the right way to see what's on them!

I also thought of a writing prompt idea, for older children. You could have a jar each with nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs. The child shakes each jar, and the first word he finds in each one, is used as the basis for a story. Alternatively, you could have a jar each with places, people and objects, again, as a story writing prompt. You could simplify it further for younger children, and have them use one or more of the jars as a sentence prompt. You could have a lot of fun making up silly sentences! I know, from experience, that, when it comes to writing, having a fun element can help inspire a child, no end! For younger children, you could also have a jar for each of the word type categories, and they could add new words to them, as they think of them, so they are contributing to the sentence building. If you do this, then you can't super-glue the lid, so you would have to make sure they don't take the lid off, or put it on wrong, or you could have one, big mega-mess!

If you have any other suggestions for an I-Spy jar, or something similar, please share them with us!