Ellie's Handiwork

We did some hand art last week for Thanksgiving. The turkey card is obviously holiday specific, but I really like the thank you cards for any occasion! Plus, Eliana had a great time stamping with her hand! I just gave her a blank sheet of white cardstock and let her go crazy with the stamp pad and her hand, and after she was done I cut the sheet in half, then folded those in half to form two cards and stamped thank you across the front. I think they turned out really cute!

Fun with socks...

What do you do when you've lost the mate to a pair of socks? You put it on your hand a play with it! I had great ambitions of decorating the socks with eyes and hair and roll-out felt tongues, but the truth is that Ellie is just as happy with a plain old sock for a puppet as she would be with a decorated one! Easier for me, too! So instead of throwing away the spare socks immediately, why not have a little fun with them first?

Daily Activity Guide

I am organizing the box of activities I have for Ellie right now, so I figured it might be a good idea to write down what activities work well for each day. Then when I am at a loss for an activity to do I will have a reference guide to look at.

Musical Monday

• Kindermusik (September through December)
• Recorder*
• Piano
• Guitar
• Singing songs and doing motions
• Tapping out rhythms
  

Tactile Tuesday

• Playdough
• Match the Bead sorting game*
• Clip the Square sorting game*
• Shape matching*
• Puzzles
  

Wordy Wednesday

• Alpha spoons*
• Alphabet puzzle*
• Tracing letters on the alphabet placemat*
• Letter puzzles*
• Starfall
• Alphabet coloring pages (print from starfall)
• Puzzle Number Shapes
• Word flashcards*
• Read books
  

Theatrical Thursday

• Children's Museum playgroup
• Dress up
• Puppets
• Little People

Fun Friday

• Tissue Paper Collage*
• Paint
• Coloring pages*

Starfall

I came across this website a while back and told Leif about it. He uses it with Ellie. As I don't really use the computer with her, I had sort of forgotten all about it. But I had a bit of renewed interest today and went poking around a bit and discovered that you can print out worksheets for the activities as well! Ellie is VERY interested in letters and coloring right now, so this might be a good way to combine the two, and without a lot of expense!

Perhaps I'll print off a few and keep them in the little school desk I just got at a garage sale. She seems to think sitting at the desk is fun and she keeps asking to color while she's there, so that might be a good way to work on her letters while she colors.

Rainy Day Fun

Up until a few days ago, we have had a very rainy few weeks! We got all geared up for summer and got Eliana a big inflatable pool for the yard and then it turned dreary out. So to make the best of the situation (and provide a little diversion for indoor play after being cooped up for so long!) here's what we did:

We blew up the pool in the basement!! It's on a mat so it is less likely to get scratched along the floor, and the mat also provides a softer floor for little knees and hands to crawl on in the pool! We didn't, obviously, want to fill the pool with water right there in our basement, so we filled the top section with the next best thing for indoor play:

Balls!! We made Eliana her very own little ball pit! She thinks it's great and played in it all afternoon, affording me a little time to get things done without her whining that we couldn't play outside because it was raining. She had a blast racing the balls down the slide...

... and then retrieving them...

And now that I know we can do this indoors, we have a winter activity just waiting for us once the summer sun is long gone! I'm excited to have another activity to pull out for her and think I'll use that basement corner as a place to rotate activities every week or so once we're inside more due to weather. Plus, it means I can use the pool all year long, which makes it a little more cost effective, and that is nice.

(By the way, if you're going to do this, I highly recommend using a vacuum that can be put on reverse to blow up the pool. I used my Kirby to do that and it still took a good long time, so I can only imagine how long it would have taken if I tried to blow it up myself! Eek!)

Activity Review: White Mud

Do you remember when I said I found that list of toddler activities from the Family Fun website? Well, we tried one of them, so I figure I should let you know how it went! One day last week, while I was sick, I needed an activity that would keep Ellie busy, but wasn't TV. So we made "White Mud."It was fun, really. We sat on the bed and she had fun tearing up a roll of toilet paper and putting it in the bowl. She really likes destroying things right now, so it was fun for her to be ALLOWED to tear something up for once.

Once we had the right amount of toilet paper torn into bits and put in a bowl, I shaved a bar of ivory soap into the tp. If you're not familiar with Ivory soap, it's really soft, so you can just shave it with a regular old table knife, like I did. Easy peasy. Then I added the right amount of water, as per the directions, and mixed away. I didn't really have Ellie help with the mixing part, which was just as well since she was still having so much fun tearing up the rest of a roll of toilet paper.

Even after I mixed everything up, I still felt like it was too soggy, so I squeezed the excess water out of the mixture into the sink. When I got done, this is what our "White Mud" looked like:

It sort of reminds me of cauliflower. Yuck. But it smells like Ivory soap, so that's okay. Now for the real test...

I gave some to Ellie at the kitchen table, though the article recommends using it outside. Since I was sick and wanted to be in bed, outside wasn't really an option for us. At first Ellie wasn't sure what to think of it.

She sort of poked at it a bit before she finally picked some up and started squishing it about. Then it was fun.

She has since asked to play with it a couple times and I am happy to let her. It doesn't require much cleanup, it doesn't stain her clothes, it doesn't get ground into the carpet... really, as far as dough goes, it's great! You can't really make anything with it, other than little snowmen, but she doesn't really care about that right now, so it's great for sensory play!