I'm a little behind, but have been wanting to share what we did for Mother's Day this year! I think the kids really had a lot of fun with it, and so did I! Together as a group, we mixed up our own bath salts to give to mom... in both lavender and chocolate scents! I got the "recipe" here. Whether making them or using them, bath salts are a great sensory activity for kids! A great texture, and so many scent possibilities! We also made our own soaps. The kids loaded a bowl full of glycerin soap bars, and I melted them down in the microwave. Then they added lavender scent and the colors of their choice. After it had cooled and set, the really fun part started! The kids used cookie cutters, a wood block, and a hammer to pound out flower and leaf shaped soaps! I hope the moms enjoy their gifts as much as we enjoyed the process of making them! :)
 Color, color, color! The two weeks leading up to St. Patrick's Day were filled with all the colors of the rainbow around here. We did lots of painting and color mixing (I provided only the primary colors and we discovered what happens when they mix together!) to make a giant rainbow, in hopes that it might bring a leprechaun to hide his gold here!
 And it worked! :) We had a mischievous leprechaun stop by and turn our milk green, and he even turned the toilet water green! He also left us some fun surprises: a "pot of rainbow" and some green glow bracelets! He left a note, so we learned that his name is Sneaky O'Malley!
 We had lots of other color fun too, like our baking soda and vinegar play, with red jell-o powder added in. An idea that came from Footsteps In Growing Daycare that we had a lot of fun with. When the kids were all done playing with the bubbling reaction, we used the resulting mush to paint with. It left an interesting textured product that smelled wonderful! :)
 We also had fun with flubber, and a new-to-us sensory material: Rainbow dough. We have made cloud dough before -- it consists of flour and baby oil. Since the only moisture comes from the oil, when we added colors one at a time, they didn't mix together but stayed separate as we played to become rainbow dough! It is shown here after we had only added green, but Play Counts has some fun pictures of the dough with all colors added.
We had fun with rainbow strips of paper available in the art area all week,
 ...and our new rainbow sensory bottles! We also learned a couple of new songs that you may have been hearing at home! If not, ask the kids to sing you the Rainbow song, or the Leprechaun song that they learned!
 We even got to EAT a rainbow with these colorful rainbow fruit kabobs and explore new and fun green foods, like avocado.
 We worked together to build a tape rainbow and then used it as the base for our rainbow color scavenger hunt! Some of the kids are really getting good at ripping tape off the rolls....such HARD work for little fingers! But they are very motivated to learn how, so they work, work, work at it!
We had so much fun learning and playing with colors!
In anticipation of St. Patrick's Day, we have begun talking about leprechauns and rainbows and have decided to try to gather as much rainbow color as we can over the next two weeks so that maybe a leprechaun will come here to hide or find his gold! :) We have started with the color red, so today the kids really wanted to make RED flubber (they like to call it "slime"). We added in some pieces of red yarn and some cups and spoons and the kids spent the better part of the morning building a wide variety of "leprechaun traps" as they told stories of what they would like to do if they ever meet a leprechaun. :)
We had so much fun last week celebrating Dr. Seuss's birthday! For the past couple of years, I think it has been the favorite "holiday" around here! This year I brought out some old favorites (like painting with our feet, and then reading the Foot Book) as well as some new activities, art projects, and fun foods. The kids had fun using tissue paper scraps to fill in their Red fish & Blue fish, and loved dipping cotton balls into colored water to make colorful Truffula tree-tops! In addition to the fun art projects, we enjoyed some great Dr. Seuss themed games and activities, too. The kids did some impressive building and patterning with our new Cat In the Hat foam stacking blocks, sharpened their fine-motor skills with some Tuffula tree beading, and even got to Hop on Pop! Of course we can't celebrate Dr. Seuss without having some Green Eggs & Ham, but we also had fun with lots of other Dr. Seuss themed meals and snacks. One of their favorites was the fish cracker graphing along with some Pink Ink Drink (also from One fish, Two fish, Red fish, Blue fish). We had colorful Lorax pasta with broccoli and asparagus "trees" and a blue alfredo river, played with Brown Bar-ba-loot bears and built our own Truffula trees (from the Lorax) using pretzel sticks and mini colored marshmallows, and at the suggestion of one of the kids, we even had a birthday cake for Dr. Seuss! We enjoyed celebrating Dr. Seuss once again and are now looking forward to lots of rainbow fun in the next couple of weeks, building up to St. Patrick's Day!
 Our Valentine "Heart Hop" game turned out to be an even bigger hit than I could have predicted! I have decided that I might just have to choose other shapes and ALWAYS have numbered shapes taped to my floor! :) I placed the hearts on the floor in the hallway that connects our toy room to the rest of the house, so every time the kids took that path, they were counting as they went! We used them for various follow-the-directions type of games, but even before I led them in any of that, the kids were hopping, jumping, counting (forwards AND backwards), and even organizing and communicating their own games. They also were able to reason that if this heart shows the number 7, and has 7 dots on it, then maybe that word there says "seven!"
And, the hearts were a great way to get out some of that BIG energy that is always so abundant on holiday party days!
We also had lots of fun with our themed breakfast and lunch, Valentine balloon play, painting, decorating Valentine treat bags (which led to a puppet-making session and puppet show!), and the highlight of course, passing out the Valentines they had brought for their friends.
Since tomorrow is Groundhog Day, today we had some fun exploring light and shadows... a great way to make the events of the day relevant to kids! First we used our hole-punches to punch holes in some cardboard tubes... Just look at how hard these little hand muscles (which need to be built up and exercised in order to be ready for writing) are being worked! Next, we darkened the toy room, passed out some flashlights and got to work! :)
We had lots of fun experimenting with candy canes today! Before we could get started experimenting (or eating!), we had to use our fine motor/pre-writing muscles to open up the individually wrapped candy canes! And while we unwrapped, we watched this short video about how candy canes are made. We talked about what happens to a candy cane when we suck on it...though we had to really think about it since most of the kids didn't have the patience not to chew them! Then we talked about what we thought would happen to the candy canes when we put them in each of our four bowls: one with ice water, one with warm water, one with boiling water, and one with vinegar. The kids noticed right away that the candy canes in the hot water turned the water red quickly. The candy dissolved in the warm water next, with slower results in the cold water and the vinegar. Next, I pulled out some baking soda and we added that to the bowl of vinegar. We got the exciting fizzy reaction we are used to from that fun combination, but other than that it didn't do much to the candy. Next, I asked the kids what they thought might happen if we put some candy canes into the oven. "They would get hot!", "They will get bigger." (I'm sure that guess comes from watching baked goods rise in the oven, so there was some great thinking going on there!) So, we tried it and the answer is: they get bendy! :) We put our mini candy canes in at 225* for about 8 minutes and when they came out, if we moved slowly and carefully, we could bend them into different shapes! We had lots of fun playing with our candy today! :)
Today we had fun decorating (and re-decorating!) our new felt Christmas tree! The kids used pieces of felt that I had cut into the shapes of ball ornaments, light bulbs, and stars and took turns making their tree beautiful! :)
I'm back! The new baby and I are, so far, adjusting well to merging our days with all the other kids... I'm glad to report that the first couple of days back have gone really well!
Today the kids made some festive trees using strips of green paper cut to varying lengths. It was great practice using the pre-math skill of judging biggest to smallest, as they had to compare the rectangular strips to get them in the right order to make a tree shape. They also had to use their visual-spacial and visual planning skills to lay the strips in a way that would allow them to fit the whole tree onto their paper. Of course, for the younger ones we didn't worry so much about those things, and instead let them focus on the fine motor skills of picking up the papers, applying glue, and placing them down to make a much more "abstract" tree! :) We then placed a foil star sticker at the top and used some Q-tips dipped in white paint to add some snowflakes!
I took inspiration from Denita at Play Counts and we made a new batch of slime in preparation for Halloween! We made this batch black, and added to it some wiggle eyes and creepy crawly bugs! Eventually we added some cups that the kids used to drape the slime over and make monsters!
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