Discovery Bottles – Preschool Play

You can make a variety of discovery bottles for your toddler and  preschooler using rice, glitter, marbles and many more ideas.  Here are some ideas from pre-school play.

Animals hidden in shredded paper. Lots of twisting and turning of the bottle required to get the animals to appear.

Car in rice. We use this one to learn about the different parts of a car.  Can you see the wheels / windows / lights / mirrors etc.

Cut up pipe cleaners.  Use magnetic wands to draw the pipe cleaners up the side of the bottle

More activity bottles…

DIY Make a Lawn Ghosts

Are you looking to add a new outside Halloween decoration?  Then this project is for you.  It is easy and doesn’t cost very much.  Get the whole family involved they will love making Lawn Ghosts in your yard.

Click here for instructions on how to make this project.

Halloween Treat Tubes

These Halloween treat tubes are super easy and fun for kids to make.  Your can use them for party favors, school treats, or just a fun activity for your own family.

Supplies:

• Empty toilet paper rolls
• Tissue Paper
• Ribbon
• Halloween stickers or other decorations
• Treats

Directions:

Fill your toilet paper rolls with candy or other treats.  Wrap the toilet paper roll with the tissue paper leaving 2″ on each side.  Tie each end with ribbon and decorate with stickers or other decorations.  And whalaa your done.

Activity: Simple Toilet Paper Pumpkins

Your kids will have no problem making these cute pumpkins made by craft elf.

Supplies:

• Fabric 22″ square, solid orange or calico
• Green felt 5″ x 2 1/2″
• Craft paper 3″ x 6″ *
• 1 Green pipe cleaner
• Glue stick
• Roll of toilet paper; the full roll not just the tube
• Pencil or round chopstick

* If you don’t have craft paper, use a paper bag

Directions:

1. Lay a 22″ square of orange fabric right side down on you work surface.
2. Place a full roll of toilet paper in the center of your fabric square.
3. Working your way all the way around the toilet paper, neatly tuck the fabric into the center of the toilet paper roll.
4. Cut a 3″ x 6″ piece of craft paper.  Starting at one of the 3″ ends, roll the paper to form a tube which will be you stem.  Run a glue stick across the other 3″ end before you finish rolling the craft paper to secure it in place.
5. Using the leaf pattern provided, trace and cut out one leaf from green felt.
6. Lay the stem on top of the leaf.  Securely wrap one end of the green pipe cleaner around both the stem and the leaf.  Curl the other end of the pipe cleaner by wrapping it around either a pencil or chopstick, then slide the chopstick/pencil out.
7. Place the end of the stem/leaf piece into the center of the roll of toilet paper and your pumpkin is ready to display.

Read More…

Activities: Easy Ghost Decorations

Supplies:

1 1/2″ Styrofoam ball

12″ Square white fabric (old sheets or pillowcase works great)

Black sharpie

Thin orange or black ribbon

White thread or fish line

Directions:

1    Lay the styrofoam ball in the middle of the fabric.

2   Gather up the fabric around the ball

3   Tie the fabric tight with the ribbon

4   Draw eyes with the sharpie

5   Thread the white thread or fish line through the top of the ghost head with a needle or tie it around the neck.

6   Hang the ghost up outside on a tree or outdoor lighting.

Activity Toddler Time: Busy Bag Exchange Part 3

This is part 3 of the Busy Bag Exchange.  Secondstorywindow.net has some great ideas check out their website.

I’m sharing some experiences and ideas from the recent busy bag exchange I posted.

Today I’m sharing the preschool aged busy bags from the exchange.

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Activity Toddler Time: Busy Bag Series Part 2

Now that you have completed part 1 of the busy bag exchange, here is part 2.

Today I’m sharing the 19 activities that were part of our toddler exchange. You can see the rest of the ideas I gathered for the swap on this google doc.

I’m also sharing what my 18 month old daughter, Adelaide, thinks of the activities we’ve tried as well.

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Activity Toddler Time: Hosting a Busy Bag Exchange

I was recently looking for a project to keep my toddler busy while going places and came across this website that hosted a “Busy Bag Exchange”  What a great idea!  I will be making these for sure.  This is part 1 in a 3 part series.

Recently I hosted a busy bag exchange with 20+ of my friends (and their friends). It’s an idea that I’ve seen around the web lately, especially getting inspiration from here and here. I liked the idea that I would work on one project (well two since we hosted two separate swaps) and in return get a variety of activities for my 18 month old daughter.

Here are my tips if you want to host an exchange:

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Activity-Kids: Spooky Pipe Cleaner Spiders

Have some Halloween fun with the kids!  These Spooky Pipe-Cleaner Spiders are easy to make.  Check it out…

Materials needed for Spooky Pipe-Cleaner Spiders:

• Black or silver cap (small or large)
• Craft glue
• Google eyes
• Pipe cleaners
• Scissors

Click Here for Directions for Spooky Pipe-Cleaner Spiders:

Sensory Activity for All Ages: Dish Soap Foam!

This activity is from “Hands on as we grow”.  It’s wonderful, my kids had a blast playing with the foam.  Although I didn’t use food coloring in mine, they still loved it.

I knew when I saw this snow sensory activity from dish soap, from You Pinspire Me, when I collected the ideas for the Snow Collection, that it was something the boys would love and we just had to do it.

Dish Soap Foam!

So easy, your child could, and can, do it!

I put some dish soap in a measuring cup [just squirted a good amount] and added a tad bit of water.
Dumped that in my food processor, and let the kids foam it up!

Ta-Da! Foam!

The longer you do it, the foamier, and thicker, it gets!

Click Here to read more…