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MATERIALS:
- One sheet of felt – make sure it’s the regular kind, not the stiff type. You want to choose a color that is different from the color of the shapes you intend to use with the board
- File folder
- Glue stick
STEPS:
- Trim the felt to fit inside the file folder
- Cover the back of the felt with glue using the glue stick. If you’re using liquid glue, spread it very thinly – otherwise it will soak through the felt and make it so that felt shapes don’t stick as well
- attach felt to inside of file folder
- Enjoy :)
Emma’s new travel felt board with a “castle” created using some of the geometric shapes from these activities.
And with her dress-up bear – the pattern for the bear is here, and winter outfits are here.
I’ve seen several “I Spy” activities for toddlers across the blogosphere recently. Here are some of my favorites:
Have an “I Spy” craft on your blog that I missed? Please link to it in the comments – I’d love to see it!
I received this first award from sunnydaytodaymama, a blog where I always enjoy reading about “life with a sunny boy”. Sunnymama writes posts about daily life, activities she and her son do together, things they make, and other aspects of everyday life with with a toddler.
Lemons to Lemonade award rules:
- Put the logo on your blog or post.
- Nominate at least 10 blogs that show great attitude or
gratitude.
- Link to your nominees within your post.
- Let the nominees know that they have received this award by commenting on their blog.
- Share the love and link to the person from who you received your award.
This second award was kindly given to me by Chronicle of an Infant Bibliophile. If you have a book-loving toddler in your house – or if you are a book-loving parent of a toddler, you will love this site, which is full of “Reviews from a baby bookworm…and his crafty mama”.
 I love your blog rules:
- Add the logo of the award to your blog
- Add a link to the person who awarded it to you
- Nominate at least 7 other blogs
- Add links to those blogs on your blog
- Leave a message for your nominees on their blogs!
I spent a ridiculous amount of time unsuccessfully compiling a list of blogs for these two awards, so here’s what I’m doing. If I have visited your blog and left you a comment, it means I love your blog and your attitude, which means you deserve both of these awards. Consider them hereby awarded.
If I have never commented on your blog and you think I would like it, leave me a comment, and I’ll come visit sometime in the next week.
Emma is really into line drawings right now. She drew these pictures on some construction paper, and we taped them together to create this beautiful exhibition.
These puppets are based off of this free pattern. I printed the pattern half-size so that it would fit tiny toddler hands, and then made a few minor changes (I shortened the white part and made the main body a bit thinner). They were super easy to put together – I hand-stitched the eyes and beak, and then used my sewing machine to finish the rest super quickly. You could even glue on the eyes, nose, and white body – but only if your children don’t try to pull any glued objects apart the way mine do.
I’m not sure if it’s because of my changes or because I used pink and blue felt instead of black (Emma’s request), but these wound up looking like a cross between penguins and snowmen to me…what do you think?
Thankfully, their lack of authenticity doesn’t make my children love them any less.
My son has a shape sorter, but he doesn’t quite get the shape sorting concept yet. This means that he gets very frustrated when he plays with it on his own and can’t get the circle to fit through the square hole. So when a box of oranges from Costco came in a box with square holes in the top, I knew immediately what we should do with it after eating the oranges.
Johnny and Emma both had a great time seeing which toys fit through the holes and which ones did not. Johnny also tried fitting his leg through, but managed to get unstuck all on his own. I don’t know why Emma insisted on wearing her coat (upside down) for the entire activity.
Haven’t got an orange box? Kleenex boxes work well for smaller toys, or you can always cut holes in the lid of a shoebox (Infant Bibliophile blogged about using a shoebox to make a shape sorter here)
I was feeding Johnny breakfast this morning while Emma cut up strips of paper at the dining room table. At one point she made a comment about Johnny needing a haircut, but I didn’t think much of it since he was sitting with me.
Then I looked over to see her holding several long strands of her own hair in her hand! So much for allowing semi-supervised scissor time! Thankfully, the damage was minimal – I couldn’t even get a picture that captured it properly.
We had a wee discussion about how only grown-ups should cut hair, using special hair-cutting scissors…
Laura Vaccaro Seeger’s Lemons Are Not Red is the first-ever book to get Daddy approval in our house. I love the textured colors in this book, and the focus on colors in nature. I would LOVE to see this book released as a super-durable board book – the cutouts have taken some abuse from my fifteen-month-old son. I’ve seen this book featured on a few other blogs recently; it seems to be a favorite in many households.
Come Back, Cat, written by Joan L. Nodset and illustrated by Steven Kellogg, is Emma’s pick for the week. She is fascinated by this story of a little girl learning how to be friends with a cat, and “reads” the story to herself nearly every day. This is a great book for teaching toddlers how to interact with pets.
Little Quack, written by Lauren Thompson and illustrated by Derek Anderson, is another of Emma’s favorite books. Discussing how Little Quack overcame his fear of swimming has helped Emma overcome a few of her own fears. Derek Anderson’s ducklings are darling, and this is a fun book to read with a child who is learning counting or basic addition and subtraction.
I love the expressive illustrations in Very Hairy Bear, written by Alice Schertle and illustrated by Matt Phelan. This book is a great book for seasons as we see the bear’s life throughout the year.
MATERIALS:
STEPS:
1) Cut cardstock into thirds.
2) Fold in half.
3) Give cards to toddler to decorate.
4) Once your child has decorated the outside of the card, have them tell you what to write on the inside and send the card off to its intended recipient.
Here are three of Emma’s masterpieces. She insists on writing “IOIOIOIOIO” on everything, with the occasional “E”, “L”, and “T” thrown in for variety.
We made our first cards like this as thank you notes for gifts from Emma’s birthday party. She fell in love with the activity, so we’ve done it several times since. In fact, I’ve learned to be careful how many cards I cut out, because she won’t stop until she’s decorated every card I cut for her. The other night she literally fell asleep while decorating a card, because she couldn’t rest until all of her cards were decorated…
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