beginnings

last week, I made playdough for Owen after googling a recipe. This activity led me to learning how to make finger paint, and finally searching all the websites and blogs of the universe to find things for toddlers to do, activities to help them learn and to have fun. So now I am trying them out! Some things work better than others, but I figured that reading the blogs of fellow mamas was so helpful to me that I would put out my own in hopes it can inspire someone else. I'm still new to this so its a lot of trial and error... But I've noticed that these activities seem to interest him much more than his toys. These are some of the things we have done the past few days:


Cooking! This is by far the best activity for Owen--he will spend a ton of time stirring and whisking away in a little pot. I am showing him how to add ingredients, last night it was flour, water and chex, this morning he has been stirring oats, flour, water, kix and frozen peas--we would add a new ingredient when his interest would start to wane. It is a very messy activity, but I am trying to remember that cleanup only takes a minute or two and the activity lasts for much longer. Last night I got him up on a chair and he "helped" me stir dinner (we made a casserole). This was so much fun that he got angry when I tried to take him down and make the rest of dinner myself.




Bean tub! To practice scooping and spooning, to touch and feel and play with. Also very messy, a large tub would be wonderful to prevent mess but we don't have one. In our tub is dried beans, popcorn and penne. He loves to play around with it, the activity was even more fun when we dumped it all out onto a tray and spread the beans around with our hands.






Transferring Sequence chips from a bowl into a muffin tin.


devolved into this....


Here he is doing "the wipers on the bus go swish swish swish"... When we get started on that song he doesn't let me stop! He will either say "again" in toddle-speak or do the actions and we keep going and going and going and going...


And I want to add that all of this stuff added up still doesn't take that much of the day, and is just interspaced here and there. Owen is still mostly doing free play with whatever he finds interesting, mostly just running back and forth in the house.

ok thats it for now , we are off to storytime at the library, I have more to share soon ;)