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Month: August 2013

Honey Bee Games and Activities Inspired by The Many Adventures of Winnie The Pooh

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We used our honey bees in a fine motor game where we matched the number of bees to the number on a honey pot.  The pinching motion to open the clothes pin is great for strengthening the muscles in little hands.  It really develops the arches of the hands and allows the child to improve his or her tripod grasp and handwriting.  This was a great activity for Little Guy (age 4), who is learning one-to-one correspondence in counting and number awareness. 

When we were given the opportunity to work on a Winnie The Pooh post, the three of us Aunts were SO excited!  We (and our kids) are huge fans of Pooh Bear and all of his friends. 
 
Did you watch this video as a child like we did?  You might remember the catchy songs and the cute and cuddly friends.  Now you can experience again (and with your own children), the friendships, imagination, and adventure of the Hundred Acre Woods when all of your favorite characters come alive in this timeless motion picture.
My kids were delighted with the bee scene in the movie, when Winnie The Pooh is trying his hardest to stop the “rumbly in his tumbly” with a little honey.  Little Guy has been singing this tune over and over again.  We decided to make some honey bee games and activities to go along with this scene.  We love to encourage fine motor, gross motor, and sensory development with our kid’s activities and crafts, and had to include those skills here, too!
I created honey bee pinch pins that were perfect for our little screening party and could be used in so many ways.
Materials: clothes pins, yellow and black pipe cleaners, googly eyes, wax paper, hot glue gun and glue.
Directions: 1. Pinch together one black and one yellow pipe cleaner.  Wrap these around the end of a clothes pin.  We used about half of each color pipe cleaner and cut the excess off.

2. Cut wings from wax paper.  Use the hot glue gun to glue the wings to the backs of the bees. 

3.  Hot glue the googly eyes to the front of the bee.  Your bee is now ready for play!

Honey Bee Fine Motor Game

We used our honey bees in a fine motor game where we matched the number of bees to the number on a honey pot.  The pinching motion to open the clothes pin is great for strengthening the muscles in little hands.  It really develops the arches of the hands and allows the child to improve his or her tripod grasp and handwriting.  This was a great activity for Little Guy (age 4), who is learning one-to-one correspondence in counting and number awareness. 

Honey Bee Gross Motor Activity

The honey pots were used again when we played a faster paced gross motor game, encouraging the kids to use their large muscle groups.  This time, I spread the honey pots out all over our living room floor.  I called out a number and the kids would have to race off to find the honey pot with that number.  Once they found their honey pot, they then had to run over to a large bee hive that we created from a recycled snack container and crepe paper.  I asked them to count out the number of bees to match the number on their honey pot, and drop them into the large bee hive.  To make it harder for my preschooler and kindergartener, I had them close their eyes.  This gross motor activity was just what they needed to get some energy out on a rainy afternoon!  As a bonus, they were developing their eye-hand coordination, and visual scanning skills as they scanned for numbers and counted out the bees.  They have already asked to play this game again!  This would be such a fun game for a Winnie The Pooh themed birthday party…and I have two little ones to attest for it being fun!

Honey Bee Sensory Play

Our honey bees were really loved when they were added into a themed sensory bin.  I poured in a bag of dried split peas, a few fake flower petals, and a handful of plastic flower beads for fun sensory exploration.  A sensory bin is such a great way to explore different textures, manipulate small objects, and develop language with little ones.  My kids loved using the honey bees to pinch the flower petals and buzzzzz around, only to drop the petal back into the bin.  This sensory bin stayed out in our dining room for a few days and was played with quite often!

Honey Bee Treat

We had such a great time watching The Adventures of Winnie The Pooh and then playing all of our honey bee games and activities, that we worked up an appetite.  I threw together a quick bee hive snack made from a marshmallow and melted butterscotch chips.  This was the perfect ending to a fun day.  If you are planning a Winnie The Pooh party or movie play date, I hope you will use some of our ideas!

Fairy Small World

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Wooden birdhouse decorated with flowers, glitter, and beads, in a sandbox with small steps made from pebbles. Text reads fairy small world

This fairy small world activity is an old one on our blog, but do you believe we still have the small world fairy house that we made many moons ago? I love that the small world fairy garden was a sensory bin activity using materials we had around the home, including our sand box! This is a great small world play idea for occupational therapy, because you can foster the skills needed by each child: fine motor, sensory, self-regulation, etc.

Using your sandbox as a space for a fairy small world is such an easy sensory bin idea. The dramatic play benefits that happens in a miniature fairy world is unlimited, especially when you use small things like sticks to create paths, or rocks to make fairy furniture.

How to make a Fairy Small World

While we used our sandbox for the sensory space, you could recreate a fairy world of your own in any sensory bin, around the base of a tree, or even in a potted plant. Here are sensory bin base ideas to get you started, if you go that route.

Once you have your place space in mind, you can gather other items to create a fairy small world:

  • Miniature house (this can be anything from a DIY fairy house made of leaves, bark, and seashells, to a store-bought fairy house)
  • Small items: feathers, leaves, gems, pebbles, sticks, acorns, etc.
  • Nature items: plants, pieces of bark, twigs, rocks, etc.

Create your fairy small world!

Set up your space and start playing. The possibilities are endless, and depending on your play space, you can make the fairy small world as elaborate or as simple as you like. We went simple and fun with our sandbox fairy neighborhood.

 
 
We made these sweet little fairy houses at Big Sister’s Tinkerbell Fairy Birthday party.  You can read the post and all of the party details here.  The fairy houses have been decorating our porch table since the party and involved in lots of pretend play activities.

 

 
 
Big Sister had the fairy houses in the sandbox one afternoon while the younger kids napped. 
 
She had her La La Loopsy dolls all set up with a neighborhood and all kinds of fun going on.
 

 

I added a few stones for sidewalks and Big Sister thought we needed more decorations added. 
We pulled a few potted plants from the porch and made our little fairy neighborhood quite pretty!
 
 
 

Balls in the Baby Pool

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Putting ball pit balls in a baby pool is a great sensory room DIY ball pit that kids love. Whether you play inside or outside with the baby pool full of water, this sensory play activity is one of our favorite ball pit activities!

Baby Pool Sensory Play

 
We’ve been loving these last days of summer before the school starts up again.  One super nice and sunny day, we had the baby pool out and added a colorful twist…all kinds and shapes, and colors of different balls.

 

Baby Pool with Balls

 
We threw in ball pit balls, ping pong balls, whiffle balls, and every other kind we could find.  This was such a fun way to play in the pool.  Everyone had fun throwing them in and out of the baby pool and grabbing at the different colors. 
 
We had all preschool-aged and toddlers at our house today, but, this would be great for sitting babies too!  The eye-hand coordination and visual tracking skills really develop with this one. 
 
They can visually track the different colored balls as they scoot around in the water and grasp at them.  We had so much fun with this. Let us know if you try this activity, we would love to hear how it goes in your house!
 
 
Try putting something different in your baby pool while the weather is still warm, or pin it for next summer 🙂
 
 
Looking for more eye-hand coordination activities?  Try one of these:
Color Matching Water Bin
Toddler Ping Pong Visual Motor Play
Scooping Ice
 

Colleen Beck, OTR/L has been an occupational therapist since 2000, working in school-based, hand therapy, outpatient peds, EI, and SNF. Colleen created The OT Toolbox to inspire therapists, teachers, and parents with easy and fun tools to help children thrive. Read her story about going from an OT making $3/hour (after paying for kids’ childcare) to a full-time OT resource creator for millions of readers. Want to collaborate? Send an email to contact@theottoolbox.com.

Clay Nature Art Sculptures

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We’ve been enjoying some beautiful weather and having TONS of outside play.  We’ll hang out in our back yard and get into all kinds of ball throwing, tree climbing, water playing fun.  One morning we pulled out some lumps of clay.  They were combined into pretty swirls of colors.  Ad a few leaves and sticks and we had


Nature Art Sculptures from Clay!

This clay is reeeeally hard, so we put it into a bin of water and pressed and pulled the clay until it became softer.  The warm sun didn’t hurt either.  What better fine motor strengthening play than messing with clay!
The sticks and colorful leaves
(HOW are the leaves falling already!?!)
made pretty little sculptures  for our driveway.
 
Pushing those sticks into the hard, resistive clay was great fine motor dexterity work, including tripod grasp for the smaller trigs, and tip to tip grasp to push the leaf stems into the clay lump.
 
These lumps of clay turned into something else not long after our sculpture fun…wait until you see what happened next 😉
Looking for more ways to work on tripod grasp?  Start here:

Messy Sensory Play for Kids

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Messy and Sensory Play for Kids!
We love getting messy with sensory play with our kids.  There is so much learning.  And fun to be had!  We’ve featured sensory play before and we just couldn’t help doing it again!  These features are a great way to explore colors and textures with a lot of learning mixed in.  Wouldn’t it be an AWESOME line up for a messy play date?  Stop by and check out what these bloggers did to get messy.  You’ve got all the recipes right here!


Radioactive Slime by Adventures At Home With Mum
Mixing Colors By Hand by Teaching 2 and 3 Year Olds
Frozen Watercolours by Munchkin and Bean

Cornflour Slime by Learn With Play at Home

Color Matching Lego Matching

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 Legos and Play Dough to Match Colors

This was a super easy and very fun fine motor activity we did one day.  Perfect for the littlest ones who find dinner-prep time is time for Mom to hold her while sautéing chicken
…cough, Baby Girl, cough…
Pull out one color of play dough and one matching color of Legos.  Baby Girl loves her mega blocks and we play with them daily.  This was perfect for her because she could press the blocks into the dough and see an imprint of squares and circles.  Great for language development, as well as color identification. 
She liked that she could press the little circle “buttons” (and this works those little muscles of the hand and index isolation). 





We’ll be pulling out the play dough and Lego blocks again, for sure!

Window No-Mess Sensory Spelling

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No-Mess Sensory Spelling:

 We’ve done the no-mess window painting a few times before (Seek-and-find, and Colored gel mixing to name a couple) and had a lot of fun with it.  This time we added a spelling component to add a few Kindergarten sight words to the fun.
This is so easy and Big Sister had fun moving the letters around in the paint to work on some fine motor skills, too.
Pour a little bit of paint into a sandwich baggie.  Add a few foam letters.  Seal the baggie closed.  Tape it to a window and start to play!  We had a really rainy day recently and this was a fun indoor learning activity.  (You can see the raindrops on the picture!)
You’ll also love our diagraph spelling word poem that helps children with learning commonly misspelled words.

Fine Motor Letter Learning

Moving the foam letters around in the baggie is resistive and a really great fine motor strengthening activity to work the fingers.  The child is able to isolate her index finger to move the letters around. 
Add a few extra letters to work on rhyming words.  This is also great for just placing right on the table surface and better for smaller kids that way, too.  Littler ones can just move the letters around and address letter identification and colors.

Family Reunion Lawn Games

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Games and Activities for Outdoor Family Fun!

 We had a big old fashioned family reunion this summer with lots of family, food, and fun!  Us Aunts were in charge of the kid’s games and activities and had a blast putting the activities together…and playing, of course!


We started out by researching the best outdoor lawn games from the best kid’s activity bloggers out there.  If you missed our round-up post, check it out and pin for next summer.  We’ve got SO many outdoor summer lawn games together in one place.
Outdoor Summer Lawn Games
We knew we would have a ton of kids aged newborn to high school age and were catering to the younger set.  Our plan included an obstacle course, ball lawn games, dress up, and bubbles.

Lawn Obstacle Course

This was so easy to set up.  We bought a pool noodle from the dollar store and raided our kid’s outdoor toy bin.  Add a couple of buckets from the sandbox for a hurdle.  They ran around the mini cones, jumped on the trampoline, dove through the hula hoop, and hurdled the pool noodle.  You’ve got your self a pretty nice little obstacle course!  This was a fun activity for the toddlers and preschoolers.  There was a lot of trampoline jumping going on, too 🙂


Family Reunion Lawn Games

We filled a bunch of water bottles with colored water…and have been playing with them in lots of fun ways…blog posts to come 😉 For the Family Reunion, we used them to bowl!  The kiddos had a blast with this. 
Another game we played was catching a ball with milk jugs.  We’ve done something like this before with our Halloween ghost catch game.  I taped the edges with duct tape and electrical tape so there were no sharp edges to catch little fingers on.

Outdoor Play Dress-Up Pretend Play

The dress up time was super cute.  We pulled a bunch of old clothes out that were ready for donation and laid them out for the kids to dress up as they pleased.  Add a few accessories like hats, scarves, and purses.  It was seriously the cutest thing to see the kids all dressed up!

 Family Reunion Lawn Play

The bubble station was a big bin of water and dish detergent bubbled up and bubble wands made from pipe cleaners.  A few of the kids really got into the bubbly fun and hung out here for a long time 🙂

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Party details

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Little Guy celebrated his 4th birthday with a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle party.  He’s been loving all things Ninja turtles recently and asked for a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Party for months!

 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle birthday party details

 

 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Birthday

 
Little Guy and Big Sister celebrate their birthdays in the same month and we’ve been doing a combined party each year.  You may have seen our Tinkerbell Fairy party post for Big Sister’s theme.  These two kids try to challenge their mom on their birthday party theme!  I was able to combine the party themes going with the green connection between Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Tinkerbell 🙂

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Party Food

 We had a few Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle themed food items.  Mountain Dew turned into Radio-active slime juice.  The chocolate covered oreos were easy to make into little ninja turtle faces using lime green chocolate melts from Joanne’s. (Add a coupon and this was a great deal!)  Little Guy’s cake was a turtle face.  The kids had frozen pizzas since the Ninja Turtles love their pizza!

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Party Decorations

The decorations for this party were pretty simple.  Streamers in the turtles colors were cut and snipped to give them a ruffled look.  I hung them behind the cake and around the ceiling.  More streamers were draped across the cake table to pull the colors in.  I made some fabric turtle masks (see below!) and tied them around four balloons to make turtle faces.  Add a scrap of paper behind the eye holes and you’ve got the Ninja Turtle faces!

 

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Party Activities

This party had very little planned activities.  The kids could just run around and play and have fun doing their own thing.  Each child had a fabric Ninja Turtle mask in their treat bag.  These masks were so easy to make.  I found thin cotton fabric in the quilting section at Joannes
(on sale+coupon=jackpot!)
I purchased a half yard of each color and this was way more than enough (hence the costumed balloons in the party décor!)  I folded the half yard lengthwise and cut 2.5 inch wide strips.  The eye holes were cut 3/4 inch from the fold.  At the end of the mask, taper the end to a point, starting 8 inches from the end.
One play activity the kids could pretend and interact with, was our pizza shop play house.  You might have seen the post here.  Little Guy and Big Sister had fun helping me make this pizza shop in the week leading up to the party.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Party Favors

The favor bags were green paper bags I found at Paper Mart and fit in with the green of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the Tinkerbell Fairy themes.  I had a little help from one of the other Aunts while the cousins played one day, making these bags into turtle faces.  I hand drew the mask shape and cut circles with a hole punch.  We glued them on the bags with a scrap of white paper behind the holes for eyes.  Draw on a black circle for eyes, and done!  In the bags were our Ninja Turtle masks, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle fruit snacks, and a handful of candy.  Easy!
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