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Month: February 2014

DIY Shape Stamps

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These DIY Shape stampers were part of a craft we made waaaaaay back at the beginning of the month before Valentine’s Day. (HOW did February fly by so fast???)  We cut heart shapes from Styrofoam packaging sheets and stamped hearts.  The hearts decorated our front window for a few weeks.  While we stamped the hearts, I cut out a few other shapes from the Styrofoam sheet and had a little fun with shapes!

Shape Stamps

Creative painting with styrofoam shape stamps

This was a simple craft and creative way to paint while learning about shapes.  baby Girl is only just learning her shapes and calls everything a triangle.  Little Guy is happy to help her out with the correct shape name…calling out the shape before she even has a chance to answer!

A few shapes cut from Styrofoam sheets were all we needed to get started.  We stamped the shapes in red paint but adding more colors in there would made a fun creative painting art project.

Some of the shapes didn’t turn out exactly like they should have…but it was fun!

Stamping with these palm-sized stamps is a fun way to cross midline (reaching across the middle of the body) as Baby Girl reached to dip the shape in paint and then to stamp the shape onto the paper.  Crossing midline is an important skill for little ones.  This activity would be great for kids with special needs or difficulty using one hand/arm. 

Baby Girl wanted to paint some of her stamps too.  She is big-time into all things painting!

Our DIY stamps turned out to be a lot of fun and a great way to decorate our window for a holiday.  We re-used our hearts and made a fun spring flower with the prints.  Watch this space to see more crafty fun and see where this project went!
We’ve been having fun with our Styrofoam activities this month.  Lots of fun activities are linked up and if you’ve got any fun Styrofoam blog posts, be sure to stop by and share them with us! 

Colorful ways to learn and play

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After months of wintery gray skies and freezing temps, we are ready to play with some rainbows and sunshine!  It may still be cold and the snow is still out there, but we can play with color to brighten our day! These features from Share It Saturday have colorful ways to learn and play.  Look out colors, here we come!





Try the celery experiment with every color of the rainbow. (P is for Preschooler)
Set up an invitation to create and play with colorful parts, play dough, pieces, and manipulatives.  The learning is non-stop! (Laughing Kids Learn)
Prepare a St. Patrick’s Day Sensory Sink with rainbows galore. (Frogs and Snails and Puppy Dog Tails)
Match colors in a color matching water bin. (Sugar Aunts)
Dye pasta in a rainbow of colors for sensory play, crafts, activities, counting, and exploring. (The Connection We Share)
Encourage fine motor skills with rainbow fine motor play. (Sugar Aunts)
Create colorful magnetic art with a bunch of different colored pipe cleaners. (Munchkins and Moms)
Build sculptures with colored ice sculptures outside in the snow, or bring the fun inside for colorful art. (Happy Hooligans)
Build a pom pom catapult and toss all colors across the room. (3 Dinosaurs)

More colorful play ideas:
Make your own colored sand.  It’s simple, I promise!
Paint a rainbow with a recycled egg carton.
Create a few rainbow sensory bins for hours of colorful play.
Use lots of different colored tissue paper to play with tissue paper and work on fine motor skills.
Paint snow.  Indoors or outside!

Snowman Craft Fine Motor Winter Craft for Kids

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Winter crafts are one of our favorites!  When it’s so cold outside and the snow is blowing around, it’s so much fun to just create a fun craft with a pile of paint, glitter, and STUFF!  We’ve done quite a few winter crafts around here and this cute little snowman craft is a fun one to add to the list.
Spring seems to be a long way off with all of the snow outside, and this snowman has been happily hanging out on our dining room wall as we wait for any signs of spring. 

 

Snowman Craft for Kids

 {Note: This post contains affiliate links.  In other words, this blog will receive monetary compensation when any purchases are made through the links in this post.  Our opinions and ideas are in no way affected.  You can read our full disclosure policy here.  As always, we thank you for your support and community here at Sugar Aunts.}

We started out with a few supplies: black pony beads, orange felt, white paper condiment cups, glue, and markers.

Baby Girl glued three of the condiment cups on a sheet of paper with a. lot. of glue.  But isn’t a ton of glue always involved in crafts with two year olds 😉

This dried. Eventually.

We cut a little triangle from the orange felt and glued that on.  We drew a cute little smile and arms with the marker and then decided to draw buttons on too.  You could totally use the pony beads, but that didn’t happen with this cute snowman.

What fun winter crafts have you done?  Stop by our Facebook page and share the pictures or links with us. And be sure to “like” if you’re not already.  We would love to have you join us!

Visual Motor Activity for Learning and Scanning, Eye-hand Coordination

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We shared a great bubble wrap activity yesterday and are continuing again today with another fun learning through play activity with the awesomeness of bubble wrap!   This time we did some visual scanning to work on letters of Little Guy’s name, letter sounds (a great pre-reading activity!), color awareness with Baby Girl, and eye-hand coordination as we popped the bubbles.  Sounds like a super fun way to play and learn, right?!?
Visual Motor activities are very important to the pre-hand writer…and new handwrites, too.  Learning to place those letters on the lines and be aware of how much space is left on the page is part of visual-motor skills.  So is line awareness when cutting.  And even, moving with large muscles as we carry items in the home or classroom.  We have to be aware of how much space is around us and this is where visual-motor awareness comes into play.  
Visual scanning (scanning with the eyes across a page, for example) and hand-eye coordination (using the hands in a coordinated manner based on what the eyes are telling us) are both part of Visual Motor Skills.  Visual Motor activities are a fun way to play while working on these important skills.


This visual motor activity is a great way to work on visual scanning, eye-hand coordination, and letter and color awareness.

 

Visual Motor Activity to work on visual scanning and hand-eye coordination

We started our fun with these funny faces stickers from www.craftprojectideas.com/.  We received them free of charge and have been loving the silly faces in our crafts.  The colors were perfect for this activity.  Baby GIrl stuck the stickers onto a piece of paper and together we worked on colors.  She can tell me some of the colors, but most of the time, needs help.  These stickers were a fun way to practice!
Kids can work on color awareness with colored stickers in this visual motor activity.
{Note: This post contains affiliate links.  In other words, this blog will receive monetary compensation when any purchases are made through the links in this post.  Our opinions and ideas are in no way affected.  You can read our full disclosure policy here.  As always, we thank you for your support and community here at Sugar Aunts.}
Once the stickers were in place, I taped a piece of bubble wrap on top of the stickers.  Now we were ready to get to popping!
Preschoolers will love locating and identifying letters in their name as they visually scan.
Little Guy used a Window Marker
to dot the colored stickers as I called out a color. 

  

Use window markers and scan for colors, letters
He had to visually can the paper to locate the color he needed.  Pushing hard enough with the marker provided a nice “pop” when he dabbed the bubble.  Using his hands in a coordinated way to dab the correct bubble worked on hand-eye coordination.  Because of the bubble wrap on top of the stickers, he had to make sure it was aligned correctly.

Children can visually scan for letters and develop eye-hand coordination to locate letters.
Next, we tried this with the letters in his name.  I had extra letters, plus the letters in his name and asked him to dab all of the ones that he needed for his name.  Scanning across the page in all directions was fun way to explore letter identification as he visually scanned top to bottom and side to side.  He again worked on those hand-eye coordination skills as he popped the correct bubbles.
More playful ways to practice hand-eye coordination and visual scanning :

Playful Math Learning Thorough Play

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It’s Share It Saturday time again! We hope you’ve had a wonderful week of fun.  The links this week were very fun to look though (You guys are SO talented and creative!)  This week’s features bring us creative and fun ways to learn math concepts through play.  We’ve got nature and sensory-based math, items to count, sort, and pattern, fun ways to graph, and more.  If you’ve got a little one who is learning early math ideas to multiplication…these Playful Math ideas are for you! 
 

 

Playful ways to explore math concepts


Math in Nature:

Use nature to Play with rocks (An Idea on Tuesday) and learn number awareness, counting, and more.  Or, try something different like counting nature (Sugar Aunts).
 


Counting fun objects:

Use many different objects to Count to 100 (KCEdventures). 
While you’re looking for objects to count, try early learning with pistachios (B-Inspired Mama).
Or even add roses for hands on learning (3 Dinosaurs).   Explore Composing and Decomposing Numbers with a snowman theme. (Sugar Aunts)
 


Math Concepts using Candy:

Practice graphing (Fantastic Fun and Learning) with all of that left over Valentine’s Day chocolate.  Really love those sweets?  Practice measuring with candy (Buggy and Buddy). 
 


Patterns in Play:

 Explore shapes, patterns, and sorting (Sugar Aunts) with Wikki Stix.  Or, take the patterns outside to try snow patterns (Sugar Aunts).


 Creative counting:

Something like photocopies can be used for counting and times tables (My Little 3 and Me).  Craft something fun, like honey bee hives to explore numbers and counting (Sugar Aunts).
 


Sensory Math:

Match, count, and order numbers using a Math sensory bin (Little Bins for Little Hands).
 
 
Need more ideas? After School For Smarty Pants has 100 ways to make math fun at home.
 
 
If you were featured, feel free to grab our button:
 

 

Check out who the other hosts are featuring today:
 Life & Lessons From a Country Road 

The Share It Saturday Pinterest board has loads of fun ideas for play and learning.
 
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Looking for more fun math ideas?  Follow along on our Playful Math Pinterest board!

 

Painting Snow with Watercolors

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We brought our water table inside one day when the weather was WAY too cold to go outside.  There have been a lot of people affected by cold temps this winter and big winter storms have been making this winter feel verrrry long!  And cold…really cold! We LOVE creative painting activities and this idea was one of our favorites.
This is a Winter Sensory Bin activity that is motivating and fun for kids because they might not have experienced painting snow before!
So when it’s too cold to go outside, and the kids are going bonkers inside…what do you do?  You can only play with the same toys so many times when you’ve been stuck inside for so many snow days.  This Watercolor Snow Painting activity was just the thing we needed to get creative and have some winter fun! 
We’ve done both indoor snow painting and outdoor snow painting before and both were very fun. For the outdoor version, check out how to paint snow to incorporate more motor skill work.
This watercolor version was just as much fun in a different way!


Bring snow inside in a water table for snowy sensory play.

Painting Watercolors in Snow

 {Note: This post contains affiliate links.  In other words, this blog will receive monetary compensation when any purchases are made through the links in this post.  Our opinions and ideas are in no way affected.  You can read our full disclosure policy here.  As always, we thank you for your support and community here at Sugar Aunts.}
We started by pulling our water table
in from the garage and a few bins of snow were all we needed to fill it.  A few paint brushes and some watercolors
and we were all set.
Use water colors to paint snow. This is a great indoor activity for when it's too cold to go outside.

This was so much fun.  The snow lasted in the house for a couple of hours and as it melted on the edges, we had more water for painting.  When Big Sister came home, we brought in a few more bins of snow so she could paint too.  This started a whole new round of painting fun.

Creative painting with snow and watercolors

The colors were so bright and pretty on the snow.  AND we were toasty warm!

Kids love to paint snow with watercolors!

A few kitchen utensils were brought in for some scooping and serving “snow cones”.

Toddlers and Preschoolers LOVE to paint snow!
Love this cuteness!
What a fun sensory experience! 
Our friend Jaime over at Frogs and Snails and Puppy Dog Tails did some snow painting too.  You have to check out what they did when they got some snow. Very fun stuff!
Looking for more wintery fun activities to learn and play while the temps are COLD?  Follow along on our Winter Fun and Play Pinterest board for some great ideas:

Valentine’s Day Snacks for Kids

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We love to create fun snacks and foods for the kids.  It’s so much fun to make healthy foods look fun for holidays.  Valentine’s Day is coming up this week and we’ve got some non-candy snacks to share.  Get ready to create in the kitchen, because the kids are going to gobble up these Valentine’s Day snacks!   
 

 

 

 

 

Valentine’s Day Snacks for Kids 

Kids gobble up this Valentine's Day granola parfait snack!

 

 

 
This granola recipe is AWESOME!  We’ll be sharing soon, so stop back and see how we made this super-food granola.  Can’t. stop. eating it.  And the kids are loving it too.  I made this pretty little parfait for the kids and I to share one day.  It’s got our super-food granola, vanilla Greek yogurt, and sliced strawberries.  This is the perfect Valentine’s Day healthy dessert, breakfast, or yummy snack to hold off the sweet intake on this candy-driven holiday!  Put it in a wine glass, and it’s just right for your romantic dinner dessert.
 
Granola is the best healthy snack for kids.

 

 

 
Seriously. SO good!
 
My kids love grape tomatoes! The perfect healthy Valentine's Day snack!

 

 

 
My kids looooove grape tomatoes.  We could (and have) gone through a whole pack of them in a day.  A quick slice with a knife and you’ve got hearts.  The kids cheered when they say these.  And then gobbled them all up!
 
A cheese and pepperoni plate for Valentine's Day.
 Kids love cheese, pepperoni, and crackers at snack time.  These hearts were made with a heart shaped cookie cutter.  Hint: stack a few slices of cheese or pepperoni and then cut your hearts.  Quicker is better when the little ones are running around and starving 😉

 

Heart shaped cheese and pepperoni make the perfect non-candy Valentine's day treat for kids.
 
We hope these snack ideas will give you a few fun ideas for this Valentine’s Day.  Make it simple, meaningful, and fun. 
 
 

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.

Decorating Cupcakes with Kids with Less Mess

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You’ve done baking with kids before, right?  You know how messy a normal (sans-kids) baking session can be.  Crumbs, ingredients all over the counter, semi-burned crispy-ness on the cookie sheet…It’s fun 😉
Add kids to the scene, and baking can be an all-out kitchen destroyer!  You’ve got spills, fingerprints, and the inevitable, “I want a grilled cheese sandwich!” in the middle of a mixer bowl-filled, chocolate chip, broken egg shell war zone.
BUT, we are big suckers for sweets and our little sweeties love to create in the kitchen…so we get the damp wash cloths ready, pull up the kitchen stools, and brace ourselves for sure-thing messiness.  This cupcake decorating session came about one snow day recently when the weather outside was somewhere around a high of 2 degrees F and we were going no where near the outdoors.  We needed something to keep the kids occupied and having fun.  Baking cupcakes was it!
Our cupcake decorating turned out to be pretty low key and not so bad stickiness-wise with just a few easy tips.
Contain the mess when decorating cupcakes by putting different colored icings into muffin tin sections.

Tips for Decorating Cupcakes with Kids

  This post contains affiliate links. 
To make our cupcakes, Big Sister and I scrolled over our “Sweets” Pinterest board and found this yummy perfect vanilla cupcake recipe.  We made the cupcakes with our pretty cupcake liners.  (Is there anything kids love more than putting cupcake liners into the tin!!?)  We made the cupcakes with just a couple of spills, only one dropped egg, and just a few sneaks of flour.  (My kids LOVE to swipe flour…tell me yours do this too???)  It was a success, mess-wise 😉
decorating cupcakes with icing
We waited for our cupcakes to cool…and this is the haaaaaaardest part of decorating cupcakes.  It takes for-EVER for those cupcakes to cool when little fingers can not wait to get started!  The icing recipe from the same post above turned out to be pretty good, although we only made half of the recipe and it was way more than enough.  Just a note if you use that recipe:  Caster sugar=granulated sugar and icing sugar=powdered sugar.  Good to know and something new I learned!
Before decorating, I threw down a disposable tablecloth to catch all of the inevitable crumbs and icing smears.  Watch for after-holiday clearance sales on these table decorations…You can get cheap-o table cloths for cents at 90% off sales.  And a red Christmas table cloth is the perfect Valentine’s Day table décor.  Shhhhh, we won’t tell! 😉
Use a muffin tin to contain the icing when decorating cupcakes with kids.

Now comes the fun part!  Separating the icing colors  into the cups of the muffin tin
made decorating a breeze with the kids.  They used a different infant spoon
for each color of icing and that kept the kids from dropping sticky spoons all over the floor.  A few of the sections of the muffin pan held sprinkles and a couple of other decorations for our cupcakes.  We LOVE gel food coloring
for icings on cookies and cakes, and even for coloring homemade play dough.  The colors are so vivid and our cupcakes showed it!

When you mix your colors, do it right in the muffin tin.  Slap some plain icing into each section of the muffin tin, add your food coloring, and stir right there in the tin.  No extra bowls=perfection!

A great Valentine's Day playdate idea! Decorate cupcakes!

Putting the icing all into one muffin tin makes for easy(-ER…easier, not easy when the kitchen is now covered in a sugar and crumb coating) clean up.  You don’t need to wash a ton of tiny icing bowls.  Grab up that table cloth and you are mostly cleaned up. 

We had a great time with our cupcake decorating session and only a slight sugar rush.  Hopefully you’ll find some of our tips easy to use and will jump in with both feet and not stress the mess.  Hey, at least you end up with cupcakes to go with your sugar encrusted kitchen!

Sight Word Sensory Bin

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This sight word sensory bin is an old activity here on the website, from when our own children were just learning to read. When they were in kindergarten, sight words were all the rage. Now, these strategies are not used as much, but the practice of learning words and letters continues. You can use components of this sensory bin activity in beginning reading for kindergarteners to practice reading words, identifying letters, or matching uppercase to lower case. The sky is the limit, and all you need is recycled paper!

While we used recycled paper for this sight word sensory activity, you could use any sensory bin base material.

Sight Word Sensory Bin

I love this sight word sensory bin idea (or any way that you use the sensory bin idea) to involve motor skills and multisensory learning into reading skill development. As OT providers, we love play-based learning and hands-on activities, and this one fits the bill!

 We’ve used a lot of fun and different materials to practice sight words this school year.  Sight Words with Ping Pong Balls and Sight Word Practice with string are just two fun ways we’ve practiced the work list that comes home with Big Sister each week.  Just recently, we got a note from her teacher saying “Awesome job on the sight words!”  This was a pretty proud mama and all of our practice is paying off! 
 

Shredded Paper Sensory Bin

 
This sensory based activity is a Sight Word Sensory bin…and just one more creative ways we’ve been practicing homework words.  Putting a creative spin on the practice makes repetition fun and easy.  You can find more links to our other creative sight word activities at the bottom of this post.
 
 
Kids can practice new sight words with a sensory bin.
 
 

 

I had this sensory bin ready to go when Big Sister came home from school one day.  It was a fun way for Baby Girl and Little Guy to play while they waited for their sister to get off of the school bus.
 
Kindergarten sight words in a sensory bin with shredded paper.

Put those paper shreds to work and use them in fun play.  Shredded paper is a great sensory bin filler. 

We’ve used it a few other times and it actually about today because Little Guy remembered doing this Snowy Farm Sensory Bin activity and asked if we could pull out some shredded paper again. 

The shredded paper can even be dyed to give your sensory bin a colorful spin.  We dyed shredded paper pink in our Valentine’s Day sensory bin.

Use Sight Words in a sensory bin to enhance reading for young kids.

Big Sister played in the sensory bin and said the words as she pulled them out.  We made sentences together with the words from the bin.

Shredded paper makes a great sensory bin filler for kids' sensory bin activities.

Big Sister wanted to add her entire sight word collection to the sensory bin.  It turned out to be mostly sight words!  I think we’re on to a new sensory bin filler 😉

Looking for more sight word activities for beginner readers?  Try these fun ideas:

Sight Word Sticky Easel
Sight Word Manipulatives
Sight Word Scavenger Hunt
Beginner Sight Word Letter Match
I Spy Sight Word Sensory Bottle
No-Mess Sensory Sight Word Spelling
Sight Word Bottle Cap Stampers

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