Color Matching With Play Dough

This was an easy and fun way to spend an afternoon.  And when Baby Girl woke up from her nap, she loved it too.
I put out six colors of play dough and a little bin of colored beads, paper clips, and other little things.

               Fine Motor Strengthening for kids

They had so much fun matching up the colors.  Baby Girl just loved pushing the little beads and things into the Play Dough. 
I love her little knuckle dimples 🙂
Pushing the little objects into the dough is resistive and an excellent fine motor strengthening exercise for little hands.  They are also working on their tripod grasp when they push the beads into the Dough. 
  Big Sister said we needed to wash all of the little objects after we were done.  We put all of them into a bin of water and everyone had fun swishing them around.   
 Drain them into a colander and you are good to go 🙂

Textured Shaving Cream Sensory Play

 There is something about kids and a pile of shaving cream…They Looooove to play in it!
We added some old sprinkles from last Easter to give this Indoor Play Idea a different twist.  They loved feeling the texture of the sprinkles on their hands while they played.  It probably has a great exfoliating factor too 🙂
This sensory bin base material is shaving cream with an added texture.
Get both hands involved for crossing midline and engaging both sides of the brain while using the large muscles of the arms and shoulder girdle…
Draw letters and stars in it…
See what happens when you draw with a plastic ball…
Take a break for a dance party…
 And draw a little more!
Such a fun time!!

Definitely try adding textures to shaving cream for fun sensory play.

Colleen

Indoor Snow Play

Grasp Strengthening and Learning Colors With SNOW???

Some days, it is just HARD to get the kids dressed up in snowsuits/gloves/hats/boots/scarves…only to bring them back in 10 minutes later because the baby wants to follow the big kids, but can’t pick up her boots to walk through the snow that is up to her mid-calf…so she stands still in the yard until I  pick her up…
Today was one of those days.
We needed an activity for after baby-nap-time and before dinner-making-time and this was just the one!
I had this idea in mind since right after Christmas when we got some snow, and I wanted to dye it using eye droppers.  After looking everywhere around the house, I just can. not. find the eye droppers!  So, on to another idea…
Turkey Baster
Spray Bottle
Scoops and Spoons.


These kids were so beyond excited to see me setting this up.  They helped stir the food coloring into the bowls of water. (Get Dollar Store food coloring for projects like this!  So cheap, and it will last you many, many projects…)  But they could not guess what we were doing with it.  Once I brought the snow in, there were cheers!

 We did some mixing of colors on the snow…What does red and blue make?  We had green in the spray bottle and it was fun to change the stream to get more color on the snow.  They were pretty excited to get brown, of course 🙂
 

Squeezing the turkey baster bulb and the spray bottle nozzle is wonderful for grasp strengthening in hands. 

The strength of the whole had is needed for so many fine motor work in play and school based activities.

This was the extent of the mess…not too bad! They kept the tray on the right pretty clean of color mostly since that was Baby Girl’s side and she was busy eating the snow 🙂

This was a fun indoor play time for everyone!
Colleen