The Rainbow Clouds Craft

I saw this beautiful rainbow craft a few weeks ago in Pinterest and I totally forgot the main site, so please if you own this craft leave a message and I’ll include the credits. 

I’ve been introducing Vito to the spring season using our Spring Season Picture Cards, books and outdoor activities.  Today, I’m sharing the rainbow clouds the boys made last week.  The weather was terrible at that time  and we couldn’t explore our yard so I made use of their free time doing crafts at home.  So I tried to scan through Pinterest in search of simple crafts that BOTH of my kids could work on, and this is one of them!

Crafts projects allow children to exercise their fine motor skills, improve manual dexterity and understanding of visual-spatial relationships.  They provide opportunities to use their imagination as well.  Just be vigilant when using small items and sharp objects like scissors.

Materials:

• strips of red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple cardstocks
• white cardstock for the clouds
• cotton
• glue

Procedure:

1.  Pre-cut the white cardstock into a cloud shape.  I made one for each of the boys.  Apply glue on the clouds, and I suggest you provide each kid a glue as they tend to fight over one object when working.  In our case, I just instructed them of what to do, and they’re the ones who executed it. Mostly, Vito follows what his brother is doing

2.  Place a generous amount of cotton.  The fluffiness of the cotton bothers Vito though and he tried to avoid touching the glue as well.

3.  Apply glue at the bottom side of the cloud for your rainbow.  Place accordingly the strips of coloured cardstock to form a rainbow.  You can demonstrate this to the kids or instruct them of the order of colours if they are not yet familiar with rainbow.

4.  Strike a pose when they are dry!  See how Vito refuses to strike a pose in the camera LOL.  See what happens when your toddler is camera shy.

                                

5.  And don’t forget to put  them on display. They look adorable as wall decors and kids love looking at their masterpieces!  The cherry blossom was another project that we made earlier last month and will post the details soon.

 

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St. Patrick’s Day Activities for 28 Months Toddler

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Vito is 28 months old.

St. Patrick’s Day is just around the corner and we are excited to watch the parade in the city this year!  To introduce Ireland’s big celebration to Vito, I prepared a bunch of work trays for him this month as he turns 28 months old.  I featured 9 activities here but in reality we’re doing so much more, so I’ll just update the blog of other activities that are not included here.

1.  Ireland Matching Cards.  These cards are similar to the picture books that I have already in the shop.  The cards here are all about the icons of Ireland.

2.  Sorting Erasers.  Owned this since last year and it is just now that Vito enjoys sorting it.  You can get the erasers from here.

3.  Sorting Colors.  Using the Montessori Colour Tablets #2, Vito will be sorting the rainbow colors using our Learning Resources counters.  In the picture we’re using the insect counters, he likes them!

4.  Letter R and Round Magnets.  This Rainbow Do a Dot was printed from here and I saw this from Deb’s page.  It’s a good practice of hand eye coordination.  Vito makes sure he places the round magnets exactly into the dots.

5.  Creating a rainbow using Do a Dot Markers.  Similar to the Rainbow do a dot but this time we’re using the markers.  I showed Vito how to color the rainbow and he finished half of the page. And no, he didn’t follow the order of the rainbow colors (as expected).  You can get the rainbow pattern from Making Learning Fun.

6.  Pouring lentils using a funnel.  Out of all the activiites, this one is Vito’s favourite.  More on this later.

7.  Scooping lentils. He’s quite bored with scooping activities lately, I guess its because we’ve been doing it all throughout the week.  And besides, he enjoys using his hands more than using a scoop or spoon.

8.  Counting gold coins.  I bought the gold coins in Amazon for our Pirate Unit last year, and this time Vito gets to use it for St. Patrick’s Day.  We have more counting activities than letters because believe it or not, Vito is more interested in counting than letters.

9. Patterning.  This is for colour recognition and introduction to patterning.  We are using the link cubes I bought from Singapore years ago, but you can also purchase this in Amazon.  This March, we’re working on orange and green colors, so our color activities will revolve around this two.

10. One to one correspondence using clothes pins.  A new addition to our monthly work trays is this counting cards and clothes pins.  We have lots of pins at home but found them difficult to open, so I bought the wooden ones for Vito to practice on.  He’s able to open and close it, and now his biggest challenge is to clip it on the picture. This activity is counting practice and enhancement of hand-eye coordination skills.

 

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March Activities and {Learn & Play Link Up}

March is fast approaching and I’ve been doing some planning for the boy’s activities for next month.   I am also looking forward for a warm weather so we can do outdoor play and exploration.  For this week’s featured activities, let me share Vito’s first “themed” unit:

We had a lot of fun with these, especially the scooping of pompoms and the paint works!

Now, for this week’s featured posts, I am sharing the activities that you can do for the month of March!

Featured posts:

St. Patrick’s Day Crafts and Activities from Your Vibrant Family

13 Preschool Trays from SmartE PartE

Easter Activities and St. Patrick’s Day Tot School from Every Star is Different

Montessori Inspired Christian Easter Shelves from Mama’s Happy Hive

Welcome to the Learn & Play Link Party!

Now it’s time for this week’s link party! This is a BRAND new link up for all blog posts that include learn and play activities and hands-on education for kids. We are excited to read your blog posts and to see what you have to share! Please link up below and grab our button to display on your blog.

If you are a blogger, share your family friendly posts here. We are looking for things which include:

Montessori Education

Homeschool

Sensory Play

Tot and Preschool Trays

Fine and Gross Motor Activities

Kids in the Kitchen

Healthy Recipes for Kids

Arts and Crafts

Natural Living

Free Educational Printables

Family-Oriented Activities

Healthy LivingYour post will be featured on each of our blogs where we will pick our favourite posts every other week. That means there is more of a chance that you will be featured!

 

Everyone, please meet our link party hosts:

Christian Montessori Blog ~ Please visit our CMN FB group ~ Pinterest

Vanessa from Mama’s Happy Hive~FB~Pinterest~Instagram~Twitter

Jennifer from Study at Home Mama~FB~Pinterest~Instagram~Twitter

Marie from Child Led Life~FB~Pinterest~Instagram~Twitter

Jae from Pinay Homeschooler~FB~Pinterest~Instagram~Twitter

Heather from Golden Reflections Blog~FB~Pinterest~Instagram~Twitter

Renae from Every Star is Different~FB~Pinterest

 

GUIDELINES FOR LINKING
Please link up 1-3 posts

Follow each of the hosts on social media

When you link up, please add our button and place it at the bottom of your shared posts or link back with text link.

By entering a link, you’re giving us permission to feature an image on our blogs. Proper credit & links will ALWAYS be given.

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St. Patrick’s Day Activities for Tiny Tots

I am not really a fan of seasonal themed activities. Why? Well for a busy Mom like me, it is sooo difficult to prepare and assemble.  The fact that we live far far away from the city, our resources is quite limited. It is sooo hard to find materials that fits well on a specific theme (and I have no time to look for them either!).  Plus the fact that well, these stuff still cost a lot and space is my biggest problem here. Not enough storage for the materials! 

But… we all have to agree that it is fun to do it with your little kids.  It’s cute and fun! And the kids will have that feel of the occasion.  That’s why, because this month we are celebrating St. Patrick’s Day here in Ireland,  I am trying it out this seasonal themed activities with Vito!  Yes, I’m testing the water and see if I can pull off a seasonal themed activities and let’s see were this will lead me.  We’re not doing a bunch right, we’re only trying those that are easy to prepare and feasible for us.

Scooping giant pompoms 

                

Vito has been showing signs that he’s ready.  He always wanted to feed himself so I’m giving him lots of scooping activities so he can practice.

Materials:  giant pompoms (or berries or baby potatoes), plastic scoop from oatmeal box, plastic bowls

Recognizing the rainbow colours

 

We’ve looking at colours since last year and though we may have one colour per month, it won’t hurt to checkout different colours at the same time. Here I was talking to Vito all about the rainbow its colours.  We use my Learning Resources Critters Counters which I got from an Amazon Sale last year.  I was pretty happy that they have all the 6 colours of rainbow!

                   

Materials:  colour cards (from flash cards, cardstock, art paper) and counters (or erasers/rubbers, pompoms, toy beads etc)

 Language and Vocabulary

 

So you might think that it’s too early for your little ones to understand all of these?  You might be mistaken! They actually absorb all the little things you show them!  Currently, there’s a lot of displays of leprechauns, rainbows, shamrock etc at the stores and malls. Vito sees all of these whenever we’re outdoors.  So what I did here was provide some beautiful cards with a clear readable font for infants (I used Sassoon Infant Std, standard font used here in UK and Ireland) and added tangible objects so I can show and explain to him what he is seeing everywhere.

Materials:  St. Patrick’s vocabulary cards (downloadable from this post, follow link at the end of this post), matching objects

Gold Counting Activity and Number Recognition

I made counting cards as well and used some play gold coins for this.  Since the starting of the year, I’ve been introducing Vito to counting by counting his fingers, his toes, the buttons we’re playing, the blocks and anything at all. So here, I introduced counting with the symbol.  Again, there’s no such thing as too early or too late.

Materials: counting cards (downloadable from this post, follow link at the end of this post),

Mess Free Shamrock Painting

Materials: sealable plastic bag, printed shamrock (you can get the outline in the web), orange and green non-toxic tempera paints

Put everything in the plastic bag… and let the fun begin!

Vito’s shamrock masterpiece (after he basically torture the plastic!)

And there goes our activities for St Patrick’s Day!  Even if these are all for Vito, big brother loved doing all of these as well! How cool isn’t it?

Now for your freebie, download your FREE COPY OF ST. PATRICK’S DAY printable, the TINY TOTS EDITION here!

More toddler activities can be found here in my Pinterest Board: Follow Pinay Homeschooler's board Pinay Homeschooler on Pinterest.