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The Rainbow Clouds Craft

Wednesday, 9 March 2016

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:

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 Open-mouthed smile

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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Our Spring Season Picture Cards

Monday, 7 March 2016

Spring is just around the corner and I’ve been thinking about the activities that the boys and I can do. I was very much inspired by Deb’s post on Spring Season Cards, so I borrowed the idea of printing pictures that relates to spring and we will be using them for the follwing:

introducing the season of spring to Vito
creating stories using the picture cards
inspiration for crafts
inspiration for outdoor activities
St. Patrick and Easter activities
farm animals and their babies
animal life cycles

Like for example, we’ll be doing cherry blossoms crafts and paint eggs during Easter. We’ve got dandelions in the backyard and we’ll disect them too! St. Patrick’s Day is next week, and we’re still contemplating how are we going to celebrate it with the rest of the locals.

We’ll be planting seeds in the coming weeks as well. I already prepared some pots for the boys. We can’t go out in the rain yet because honestly, it’s still freezing here. And hopefully, once the weather gets warmer we’ll take a short trip to the farm to see and feed some real live farm animals and explore the forest to observe insects!

So as you see, these cards will be our guide… and as Mavi would say it, it’s the ultimate checklist!

Exploring the Bucket Balance

Saturday, 5 March 2016

Vito is 27 months old.

I have this bucket balance years ago and was mostly used by Mavi. He’s been using it to learn concepts like mass units and the concept of gravity. I’m so hesitant to let Vito use it for the obvious reason that at his age, he might break it or doesn’t know how to use it. But I was wrong! One day, I ran out of ideas for him so I bravely took our bucket balance and a bunch of Duplos for him to explore. Well, lo and behold! It was a total hit and didn’t expect that he’ll enjoy using it!

So what did Vito exactly do with the balance and what are the things he discovered?

First, it goes up and down! This was the first thing he learned! Up and down, up and down he keeps on saying it as he manipulates the scale by placing Duplos in the bucket.

See his smile?

Then he realized he can control it as well by moving the center hold. So he’s ignoring the weights (Duplos) but controlling the balance by moving the center to left and right, thus making the scale goes up or down.

Next, he discovered that there’s a mini drawer where he can open and close. So we practiced it, open and close saying those words all together to learn the concept.

He started putting in some objects (weight) to see what will happen. And he closes it and said “hide”.

Vito kept playing with this for the next 30 minutes, and we varied the number of Duplos in each bucket to see the effects.

I honestly didn’t know that this old learning material of Mavi can have a big effect on Vito. It’s currently one of his favourite “toy” and we kept on using it as a tool in play pretend. This is such an amazing tool for introducing early concepts of math, science and simple machines! This Learning Resources Bucket Balance if you have the chance can also be a wonderful gift for birthdays and Christmas. I’m happy that both of my boys have benefited from this!

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Goodnight Moon Storytelling Basket

Thursday, 3 March 2016

Oh my, Goodnight Moon is one of my kids favourite books and I can’t wait to share with you the contents of our storytelling basket! I assembled it over the weekend and both Vito and Mavi are having fun tinkering and exploring the objects.

I read this book everynight. It’s calming, relaxing… makes them ponder of what’s out there in the night, letting them observe their room and the silence of the night. And may I just say, there is so much love in the story. The old lady as I would always say to the boys, is lovingly watching her little kid going to sleep, just like most Mommies do!

So this is our storybasket where I placed all of our objects and the book. I put this on the top of the shelf. Some of the items here are small so I need to assist and supervise whenever they play with it. Items here were from the following Playmobil playsets:

The clock was from Amazon, the moon is a DIY, the kittens were from Safari Toob Domestic Cats and the bears were from Learning Resources counting bears.

Now, we’ve read this book a hundred times LOL. Vito knows this by heart. So he knows each of the objects in the book and he was quite fascinated that he gets to see them and touch them personaly! Take a look at our three little bears sitting on chairs, the comb, brush and the bowl full of mash!

He obviously loves the bears!

But his favourite of all was the clock! Now I highly suggest that you read the book to your child first. Give it a week of reading before starting the storytelling basket as there might be times they’ll get distracted of the toys. When that happens, just allow your child to play with it for as long as he wants.

Vito can’t take his eyes from this clock so we have to pause and explore this. We talked about the numbers and hands and he was fascinated!

I hope you like this post. It will give you an idea on how to put fun into your reading time. We previously had the Papa Please Get the Moon For Me and it was also a hit!

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Dr. Seuss Books and Activities and {Learn & Play Link Up}

Wednesday, 2 March 2016

Celebrating Dr. Seuss Day, I’m featuring 5 fantastic posts of Dr. Seuss! We have a lot of Dr. Seuss books at home and they were Mavi’s first set of books. I used the book Put me in the Zoo to teach Vito all about colors. Check here or click the image below for details.

Now for this week’s featured posts!

The Use of Funnel for Toddlers

Tuesday, 1 March 2016

Vito is 28 months old.

I recently introduced the use of funnel to Vito and boy oh boy, it’s non stop play!

The addition of funnel in our beans and water transfer has added an extra spice in Vito’s daily activity. He’s been doing activities like pouring and scooping for quite sometime now and let’s say he’s getting tired of it. So to explore the other capabilities of pouring, I added funnel in his activity tray.

Benefits of using funnel or tubing:

the difference between wide and small mouthed containers. Make sure that the bottle is clear so the child can see the flow for the elements.
from one step water transfer to pour-funnel-pour procedure (additional step)
learn the concept of water flow

Children are fascinated with water and by making the flow. The use of funnel is one of these elements that can help children understand about small spaces and how the flow of water works. They will discover that to easily transfer water to a small mouthed container, they’ll be needing a tubing or funnel to successfully pour elements into it.

To demonstrate here’s a video of Vito transferring lentils and water using a funnel.

Your kids will definitely have fun with this one, mine can’t stop playing! Hope that this will work on you!

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St. Patrick’s Day Activities for 28 Months Toddler

Sunday, 28 February 2016

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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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Having Fun with London Playsets & Cards

Friday, 26 February 2016

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We are all in love with our wooden London Playset/s which we acquired recently. It’s so precious and beautiful that I can’t seem to take it out the bag!

Now how do we use these figures?

As LEGO would say it, “imagination is the limit!”, we use these wooden materials in so many ways! We use it for imaginative play, setting up the London city with trains and cars and use our Playmobil figures to play pretend as tourists.

And to enhance its educational value, I created a picture booklet with cards so we can learn more about the story behind the icons. Another playset we’re using is the Playmobil where we’re using the Queen as an additional character in our set. The picture book that we have has this beautiful clip arts of United Kingdom’s landmarks (including Scotland and Wales). Mavi reads the picture book as he identifies the figure.

Vito is the one who mostly uses the cards (Mavi uses the outline pages for colouring) as he loves identifying and matching things.

Now a little bit of the London playset, the Big Ben and London Bridge are stackable, and is made up of little pieces. It doesn’t bother me though. Mavi suggests we glue them but I don’t really want to do that. The London Eye is impressive, Vito loves to spin it!

Of course, it wouldn’t be London without those iconic “red” buses, guards, postal kiosk and telephone box.

I am so pleased with this toy, and when not in use as a toy, you can display it in your shelf to add colours to your sitting room. I couldn’t recommend this enough!

If you are interested in our United Kingdom Picture Book (which includes the cards as well), click here or the image below to purchase. It’s absolutely worth-it!

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