Sand Play

Large Grape Juice Bottle

Large Sprinkle Container

3 Liter Soda Bottle

Vinegar Bottle

Large Stainless Steel Bowl and a Bus tub of some kind from Business Costco:)

These added so much fun to the sand box for the kids!

Spooning Colored Marbles Tray Activity

Here is how the tray looks on the shelf.

The child turns each cup in the stack over in a row. Then they spoon each marble(from a cheap Chinese checkers game) into the cups while sorting the colors.

When they are done, they gently pour each cup back into the dish and stack the cups up.

Then they return it to the shelf the same way they found it:)

I love the sensory stimulation in activities like this, the sight of the colors, the sound of the balls clinking one by one! Love it!

Family Tree For Children

I have been meaning to do this project for over 2 years now! I don’t know why I waited so long! It was really simple once I gathered all of the pictures!

Here’s how to do it for yourself!

1. Grab pictures of each family member you want to include(I snagged a bunch off of facebook-right click-save as). Collect them all into one folder and crop them so that all you see is their face. I made sure every picture was in portrait so they would all be the same.

2. Select all of the photos and then click print.

3. Select “Contact Sheet”

4. They should look like this when they print. Just Laminate, Cut, and stick Magnets on the back of each picture!

The first thing we did was put them on our white board. We talked about our family and doodled.

We plan to write names, tell stories, sort(age, type of relative), learn dates of birth, and even use it to talk about serious things like death, divorce, adoption and other “life” situations. It’s also a great way to help kids know who family members are before they come visit or before we go visit them!

Tray Activities

Tray activities are out on a shelf in our school room and open for the kids to use as freely as they want.

This first one is so simple but I loved the metal cups(business Costco but I've seen them at wal-mart too). They make a really nice clinking noise as they take them off of the stack. The glass gems(dollarstore) are together in a plastic bowl.

 The idea is to have the child unstack the cups and put 1 gem in each of the 10 cups. This teaches one to one correspondence and problem solving skills(in the picture Drake realized that he didn't have a gem for the last cup so he started to look in other cups and found that he had put 2 in another cup).

 This next activity is just little rings in a cardboard jewelry box. Open and close plus it is just pleasant to touch the tiny rings. Bonus(that I didn't plan) is the child can sort the colors.

This last one is nuts and bolts from the hardware store mixed with a set from the target dollar spot. I loved how contrasted the colors, textures and weights were! The kids really liked all of these activities:)

Here another post I did for this blog I write for. I thought it was a really great activity for rhyming!

I posted on a blog that I write for if you want to check out this post. It was one I really enjoyed writing and I think it has some great tips for doing simple math:) Click here or the photo to check it out:)