Storage

Today I worked on organizing my son's toys.  I made categories for all of our multi-coloured Ikea bins. I put painter's tape labels on them today and will finalize everything tomorrow and make proper labels for them.  It's a big task. I still have some bins that have an assortment of stuff in them. Those have to be finalized tomorrow.  Once it's all done, I will be posting pictures, maybe even tomorrow.

Our latest fun times!

Sensory Bin Fun!

He loves filling the trucks with the rocks!

We added some of his small trains and Cars toys to the macaroni.  He was so excited to find those things hidden in there.

These are some of the words we have posted on our mantle that he can read.  As you can see, they are words that are important to him.

I think a bulletin board is very important for all children to display their artwork.  That way they can take great pride in what they do.  Logan is always happy to show people what he has done.  I purged his bulletin board yesterday so we could display his new works of art.

I bought this AB Seas fishing game off a neighbour for $2.  I love Facebook Swap and Shops!  It's a great game.  He fishes for letters with a magnetic fishing rod.  He catches a capital letter and then has to match it to a lower case letter on the board. There are various games you can play with it.  One could easily make their own ABC Fishing game.

Our pug, Keiki is never far from her boy!

First thing this morning, Logan went straight to the rock sensory bin!  It's a definite hit!

Love the dollar store! I bought a set of 26 letters  for $2.

We started the painting project with the letters to spell his name.

He loved painting and choosing the colours that he wanted to paint his name with.  He chose his new favourite colour blue first.  (It used to be yellow.)

He started to ask for more letters. This activity was great for him as an introduction for him to learn how to form the letters.

This is how many letters his attention span was good for!

For this project, I used painter's tape.  Then I put dabs of finger paint all over the paper.

He started out a little timid to get paint everywhere so I had to add more finger paint and really talk him into spreading it around!

Daddy also had to talk him into doing more painting. Then we had success!

Taking the tape off was a bit of a challenge but here is the final result!!

Too many days of rain and we took to the garage to ride his trike!

He also enjoyed playing soccer!

Then the boys had fun playing hockey!

It was a busy but fun day!

Pinwheel

Shamrock Pinwheel

This activity was not a success! My husband thought a pinwheel would be a good idea.  As it turns out we made this shamrock too big. The instructions said to make the leaves 3" tall as mine were about 5" or so!  I should have followed the instructions.  Oh well, better luck next time!

Hand Butterfly

HAND BUTTERFLY

This was a quick one.  I traced my son's hands and let him colour them in before I cut them out.  I made the body and antenna out of the same piece of paper. I used fancy scrapbooking scissors to add some fun to it. My son loves using those scissors.  If I hold the paper sideways he is able to cut it with 2 hands. Hopefully soon he will be able to cut using only one hand!

No Mess Finger Painting!

No Mess Finger Painting!

For this activity, I squeezed a bit of finger paint into a ziplock bag.  Seal the ziplock bag.  Tape the ziplock bag onto a white piece of paper.  Then my son had a ton of fun squishing the paint around with his fingers.  At first he looked to see if there was paint on his fingers!  It was cute.  

Eventually he grabbed the bag and paper and really scrunched it all up. 

It actually made a really cool effect!

Reading!

READING!!

My son is very much into reading these days. He knows all his letter names and their sounds.  He can also read 12 words now.  We created these pictures today to add to his list of words he can read. You can tell he really enjoyed colouring the bus!  Once he can associate them with their pictures, then I will take the pictures away and just have him read the words in different environments.  Of course all the words he reads are concrete things that he is interested in! And yes, I am very proud mom!! :-)

Our Family Story Book

Our Family Story Book

I thought it would be fun to write a book together as a family.  Of course with the attention span of a toddler, it had to be short and sweet.  I did the writing with input from my son and my husband. My husband drew the pictures and my son did the colouring.  I think it's a pretty good story for our first one!

We were definitely tired at the end of the story!!

Frozen Yogurt Drops

Frozen Yogurt Drops

My son and I love these!  I took some Strawberry Activia and gave it a stir.  I put it in a Ziploc Bag, cut a small hole in the corner and then dapped it into drops onto a cookie sheet.  Put it in the freezer for an hour or more and you have a delicious treat. 

I find freezing the yogurt makes it taste less sweet for some reason.  I learned that it is best to freeze the bowl that you are going to put them into as they melt really quickly.  Also only put a small amount in a bowl.  Keep the rest in the freezer and add more to your bowl as you finish those ones.  

I found they came off the cookie sheet pretty easily with a spatula.

My next project will be to see if I can make interesting shaped yogurt drops such as hearts or shamrocks.

Finger Paint Hand Tree

FINGER PAINT HAND TREE

I had my son do some random finger painting on finger paint paper.   A few days later we traced his hands twice on that very dry paper.  I drew a trunk and cut all the pieces out.  My 2 year old enjoyed squeezing out the white glue and gluing all the pieces onto the black paper. I dated it so we will know how old those hands were!

Sensory Tub Fun

ROCK SENSORY TUB

Today I made some sensory bins for my 2 year old.  I have been looking at all kinds of them on pinterest so I decided to make my own but adapt them to suit the needs of a two year old.  This bin is filled with small stones. I added some blue glass stones, pink rocks and larger black stones.  Eventually I will use these different types of stones for sorting. I wrote my son's name on a couple of the larger black stones. Then I wrote each letter of the alphabet on the small white stones with the upper case on one side and the lower case on the other side.  We also put some words that he can read on the rocks and added numbers so he can learn his numbers.  We made dice dots on some of them too.  I hid various things in the rocks but he is mostly just interested in dumping the rocks into buckets and dump trucks!  


This activity is great as it held my son's attention span for a VERY long time!!  It was the perfect activity for him since it's too cold to go to the beach.  I like the educational components to it.  Next time we will count, sort, do an alphabet hunt, and look for various colours of items.

MACARONI SENSORY TUB

The second bin we tried was with macaroni.  It was a little bit too full. I would recommend only filling the bin 1/4 to 1/2 full.  Had I known how messy it was going to be, I would not have bought any macaroni for a 2 year old!  My kitchen is literally covered in noodles. They are easy to sweep up but if you are a neat freak, don't bother trying it!  The part I do like about the macaroni is that you can easily slide your hands into it so you get the true sensory part of the sensory bin.  My son and I love to bury our hands in it.    I hid a bunch of his toys in there, along with some dice and other craft materials. I gave him a rake but I would recommend that for when he is older as he does not have good control of it and flings macaroni everywhere!


As I type this blog, my son has been happily playing with these 2 bins for over 2 hours and is still enjoying himself.


This was a great investment for an activity and all it took was a trip to the dollar store!