Saturday, February 22, 2014

Edible Art

I recently found a website called makinglearningfun.com. It has lots of printables for crafts and learning activities for kids. A few of the printouts that I found are for use with dot markers or dot stickers. I found one of a peacock with the suggestion to use Fruit Loops for the dots. We didn't have Fruit Loops at home but we did have Fruity Cheerios. So we gave it a shot.

We started out by coloring the peacock. Then I added dots of glue and let Noah put on the cereal pieces.


 

Noah really had fun with this. I skipped around the page when doing my glue dots because I expected him to get bored with it. To my surprise, he enjoyed it enough to finish the whole thing. It was pretty cute when it was all filled in.

We did a second one later in the day with a dinosaur. At that point, Noah was for more interested in eating the cereal than putting it on the paper. But we did manage to finish it. I think this is an activity we will be repeating often in the future.



Lessons for Mommy

I've learned that being a parent tends to highlight things about you the parent as you try to teach new skills to your child. One thing that I already knew about myself is that I really like for things to be balanced and symmetrical. This means watching Noah build his block towers that are neither of these things can make me a little crazy. I have to practice a great deal of restraint so that I don't take over his building project to make it the nice symmetrical tower I would like for it to be. He doesn't know anything about symmetry, and even if he did, I'm not sure he would care. This is a good lesson for me in letting things go so that he is free to express himself and learn on his own. All I need is a few deep breaths.




Friday, February 21, 2014

When Dinner Attacks

I was trying to find some form of bread to cook with dinner tonight and pulled a can of biscuits out of the back of the refrigerator. When I opened them, they literally exploded all over the kitchen. This picture only shows part of the mess that was spread all over the place. I guess they had been in the fridge a little longer than I thought.


Friday, February 7, 2014

Let's Race

One of Noah's favorite things to do is race his cars off our coffee table. Step one: get them all lined up neatly in a row.


Step two: start at the end and launch them one after the other off the table.



I'm not sure why he thinks this is so much fun, but he really gets into it. He'll send them all flying, then line them up and do it again. As long as it keeps him entertained and nothing gets broken, I'm okay with letting the race go on.

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Spill the Beans

This morning I was trying to find something that would entertain Noah for a while. I dumped a bunch of beans into a plastic container and gave him a few scoops and cups to play with.



He seemed to really enjoy it. He would fill a scoop, dump it into a cup, then dump them back in the container and start over. I scooped some with him for a while and then walked away to check my email for work. When I came back in a couple of minutes, this had happened.


I couldn't even be mad at him. It was my fault for leaving him alone. He got down on the floor and helped me pick up as much as we could, and then I vacuumed up the small pieces that had broken off. It took quite a while to clean up the mess and then bean time was over. Lesson learned: never leave a boy and his beans unattended.

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

A New Method

I'm always checking Pinterest for interesting new things to do with Noah. One thing I saw was painting with bath sponges. I found some small ones at Wal-Mart and decided to give it a try.


Noah dove right in and quickly covered the paper with paint. I tried this myself and discovered that if it's done carefully and neatly, it looks a bit like fireworks.


But what two year old cares about being careful and neat? Certainly not mine. He mixed the colors all together until he had covered the entire page. He then asked for a paintbrush to add a little more texture to his creation.


When he was finished, I wrote his name in his painting with my finger.


Noah stepped away from the paint, feeling satisfied with his creation, and said "No more". This little activity kept us busy for about 15 minutes or so. That's pretty good in my book.

Sunday, February 2, 2014

Line 'em Up

Every now and then, a boy needs to see all his cars all lined up. And sometimes, he realizes the window is non longer big enough to hold all of his cars. Does this mean we have too many? Probably not. Just means we need bigger windows.