Getting busy with busy bags

Apologies for technical problems I have now sorted the photographs issue.  I now have realised that I have to resize all my images before uploading them to my picassa web albums so have had the wonderful task of opening each photo on my blog and resizing it.  All worth it though as I have found out a new way of editing the photographs hopefully making them more appealing for everyone.

On the same line as technology I thought that I would also share with you that I can now manage my Facebook page via my mobile phone.  This means that when I return to work and University even if I am unable to do a blog post I will be sharing a photograph with you via facebook.  This may be a book that we have read and enjoyed, a toy from the toy library or an image of what we have been doing.  I hope that this will enable me a way to stay in contact with my readers even when life gets busier again so be sure to "like" the page. I know a lot already have so thank you for that.

Over this next few days I am going to share with you some busy bag ideas.  I have always wanted to make up some busy bags and have started to collate ideas on Pinterest to inspire me. I decided to make these a few days ago and all of them were really simple to make apart from a small incident with my hot glue gun, I forgot how much it hurts to burn yourself! please be careful.

The first one I have shared with you is the magnetic busy tin. In this box are Pom poms that have magnetic sheet placed on the back to make them Magnetic. With thanks to Planet of the Apels  for this idea initially and The Journals of Laura Ingalls Wannabe.  (I could of used magnets but I knew I had this in and did not want to fork out a lot of money buying magnets). I have in this box confessions of a homeschoolers print out  the Pom poms can be placed in the boxes as a counting activity. If you have not been to this blog I suggest that you try it out there are some FANTASTIC resources on there the woman is amazing!. The magnetic numbers in the tin can also be matched to the numbers on the cards.

In this box are the funny faces magnetic travel tin that I shared a few months ago.  Little Boo loves this activity and I thought it would be fun to add this to the tin as well. This way Little Boo gets a choice of which activity she would prefer to do.

I have placed a die inside this tin as well.  Little Boo loves shaking this and playing with it so I thought this would be a fun way to encourage her to count out the dots and then match the number of dots to the number of pom poms that she counts out. There is also the opportunity to encourage children to make patterns with the Pom Poms over at Bubbles and bobbins blog there are some wonderful PDF print outs we are also going to give these a try. I may even make some of our own watch this space...

PRICE BREAKDOWN

I am trying to make the bags for as little money as possible as I know many of us like to save money. So thought I would provide a break down of the prices.

Tin- Free (my husband was given some lovely cakes at work that cam in this tin, needless to say I ate most of the cakes)
pom poms- £1 for 200 from pound shop
magnetic sheet- £1 for 2 sheets
magnetic numbers- £2
die- FREE taken out of a  game that was being thrown out


Please feel free to share this idea google+ it Facebook it, Twitter about it or now I have added the option to Pin it. I am addicted to Pinterest!!!

Exploring portraits with toddlers

Today we decided to look at faces! Yesterday we had a great experience in art gallery looking at  portraits there so I decided this would be a good idea for today.  The art gallery had a room in which sculptures could be felt. This allowed us to explore the faces more.

At first we looked at the art work available on the BBC website the idea behind this website is that 200,000 paintings will be digitised so that they can be made more accessible and enjoyed.  The brilliant thing is, is that the images have been tagged and therefore easy to search by what is in the painting.  This makes the website a brilliant resource and so easy to use! simply searching the word "portrait" gave us loads to look at.

Little Boo decided that she wanted to use some Play-dough so I made up a massive batch of cooked play-dough.  I put loads of different items out for her to use to create the faces these included

• Googly eyes
• Gems
• Dry pasta
• Dry spaghetti
• Pipe cleaners
• Straws
• Lollipop Sticks 
• Scissors
• Bottle Tops

We have done our funny faces activity.  I have done this before with Little Boo and she loves it, it also helps her to know the places where the eyes, nose and mouth go on the face.  This activity is really easy to get ready as all that is needed is some magazines and then you just cut out the eyes, noses, mouths and hair.

We had a go at using some play-dough mats that are available at twinkl these worked really well and Little Boo enjoyed making them. 

This one is Daddy! 

It has been fun doing all about faces and incorporates an element of maths as Little Boo started talking about how many eyes there should be. 

Busy tin tried and tested

Thankfully I have been supplied with another metal tin.  This was fantastic as a few weeks ago we all went on a rather rainy camping holiday to Forest of Dean and I was looking for games to take which Little Boo could play.  

The idea for these funny faces came from another post that I have done which is very similar. I was trying to think how to make the idea portable so came up with magnetic funny faces. After a quick Google search for cartoon eyes and cartoon mouths I found ones that I liked put them onto a word document then printed them onto magnetic paper. Luckily the magnetic paper is currently in stock at the local poundland so was £1 for two sheets.  This makes this busy tin a very cheap idea.

This idea is so simple and Little Boo loved playing with them.  Sorry the image is bad we were in the tent!

Hope that this provides you all with some inspiration.  I have also considered using this at work as one of the units I teach is all about emotions the different faces could be made up to display the different emotions.