Play dough Easter Eggs- Sorting Big, Medium and Little Eggs

During the week we decided to have an Easter Egg sale! Little Boo mentioned doing her play dough cake stall so I suggested because it was Easter that we make an Easter egg stall instead.  She was really keen so we set to work making the Play dough Easter Eggs to sell to her customers. Little Boo had a great time decorating the eggs with buttons and some sparkly gems. 

We then set up the stall and Little Boo sorted out the eggs into Big, Medium and Little sizes.  We made labels for the prices which Little Boo was keen to cut out and trace over the writing. 

Then the customers came to buy their eggs! 

The ABC cafe

I found this wonderful printable called ABC Cafe  it is fantastic Little Boo spent ages playing.  The idea is that the customers make their orders by all having letters which represent the food they want to order.  The printable then has foods which begin with each letter of the alphabet so all you do is match the correct food to the letter of their order or vice versa. Little Boo wrote down their orders, then had fun finding the correct food.

To help her I placed a choice of three foods for her to match as having all the foods was a bit overwhelming. As you can see from the picture we used Little Boo's Dolls to play but the printable does provide customers as well! We had about three tables in the end.  Hope that you find this idea fun.  I love it when I find something for free.

Numbers and Letters Box

A few months ago we sorted out all Little Boos toys and placed them into categories. Sad, I know but this has really helped me with our day to day activities. I know if she wants to play at fancy dress that the box is ready and waiting we also have ones for sticker/colouring books, play food and dolly things .  I just wish that all my stuff was this organised! Anyway, I wanted to share with you what we have in the Numbers and Letters box.  This is used to inspire Little Boo with numbers, letters and colours.

In the box we have things that we have collected over time such as free toys from magazines.  These we use as a matching activity or to count.

Buttons can be used for a multitude of things counting, sorting the biggest from the smallest, sorting into colours, making patterns or counting out a set amount. More ideas are on The Activity Mom .

Pebbles these we have used to count and to place around letters. I am also going to paint/collage a few with Little Boo and place letters on them so she can spell out her name.

We have a leap frog fridge magnet alphabet set . Little Boo has had this since she was really Little in the old house we had it on our fridge and she used to play with it loads and often dance to the tune.  Unfortunately this seems out of stock at the moment but leap frog also do a Letter Factory which looks really good and the same sort of concept.

There is a large tub of colour animal counters which I got from the education show last year at a very good price.  These have been great to sort into colours and group or count them.  There is also a tub of play animals that Little Boo likes to match up and place in groups then count them.

There are some animal dominoes in the box which Little Boo is getting really good at playing. This is great to learn matching and also learning to take turns whilst playing games. The musical instruments are included as very often we play a beat then Little Boo tries to copy what I have just done.

The wooden fruits are a fantastic threading set that I brought from the education show a few years ago (again at a much cheaper price) when Little Boo was just learning to thread.  They are lovely to use and are made for younger children to practice threading we also use them to make patterns with now.

The bus is a laminated sheet from twinkle where we count the people onto the bus. I have printed some flash cards with different amounts of pennies on them as well from Twinkle.

The most important thing is to make it all FUN! and keep adding things to it as your child progresses. 

Find your name in the bath

Little Boo has shown interest in learning how to spell her own name.  I have seen letters and numbers that you can take into the bath.  However, rather than spend a fortune buying these I decided to make some letters out of fun foam so we could play at catching the letters in the bath.  Once Little Boo had caught them I helped her to put then in the correct place to spell her name as the fun foam sticks to the wall once it is wet. She really enjoyed this activity and it was great fun to catch the letters.

Busy bags 4

Little Boo loves Charlie and Lola so I was really pleased when I found this dress up game on Cbeebies website. I coloured In the images but older children would probably enjoy doing this themselves. I then laminated it ready for use. This game was never intended for use as a travel game but rethinking the idea and having used it (in the car) I think I needed to add some magnets onto the pieces if we intend to use it as a travel game again. It was good fun but the pieces were slipping everywhere in the car which got frustrating.

There are some other busy bag items which I brought all rather cheap. The first a small magnetic sketch board. A Mr potato head where you attach his facial features. This was a good game to learn where parts of the face go using a lot of position words to explain as Little Boo was playing. The last brought item is shoe lacing.

As mentioned earlier on the blog I wanted to make Little Boo some more threading cards with all the letters of her name. I have done this as a busy bag idea and it has worked well. I am hoping this will help with learning the letters of her name.      

                                                                         

Busy bags part 3

The next three busy bags that I am sharing with you are threading inspired. I am sure some of you may have seen our post on the Sellotape reel threading. For this I created a threading game for Little Boo out of Sellotape reels. These are great to transport as all is needed is the reels and threading material. Little Boo loves threading so this always keeps her happy and busy.

Another threading bag just contains coloured beads and some pipe cleaners that are the same colours as the beads. The idea is that the beads can be matched to the same colour pipe cleaner. However, Little Boo also enjoyed just twisting the pipe cleaners around each other as well or just making mommy pretty bracelets.

Button practise is the next busy bag this was inspired from tried and trues post on busy bag swaps.  It is simple to make and cheap as I already had loads of felt. The idea is to improve skills with using a button. Little Boo can use the button to put the felt shapes onto the ribbon. This was easy to make and can be used for pattern making and/or colour recognition. Little Boo enjoyed this as I started to make it more and more challenging with the patterns. The only problem was that the felt holes will stretch so be careful when little one is using this especially if they get frustrated if they can not button one on.

Hope that you liked these ideas there are a few more tomorrow :) 

Busy bags part 2

Today I have three more of our busy bag ideas to share with you. First of all I decided to place all our busy bags in clear pencil cases which were purchased at 99p each.  These have been plenty big enough and enable Little Boo and me to see what is in each bag. I could of brought the binder pencil cases and was considering this until I saw that they were quite expensive.

First of all is the sandpaper and wool bag. The idea came from Modern parents messy kids blog . This is a great bag as the ideas are so versatile children can either make letters numbers or simple patterns. This bag is so easy to transport as well. The sandpaper I brought from the pound  shop so it was not very expensive at all.  The wool was brought from a  local shop and was £2.00 for each massive ball.  I had these in though as I have used wool before.

The next bag was so easy to get ready and probably the most popular with Little Boo. I have recently brought some little animals for her initial sounds tubs so have placed some of these into a bag with green, blue and brown felt or card. This means we can play a game of where does the animal live grass, water or mud.

The last bag I am sharing with you today is the lollipop sticks and velcro. This idea was again inspired from the web and Tots Treasures. Little Boo was able to make shapes and patterns with these or stack them. The only problem is that I did not find these very appropriate for in the car as they ended up everywhere as she pulled them out the bag or apart. I decided to hot glue gun all the Velcro onto our Lollipop sticks simply for the fact that when I made these before Little Boo very easily picked the Velcro off them.

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!!!

s is for...

I have decided to start creating initial sounds tubs for Little Boo.  The idea is that each tub contains items that begin with the initial sound.  We will be sharing these tubs with you every week and our progress on learning the alphabet.  I really want learning the alphabet to be a fun and interesting activity for Little Boo so I think that this will really help.

I am hoping that this can be a joint venture as creating the tubs will hopefully be really interesting as well. Today we are starting with the letter s for seaside.  I also wanted to start learning the alphabet firstly covering all the letters in Little Boos name.  Even though I am not a preschool teacher I use a lot of sensory activities at work to teach the alphabet as I find that this is very effective when working with adults with severe learning difficulties.  The ability to be able to feel and handle a 3D letter is more engaging.  Being dyslexic myself I also think of ways that I would of liked to have been taught the alphabet basically we need to have fun!

We first of all decided to make pretty the letter s that I made ages ago.  I have been waiting to decorate this the idea is at the end we will have a full set of our own alphabet.  I realise that I have not detailed very well how I made these so will revisit this post and take more pictures. I made my own purely for the fact that I wanted lower case letters and wanted them in a suitable typeface.

The letter s had loads of stars stuck to it and it looked very sparkly by the time it was finished!

Then just a few simple games to reuse those cd cases! I made these up in a few minutes and they were a hit! I was unsure about the finding the letter s one but Little Boo did really well. I am going to get a box set up of these all ready to play with.

I managed to pick up these lovely pebbles from a local shop to be honest we love the noise they make but they were also great for placing on the letter s.  We later placed glow in the dark stars in the shape of the letter s and looked at this in our den, great fun.

We have made a start on our letters book.  For this I have used a sandpaper and bubble wrap letter s in the centre. The idea with this is that Little Boo can feel the letters with her hands and feet.

There was a selection of images that Little Boo could choose from which all begin with s.

Very keen to feel the letters 

After all of this we then had fun choosing what to put in the initial sounds tub

A while ago I posed about sparkly letters this activity could also be done to help write the letters.

When it came to bed time I asked Little Boo to spot the s in the book she did really well.

Whilst doing the crafts today we listened to music and it really helped Little Boos concentration. Why have I not thought of this sooner?

We have also now done letter a activities as well  hope that you enjoy this as well.  The letters are now a Weekly feature so be sure to check back whilst we share a letter a week.

Peg out the Alphabet

Whilst doing our Bear Hunt activity I thought about using the washing line for an alphabet theme. Little Boo loved pegging out the letters. At first we just pegged out the letters then I thought we could add items that began with the letters.

I went into the kitchen and emerged with an apple, banana and Little Boos Crocs! Little Boo did well and may even be able to match them herself after a while. We only did up to d (as I happened to spot Dogger in the living room). To do the activity I just printed out some letters (comic sans is probably best font to use due to formation of the letter a) placed them in the plastic wallets (with a little help from Boo, it also makes it easier to peg them on) placed two of our dining chairs in the living room then used wool around them to make the line.  I stayed with Little Boo the whole time we did the activity for safety as well at to help her complete it. Hope this has given you some inspiration it is a really simple activity.

Our completed line

Improving Fine Motor skills using pegs.