Toddler Ideas Tuesday: March 11th, 2014

Welcome back to Toddler Idea Tuesdays! Have you been busy with your young children?

This week I would like to share our St. Patrick's Day Sensory Bin.

In this tub you will find:

Green rice

Colored pasta (in all 6 colors of the rainbow)

Pompoms (small, medium and large of all 6 colors)

Pipe cleaners (again, in all 6 colors)

Gold coins

The children loved placing the pasta on the pipe cleaners. 

I had hoped they would match the colors, but that hasn't really happened yet. Hannah may have been trying, but she did get some blue in with the green.

Now that they have had a chance to use the color sensory tub I have buried some of the items in the hopes they will go digging for it.

I just wanted to share that the children also help dye the pasta and the rice. It is a great opportunity for counting one-to-one and also for observing color mixing.  We used the same instructions for dyeing the rice/pasta as we did the last time we did this. 

You need 1 cup of rice or about 15-20 noodles

1 tsp of rubbing alcohol (much better results than vinegar)

6 drops of food coloring

plastic zippy bags. 

All you need to do is pour the alcohol in the bag, add the food coloring and mix it together. Then you add the rice/noodles, zip the bag shut and shake. You have to be a bit more careful with the pasta so it doesn't break.

Pour it onto a cookie sheet lined with foil or wax paper and let it dry.

Now onto:

Toddler Idea Tuesday Features

Lisa from Our Country Road shared her Preschool Totschool Wrap Up post filled with fun Fruit Themed Tray ideas.

There are color matching and fruit matching activities, along with sorting and counting. She also shared some great Montessori activities, including fruit prep. 

Jennifer from Hint Mama shared 7 Easy & Frugal DIY Ball Pit Ideas Beyond Plastic Swimming Pools.

There are so many great ideas, sure to keep kids busy for a while.

What sort of activities do you do with your toddler? Do you have some favorite activities you would like to share? How about some fun St. Patrick's Day activities or crafts?  I invite you to link up below. I will be pinning posts on my Toddler Ideas board and I would love to feature some of the activities each week from what is linked up. Please know I may share a picture from your post and link back to it, along with sharing how we used your idea in our toddler time. By linking up you are giving me permission to use a picture from your post. I will ALWAYS give credit and link back. Additionally, if you choose to try out any of the ideas with your toddler, please make sure you give credit where credit is due.

Started "N" lessons

At the beginning of last week I was feeling so encouraged. I had prepared our lessons for the letter N. Then we each took turns being sick. So we didn't get to do everything exactly as planned. But, we are continuing "N" this week.

So, on to the lessons/projects that we got done. Though I was feeling blah on Monday Amelia really seemed like she wanted to do something. So after dinner I let her glue shredded brown paper on her nest and then glue on her eggs that she colored blue. I had planned on them painting a tree/branch on some construction paper so we could glue the nest full of eggs to it, but that hasn't happened yet. Tabitha hasn't even had a chance to glue the eggs on as they got misplaced. I believe we will finish this project this week.

Next we dyed noodles. The girls helped count 10 rigatoni noodles into each bag, we did all six colors of the rainbow. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple (ok, we didn't do indigo). In order to dye the noodles I looked on various sites to get the instructions. I found two different options. Use rubbing alcohol or white vinegar. Using the vinegar was suggested to make them safer for the children and to make them edible. I chose to do an experiment. With the girls help we did the vinegar option. Here are the directions:

1) Place noodles in zippy plastic bag. (Lots of practice counting to 10)

2) Add 1 teaspoon of vinegar (or rubbing alcohol)

3) Add 5 drops of food coloring

4) Squish and shake the bag up until the color is evenly distributed and soaking into the noodles.

5) After finished with all the colors you are doing gently dump them onto wax paper (I covered cookie sheets with the wax paper so I could have room on my counter)

6) Let dry.

I did the rubbing alcohol version after the children were busy in the other room.

What I discovered was we prefer the rubbing alcohol. The colors come out much brighter and seem to be "soaked into" the noodles more thoroughly. Also, the vinegar ones became brittle. I can break them with slight pressure between my thumb and index finger. The ones with the rubbing alcohol didn't break with even more pressure. (Though they do break if you step on them! Ooops!)

Left-vinegar/Right-rubbing alcohol

I won't post all the colors, I figured these give the general idea. Of course if you want to use them for cooking you'll want to use the vinegar. But we used them the following day to make noodle necklaces and we really couldn't use ones that were cracked down the side.

Surprisingly, Tabitha did a great job threading the noodles onto yarn. I say surprisingly because we have never done it before. Even Amelia had the idea, she just couldn't get it to go through. I plan to keep practicing with this activity to help the fine motor skills. One little trick I tried was to leave the yarn attached to the skein so it wouldn't fall off the other end as they threaded. It worked really well!

In the above pictures the girls are standing in front of our Nn poster. I usually cut the N's out. I cut them out in green for the poster, white for our alphabet chart and the cover of their letter/sound books and black for inside the sound books. That was one thing I didn't feel was important last week as I was sick.

The words I chose to put on cards for this week that I could find sign language signs for are: nurse, nest and nickel. The other words I put on word cards are narwal, numbat, Noah's ark, and newt. We also learned to signs for noodle and necklace. Our verse for this week is :

No man can serve two masters...Ye cannot serve God and mammon. Matthew 6:24