3D Painting

Toddler+

I just love spring flowers!  Every once in awhile we treat ourselves to a fresh centerpiece of daffodils or tulips, but it costs enough that we don't keep a fresh bouquet on our dining room table constantly.  So I thought - why not have S paint a centerpiece for us?  This also got me thinking about how most of S's painting is two dimensional.  I thought she might find painting in three dimensions unusual (and maybe a bit more interesting?).  

I knew I wanted to making something spring-themed, and I immediately thought of daffodils.  I'd seen several renditions of homemade craft daffodils on the internet (and by that, I really mean Pinterest) using egg cartons, so I thought I'd give it a try.  I wanted to use all recycled materials, so I raided our recycling container for anything that might be useful.  I ended up settling on some thin cardboard for the base and the white sturdy paper (not so much cardboard but somewhere between that and cardstock in thickness) that the Hanna Andersson unders came in (hahaha).  I wanted the stems to be sturdy, so I used the corners of the orange juice container for those.

S and I observed and counted the petals and leaves on the daffodils in our deck planters (the ones we planted together in this post).  We made sure that the replicas I was making were true to the original.  S also helped me determine the placement of the flowers, grass, and Easter eggs (she had to have Easter eggs, of course!).  After cutting all the requisite shapes, I used my hot glue gun to give structure to the whole thing (regular glue would not have been supportive enough, I fear).

Then she was ready to begin!  She has recently learned the difference between 2D and 3D and kept exclaiming "it's so weird to paint in 3D, Mama!" over and over.  So cute.

She had to bend and twist her hands and body to get into the little spaces; she needed to bend and move the parts of the flowers.  It was a lot more challenging than painting a 2D project for sure!

She had SO much fun painting the ground brown.  She spent a painstakingly long time getting it just right.

Here she's spun the piece around to get to some different parts of it.

After painting the ground so very carefully, she ended up wanting to take a break and finished the project the following day (this is often the case with projects she's taking her time on - she'll spent 30-45 very focused minutes before wanting a break.  To her credit, she does come back and finish (also doing a nice job) the following day).  Here's her final product!  The tiny gold glitter is a bit hard to get out of the shaker, so she had me dispense the glitter on the flowers; however all of the other painting was done totally by her.  We just love the bright colors of our new spring centerpiece, and S had a great time mixing things up by painting in 3D!

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LED Lights

Infant +

I saw these crazy LED lights used here and thought that X and S would just love them.  You can find them for $1.77 on Ebay, so I was for sure interested in giving them a try.  The Imagination Tree had used them to make a sensory tunnel for their baby, and S and I did construct a tunnel, but X was NOT a fan of it.  S liked it more, but really we could have done without it.  Both of my kids honestly just enjoyed the experience of playing with something lit up in the dark!

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The lights have several different settings - most are static, but one option rotates through all the colors.  X was fascinated.

The long plastic fronds (?) were also super enticing, and he enjoyed watching them move as he touched them.

He loves to inspect everything very thoroughly, and here he's checking out the bottom of the light.

I bought three, thinking that there was a good chance that one would break, and didn't want to be left without one for each.  Surprisingly they've held up pretty well (they feel very flimsy) and all three still work.  Here they're both playing downstairs in the evening in the dark.  S put their lights on matching settings.

S enjoying the sensory tunnel (we made it out of cardboard).

X watching S from outside the tunnel since he did not enjoy being inside it.

These also make a fun addition to baths (they are not waterproof, but do add ambience to glowing baths  from a bathroom counter which we do from time to time with S - just add some waterproof submersible LED lights,several glowsticks, turn the lights out and voila!).

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Exploring Sound with Homemade Egg Shakers

I apologize in advance for the insane number of pictures in this post, but our rainbow rice bin was just SO pretty, I couldn't stop myself....  :)

You can read about how we made this rainbow rice here.

I wanted to think of an activity that would be appropriate for both X and S that involved plastic Easter eggs, since it's always nice to give those things a second life after the egg hunt is over.  I wanted S to experiment with different combinations and amounts of rice and pompoms and hypothesize about whether or not they'd make sound, and how much sound she thought they'd make.  I started the activity by setting up our rice in rainbow order and dumping a ton of pompoms on the ground.  I asked S to sort  the pompoms into the rainbow (she loves to sort!).

Once they were all in place, I brought out the plastic eggs and told her my idea.  I asked her for her hypotheses.  (She always starts by saying I have a hypothesis, which is the cutest thing ever) "I have a hypothesis - that the pompom eggs will be quietest and the rice eggs will be the loudest...and that the eggs with the most rice in them will be the loudest."

Before testing her hypotheses, she wanted to play in the rice.  :)

X reallllly wanted to play too.  He had a hard time resisting the temptation of sampling the rainbow rice.  Though it is non-toxic, it is not something I'd want a baby eating, so I had to watch him very carefully.

He spent quite a while investigating the plastic eggs.

Here's S making him one of several egg shakers (this was the one she was sure was going to be the loudest!).

S desperately wanted to sit in the rice.

Then she had a great time smooshing her feet around in it.

So of course X needed to try it, too.

Just a baby hanging out in a giant bin of rainbow rice.  :)

Exploring the rice some more.

S later decided she needed to take a quick "rice nap".

Did I mention that it's SO PRETTY?!?!?  :)

X loves his rice egg shakers.  He spins them around slowly and likes to watch the rice grains move.  He also loves music, so enjoys the different sounds they make.

Here's a sampling of what big sister made for him.  She was pleased to see that she was correct in her guess that the pompoms alone wouldn't make noise.  She was, however, shocked to find that the full-to-the-brim egg shaker was nearly silent!  She loves to show everyone who has come to visit since that "it's SO QUIET!!!"  It was a fun little experiment, and X now has some fun new musical toys to explore.

I'm not sure if you can see below, but I did seal the eggs with a piece of clear tape because they easily pop back open without it!

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Making Colored Rice: Liquid Watercolors vs. Food Coloring

We all know that I love rainbows (most notably here and here)...so of course I can't resist rainbow rice! Traditionally rainbow rice is made using food coloring and vinegar, but S and I wanted to know what it would look like using our Discount School Supply tropical colored liquid watercolors so we gave it a try.

If you have an infant or toddler who is prone to sampling, I'd stick with the plain rice for rice play myself.  Once they are not so tempted (or if you are willing to watch them vigilantly as we had to do with X - that rainbow rice looks tasty!), rainbow rice is a fun way to mix it up.  I personally can't stop staring at our newest batch!

To make colored rice of either variety, we start with a Ziploc bag (we use the freezer kind because we tend to make large quantities at once) full of whatever amount of rice we're looking to color.  Add the rice and then:

If using liquid watercolors add directly the amount of color you want.  If you shake the bag and some grains of rice are still white, add more color.  The more color you make, the richer the color will be.  You don't want to soak the rice, however.  For the amount seen below I used three squirts of pink.

If using food coloring, add a hearty amount and add a small bit of vinegar.  For the amount of rice pictured below, I'd add around a teaspoon of vinegar.  The vinegar helps spread and set the color.  If you still have some white grains of rice, add more food coloring (and/or vinegar).  The more food coloring you add, the darker the color of the rice will be.  You are not aiming for wet rice - but you are aiming for uniform color.

After adding the coloring, hand the bag to the nearest toddler/preschooler for shaking.  :)

I like to make one color at a time, rinsing the Ziploc in between each color to minimize the waste generated.

As each color is completed, I lay out a sheet of wax paper on the counter and spread the rice as thinly as possible.  As it dries, we mix it up with our hands to make sure all the grains have a chance to air dry.  The rice pictured below was colored with our liquid watercolors.

Ooh!  So pretty!  I couldn't resist a close up of our tropical lime green rice.  :)

Here's our color comparison.  The rice on the left was made with tropical liquid watercolors.  The rice on the right was made with food coloring and vinegar.  I felt like the liquid watercolors did a better job of totally coating the grains and therefore produced more vibrant colors.  Our liquid watercolor rice (probably in part to the "tropical" coloring) almost glowed!  It was so bright and cheerful and inviting.

Here's a grain by grain comparison.  Though the red and yellow food coloring did a pretty good job, I think overall the liquid watercolor rice had better coloration.  There's also the smell...the food coloring rice definitely smells of vinegar.  It's faint, but still there.  The theory is that the vinegar will keep the rice from growing mold; however, I have had vinegar colored pasta mold because we stored it before it had completely dried out.  I think the most important thing, regardless of what method you use to color your rice, is to be sure to give it ample time to completely dry.  I'd say at least a day of sitting out in open air before sealing it in a storage container would be ample to discourage mold.

Though either way produces beautiful and enticing rice, our favorite method was liquid watercolors.  It was easier (no measuring), has no scent (no vinegar!), and produced more vibrant colors.  I also suspect that it is ultimately more cost effective because food coloring is expensive and coloring rice requires quite a bit of it!

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Please always supervise your infant/child at play.  Please stay within arms reach and never leave infants/children unattended.

Super Easy Sensory Play: Cornstarch and Water

Infant+

I am writing a short series of posts entitled "Super Easy Sensory Play".  Activities included in the series all contain two or fewer ingredients and are items that are generally found in any house, so no need to run to the store for specialty items.  They are also appropriate for all ages.  I hope that you will give them all a try!  You can read the other posts in the series here:

Super Easy Sensory Play:  Soap Foam
Super Easy Sensory Play:  Ice and Warm Water

Super Easy Sensory Play:  Cloud Dough

Super Easy Sensory Play: Rice

Super Easy Sensory Play: Water

Super Easy Sensory Play: Dried Pasta
Super Easy Sensory Play: Dirt and Worms
Super Easy Sensory Play:  Wet Cotton Balls

I know that people have come up with lots of fancy names for cornstarch and water, but I always get them confused, so I'm going to stick to the boring (but descriptive, ha!) cornstarch and water.  First off, let me say, this is MY favorite sensory activity ever.  If you have not (and I mean you, the parent) played with cornstarch and water, you really, really need to.  It is the coolest.  If you hold it tightly, it behaves as a solid, but if you release your grip, it turns into this very sticky-looking liquid that makes crazy dripping ribbons.  Whenever we play with it, I *have* to join in.

This was X's first experience with it and I am happy to report that he takes after me in an intense love for it!  He played with it for almost 30 minutes, which in baby-time is basically forever.  :)

To make this all you need is a box of cornstarch and some tap water.  Cornstarch itself is a really neat texture, so sometimes it's fun to play with just the cornstarch for a bit before you even add the water.  I feel like the best word to describe the texture of plain cornstarch is squeaky.  It's very interesting.

  Once you're ready to move on to the next step, empty the cornstarch into a dish (I find it easier to mix with water in a shallow dish like a baking pan, but really any pan/dish will work) and slowly add water.  Err on the side of too little water.  You want just enough that all the cornstarch is wet.  It should be very thick, as you can see in the pictures below.  You can mix the water in by hand yourself, your child can, or you can stir slowly with a spoon - keep mixing until the water is uniformly distributed.

S is an old pro, so she was super excited to show X how it worked.  When S was around 2, she went through a phase where the texture freaked her out and she wouldn't play with it for several months - but then she returned to loving it again.  Phew.

At first he only stuck his fingertips in.  As always, he's inspecting.  :)

But then he really got into it!  I was surprised that he naturally figured out how to squeeze it in his hands to make it feel solid.  He's got a big handful here.

This is his OHMYGOSHTHISISAWESOMEMAMA face.  :)

S really loves it, too.  It's so fun!!!

I love the dual concentration here.

So you may have noticed that the kids are sitting on a sheet...that's because this gets messy.  Really messy.  It's totally cleanable, but it will get everywhere if your kids are playing with it.  You can totally do this play in an empty bathtub if you'd like it easily contained (and then easily transition into baths!).  Setting out a sheet works really well for us; afterwards I just throw it and the kids' clothes in the washing machine and we're good.  You could just play with it on the splat mat, but it can be a bit obnoxious to clean when it's wet (if you had a place to let it dry out first, you could totally just vacuum it off the splat mat, though).  

I hope you won't let the mess stop you from trying it though, because it really is so much fun and such a unique and interesting texture/sensory play!

Yeah...it's a bit messy.

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Please always supervise your infant/child at play.  Please stay within arms reach and never leave infants/children unattended.

Simple Small Worlds: Fizzing Hidden Ocean World

You can also read about our other Simple Small Worlds:

Insect World

Frog World

Farm World

Dinosaurs and Sticky Mud

Dragon World

Butterfly World

S and I are HUGE fans of Safari Ltd and all of their amazing models (both large and miniature), so when Safari Ltd asked if I would be interested in reviewing some of their products on my blog, I jumped at the opportunity!  Safari Ltd provided me with their Ocean TOOB free of charge, but all opinions expressed in this post are my own and were not influenced by the free product.

Though we have LOTS of miniature "guys", Safari Ltd's are our favorites.  Not only are they brightly colored (and hand painted!), but they are Phthalate and Lead-free.  They even list the names of the various animals on each model, which is SO handy...I have a hard time keeping all my dinos straight and S is always wanting to know the right names for them.  :)

Safari Ltd TOOBS are just perfect for small world imaginative play.  When I heard they were sending us an Ocean TOOB  I began to scheme.  When I think of oceans, I think of sand, shells, and beautiful blue water.  Rather than just fill a tub with blue water, though, I wanted to come up with something a little more creative.  To stay true to my goal with my Simple Small Worlds series, I wanted to keep prep and materials to a minimum.

We had SO much fun with our fizzing treasure rocks (which we learned about here) during our Find the Leprechaun's Gold Hunt - it gave me the idea to make some baking soda dough and shape it like shells around several of the Ocean TOOB creatures.  

I promise that this is SUPER easy.  Really.  In fact, I did it in less than five minutes as I was needing to pick S up from preschool!  You will need to make the dough/baking soda shells a day in advance, though, to give them time to dry and harden.  That's the only hard part!

To make baking soda dough, you just need baking soda and water.  I used two boxes of baking soda to make six shells.

Once you've emptied the baking soda into the bowl, add just enough water that the dough is crumbly.  Err on the side of too little water.  Here I could have actually done a little less - so think of the below picture as showing you the maximum amount of water to add.  :)

After that, I took six of the Ocean TOOB figures and using a shell as a reference point, made the general shape of a shell by hand (this took about 15 seconds per "shell") and then placed the shells on a sheet of wax paper.  After making the shape, I used the back of a real shell to make some grooves like the shells I was planning to use in the small world.  Like I said, the whole thing took less than five minutes - I happened to be watching a clock.  I hope a lot of you will give these a try because they are just so much fun.

One of my favorite things about the Safari Ltd TOOBS is that they have natural groupings that lend themselves to both cohesive small world play and to learning about different groups of animals.  I knew that the Ocean TOOB would include a sea lion, eagle ray, starfish, two turtles, penguin, octopus, moray eel, humpback whale, sperm whale, hammerhead shark, tiger shark, and a dolphin - so I headed to the library last weekend and picked up a variety of both fiction and non-fiction books on those animals.  When she saw the small world, S was able to identify a few of the animals because of the reading we'd done, which was pretty cool!

 So for the set-up, I set out our splat matand filled our plastic storage bin with the now dry baking soda shells, several different shells,the glass gemsI used in Frog World (we found ours at the Dollar Store), and the remaining Ocean TOOB animals.

S was already so excited that she sat down to play for a few minutes before she realized - "wait, Mama, where's the water?  Shouldn't there be water in the ocean?"

To get the "ocean" started, I provided her with four squeeze bottles full of blue vinegar.  I used four drops of blue food coloring per bottle, though you could absolutely use liquid watercolors.  In fact, I would have used liquid watercolors, only our blue (from the tropical series) is really more of a green-blue, and I had my heart set on a bright blue ocean.  :)  

I instructed her to use the squirt bottles on the white shells to see what happened.  She gleefully went to work dissolving the first shell...which revealed a turtle!

After removing each animal, she loved squirting more vinegar to watch them fizz and "to clean them off".  

Moving on to the next shell!

"A cute little penguin, Mama!"

This one had the best reveal!  The octopus' eyes peeking out as its shell dissolved were cracking me up.

"Ooh!  Mama!  A ray!"  Once S was finished finding all the hidden creatures, I added several containers of water from our sink to make the "ocean" a bit deeper.

After all the shells were dissolved, the baking soda doubled as "white sand" at the bottom of her ocean world.  She smoothed out the "sand" and kept commenting on how soft it was.  I couldn't resist playing in it myself, and she was right!  The baking soda is silky smooth at the bottom.  We could even write and make designs in it, which was fun.

S found out that adding some of the residual vinegar in the squeeze bottles would still make little foamy eruptions, so she used every last drop of the blue vinegar.  :)

Safari Ltd TOOB creatures are just the right size for little hands to maneuver and play with.  Here S was helping the whale swim over to his friends on the other side of the ocean. 

We had so much fun with this world!  S played with it for almost 3 hours and declared it "the best project you've ever thought of, Mama!"  The bright blue ocean was so beautiful paired with the vibrant colors of the hand-painted Ocean TOOB creatures.  They were the perfect addition to our Fizzing Hidden Ocean World!

CONTEST OVER AS OF 3/30/13 at 9am.  Winner has been selected - Thank you to all who entered!

And now for even more fun: 

A SAFARI LTD. GIVEAWAY

The Details:

Safari Ltd has graciously offered a free product to one lucky reader - their choice of one Safari Ltd TOOB or replica.  As an added bonus, if the selected winner is found to be following Safari Ltd on any of their social media sites, that winner will win an additional product!

So for your chance to win TWO products from Safari Ltd, follow them on any of the following:

Facebook

Google+

Pinterest
Twitter

The contest will run for one week and will end at 9am on Saturday, March 30th.  At that time, one winner will be chosen using a randomly generated number from Random.org.  The winner will be announced both on the blog and on Facebook (I will also email you if you leave your contact info in your comment) and will have 72 hours to get me their mailing address.  If the chosen winner has not responded in 72 hours, a new winner will be chosen.

Due to the high cost of international shipping, the contest is only open to US residents.

To enter, leave ONE comment below.

If you'd like to increase your chances of winning, you may add ONE additional entry (comment) for "liking" Fun At Home With Kids on Facebook.  Once you have "liked" us, come back and leave the comment - "Now Following Fun At Home With Kids on Facebook" (if you are currently following Fun At Home With Kids on Facebook, you may leave a comment stating that instead).

You may also add ONE more additional entry (comment) for "liking" Safari Ltd. on Facebook.  Once you have "liked" them, come back and leave the comment - "Now Following Safari Ltd on Facebook"  (if you are currently following Safari Ltd on Facebook, you may leave a comment stating that instead).

Good luck!

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Please always supervise your infant/child at play.  Please stay within arms reach and never leave infants/children unattended.