Baby Play: Exploring Float

You can find the other posts in our Baby Play series here:

Exploring the Kitchen:  Part I

Exploring the Kitchen:  Part II

Exploring Sticky

X loves playing in water, so I try to incorporate water into his sensory play we do whenever I can.  In the vein of "exploring" - the theme I seem to have picked for the Baby Play series - I figured float would be great since it included water.  :)

S and I grabbed a bunch of colorful floating things.  If you have bath toys - those would be great - like a great big pile of them.  The more the better for this play, in my opinion.  We added some balls from our ball pit and S and I cut up some shapes out of play foam.  I also randomly found these really cool giant foam cubes at a local store that was going out of business, so we tossed them in as well.  X was hopping with excitement when he saw the set up!

He immediately set to work grabbing various floating objects.  It was great to see him fixate on something and then reach and stretch until it was in his possession!

Now he's going for one of those amazing cubes!

Such great hand-eye coordination practice for our little guy!  X is still too young to discuss colors or shape names, but you could definitely incorporate both of those with a toddler-aged child.  You could even make a game of it - Can you grab the yellow square? - etc.

I couldn't resist this cool shot of our floating rainbow!

X thought it was great fun.  And got wet.  Of course.

S had fun, too.  She liked making little structures that took advantage of the "stickiness" of wet foam (did you know you can use foam to make Window Art?).

More fun colors.  I heart rainbows.

And I'll end with one shameless how-cute-are-my-babies shot.  :)

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

Pretend Baking: Painting a 3D Cake

Disclosure:  This is part of a series reviewing art supplies, specifically those from Discount School Supply, our favorite art supply company.  Some of the products reviewed are our own; some of the products reviewed were provided free of charge from Discount School Supply.  I will note which were provided for review within the series.  Though I was offered some of these products for free, the opinions offered are my own and were not swayed by the free products.  This post also includes some affiliate links to Amazon for your convenience.

Other posts in this series include:

Golden Glitter Slime (and Dragons)

Painting the Bathroom Mirror

Baby/Toddler Colored Rice Art

10+ Ways to Use Fingerpaint

Make Your Own Puffy Paint Shirt
Starter Art Kit from Discount School Supply

S loves to bake.  In real life, in pretend play - it's a favorite activity around here.  So when I got these amazing red and blue puffy and light foam paints from Discount School Supply, my mind immediately thought of frosting.

To make the cake, I took a piece of white poster board (I think the thin cardboard that cereal boxes are made of would work equally well - I just happened to have a piece of poster board sitting right next to me so I went with that).  I cut a large circle and then a long rectangular strip and used 5 pieces of tape to attach the circle to the strip.  I grabbed six pipecleaners and a yellow foam sheet and cut out candle flames.  I then heated up my hot glue gun and glued where the seams on the cake were and glued each candle flame to each pipecleaner candle.  The last step before presenting the cake to S was to poke 6 holes in the top of the cake for the candles to slip through.

When I presented the blank canvas cake to S she was SO EXCITED.  "I feel like a real baker, Mama!" she exclaimed.  It was really cute to see how jazzed she was.

I shook the foam paint and squired a healthy amount out onto her tray.  Don't you just want to reach out and touch it?  Colorations Foam Paint is super dry, light, and fluffy.  It feels really amazing.  Because of the interesting texture, I really wanted to incorporate a form of painting that would allow S to really dig in.  We also did some full body floor painting with the foam paint that was equally fun (she really enjoyed squishing it between her toes).  If you do not have foam paint, you could easily use regular paint of course.  It's just fun to decorate a pretend cake no matter the materials involved!

At first she kept the "frosting" flavors separate.

But then she got really interested in mixing them together by squishing large handfuls back and forth between her two hands.

Ooh, check out the marbling on those foamy hands!

The foam paint is super light, airy, and fluffy when it's still wet.  It really looked so much like real frosting to us both!

Once the top of the cake was well frosted, S the baker moved on to the sides of the cake.

And what cake is complete without sprinkles?  We used some of our sequins from our art supplies as large sprinkles.

And S put the finishing touches on by using more of our Colorations Plastic Glitter (again, I have to note how awesome it is that the glitter doesn't dump.  I am not joking when I say this is the most child-friendly glitter dispenser I've seen yet!).

I threaded the candles through the pre-poked holes and voila!  We have a beauuutiful cake!  We sang Happy Birthday quite a few times.  :)

Once it dries, the foam paint gets a bit darker.  The foam peaks do dry in 3D, but they crumble into powder if you touch them.  Which, while fun, does not make it the most easily storable piece of artwork.  Like our scented edible fingerpaints and our shaving cream paints, we think of foam paints more as enjoyable in the moment, and not as something that creates artwork we are going to keep around long term (though I do think if you had a very thin layer of the paints it would keep better - it's mostly the foam peaks that are crumbly that I'd worry about).

Here's S with her dried cake pretending to blow out the candles.  :)

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

Recycled Car City

Our little guy is currently addicted to two foods - sliced deli turkey and Happy Baby Green Puffs.  He goes through several canisters of the latter a week!  The bottles the puffs come in have such a cool shape, I've decided to give myself the challenge of reinventing them.  Especially given that Earth Day is in a few days, I figured this would be the perfect post!  Perhaps you also have some puff containers (or other bottles) that could be used to create a super fun car city.  :)

Just to illustrate - this is the stash of bottles after just two weeks.  Yikes.  Do you think they have a twelve step program for babies?  ;)

First we stripped the plastic off the outside.  It came off very easily with scissors.  Then we used some of S's copious foam sticker stash to decorate.  We have a whole set of mixed color geometric shapes, so those that weren't already squares or rectangles were easily cut into those shapes.  If you'd like your city to be monochromatic, Michaels and other craft stores sell large sheets of adhesive foam for less than a dollar!

S helped me decorate the buildings.  We decided to do a set of three rows of windows two wide on each side to make the bottles look like skyscrapers.

X inspected our work.  While he loved the city buildings and was actually quite gentle with them, we found that he liked to eat the roads, so he sat in his highchair and snacked (on more puffs, hahaha) while S set up her city.

I made several strips of varying length roads by cutting up some large black foam sheets I bought at Michaels for around 60 cents each.  Using a glue gun, I glued on little yellow stripes to divide the road into two lanes.

We absolutely loved how this project turned out.  S has already made several different configurations of cities, and there's always room to expand because it's super easy to make more roads!

She set up this city to have a square in the middle and told me that's where the city's park and playground were.  :)

We have these cute little wooden cars from a set she got for her first birthday, but you could absolutely use Hot Wheels cars as well.  The scale is just perfect for them, I think.

S had fun narrating the story of the various cars.  Here red car had to travel the whole length of the city to get to his friend's house.

Here he's knocking on the door to see if his friend is home.

And after a fun day of driving around, he parked in his garage.  Hahaha.

All in all this whole project cost less than $3!  We have been having so much fun with our recycled car city - we highly recommend it!

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Foam Window Art: Mix and Match Spring Flowers

Older Toddler+

We just love window art - and of course it doesn't hurt that we have an enormous wall of windows in our living room.  ;)  

Foam window art is another way to brighten up your house, and it's so fun to be able to make art on unusual surfaces like windows.

Foam sheetsare fairly inexpensive (in fact, I've recently seen large multicolored packs at the Dollar Store), so we like to use them in a lot of our play.

S loves to cut foam with her scissors, but since she's still learning the ropes of cutting shapes, she prefers to have some precut shapes to work with.  For younger children, it's fun to practice shapes/colors with foam window art.  Older children might like building blocks or more elaborate scenes.  Because it was a rainy winter day, but we're at least getting closer to spring, we decided to make a field of spring flowers on the windows.  

To do a project like this, you'll just need some precut foam shapes, and a shallow dish of water.  

Your child simply dips the shape in the water and then places it on the window.  The water makes the foam stick to the glass (this also works on bathtub walls - so it's a fun thing to incorporate into baths as well)!  Depending on how dry your house is and how often the shapes are disturbed, they can last for around 24-48 hours on glass.

I provided S with several different shaped sections of grass, different length/width stems, different sized/shaped leaves, different colored/sized flower centers, and different colored petals.

 There was a little troubleshooting involved as well as S soon figured out that if the foam did not have a good amount of surface contact with the glass it wouldn't stick.  She needed to space her flowers out a bit more to get petals on all of them.

And here she is with her completed field of spring flowers.  They really brightened up our living room on an otherwise gray and rainy winter day.  :)

And here's an older picture of her with the foam square set that we use as building blocks.  We worked together to make a house and she used her cutting skills to make smoke coming out of the chimney and a front door for the house.  I'm not sure what it is about foam window art that makes her squinty, but it sure seems to!  Hahaha.

The foam is totally reusable for another day of window/bath art and can of course be used on paper with glue for art projects (or for contact paper window art).

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