Sensory bags for the kids!

I decided to make sensory bags for my kids, with little Alex in mind in particular as I'd like to introduce him to more types of sensory play. 

A sensory bag is basically made up of stuff you put in a bag that won't burst the bag (read: no sharp objects) and yet offers some sensory play for the child. So basically anything goes as long as it doesn't break the bag (e.g. gel, liquid soap, shaving cream, embellishments, buttons etc.). 

Little Alex has played with his leftover food (yes, I let him play with only the leftovers - after all, it's all gonna be thrown away so I might as well let him have a go at it) and he loves to crush cauliflower - somehow he thinks that it isn't food because he never tries to mouth the florets which I give him for finger food. He always crushes the florets and has this look of glee when the florets are in bits and pieces in his palms. Babies.

Since sensory bags can offer safe sensory play for babies, I decided why not?

So I got down to making them for my kids.

Here's the math themed sensory bag for my girl. This was too small a baggie and I have since transferred the stuff into a bigger bag so that we can play I Spy with her. Too small a bag means that all the items are squashed together and it's difficult to play the game.

Items that went in my math themed sensory bag:

• gel sticker numbers
• heart-shaped beads
• some sequins
• glitter
• liquid handsoap
• food colouring

And here's the all things bright and sparkly bag for the baby boy:

Items that went in this bag:

• liquid handsoap
• lots of glitter
• lots of different shaped sequins and embellishments

Remember to tape up the sensory bags to prevent leaking and supervise your children at all times as little teeth and sharp fingernails could pierce the bags.

I added colouring to one of the bags the next day and my girl realised to her delight that she could practise her handwriting! :)

Simply use your fingertips to 'write' on the sensory bag! Here she practised her Chinese strokes but she also happily practised writing alphabets. So wonderful to find another use for my sensory bags since she's not so into squishing the bags!

If you have a preschooler who's learning to write, or if you've a little baby and you want to introduce safe sensory play, give this a try!

I'm gonna try to make a shaving cream sensory bag as well as a water beads sensory bag too... when I get my hands on the materials... :)

Do share your sensory bags on my Facebook page if you make some! 

*edited on 3/8/2010:

Please try to use freezer bags as they are thicker and have a double zip instead of a single one. Mine kept leaking after awhile as I was using normal storage bags.

Activities to go with The very hungry caterpillar by Eric Carle

It's been quite awhile since I've found time and energy to blog... this is such an overdue post!

The good thing though is that The very hungry caterpillar is a classic so it's never too late to share what we did for the reading of this story.

I made this learning aid from here:

There are a couple of missing pieces though but it still works rather fine.

I got her to match the pieces to what she could see on the pages to practise counting:

and instead of a 'story stick' (which is how the learning aid is supposed to be made), I gave her a piece of yarn for her to thread the pieces together, following the sequence of the story:

And so it's killing two birds with one stone: getting her to practise fine motor skills as well as learning to sequence according to the story line. She did really well with the sequencing after awhile such that by the time she watched the performance put up by Act 3 in mid July, she could tell exactly what was coming up next :)

After threading all the cards, just tie a ribbon and she gets a necklace - which made the vain little one very happy. This activity can be done over and over again - something that your preschooler would request to do!

And we chose a day to make egg carton caterpillars:

My girl loves all things small and cute so instead of making 3 long caterpillars, we had 5 short ones. 

Painting the egg carton was quite a highlight as it was a new experience.

After the paint has dried, just draw and cut out eyes for the caterpillars (or use googly eyes), draw a smile, pierce two holes at the top of the caterpillars' heads (to be done by an adult) and poke the pipe cleaners in.

Do you notice that there's one female caterpillar? :) 

Hint: the one with the eyelashes

We made a symmetrical painting by first folding a piece of drawing block in half then squeezing paint randomly on it. Once that is done, press the drawing block together and you will get a symmetrical painting. After you have done the first fold, you can unfold it and press the other side of the drawing block together and repeat the process. :)

After the paint has dried, draw a butterfly and cut it out:

We did this counting activity which you can download here:

Alicia wasn't very interested in this activity compared to the rest of the activities but you can always give it a shot. 

Another activity that might interest your preschooler would be these two dot-to-dot printables which you can download here.

We took the chance to revise the Days of the Week using the learning aid my mum made for her earlier (I made the Mandarin version):

Have fun!

Activities to go with Mister Seahorse by Eric Carle

I think you already know I like Eric Carle's books... so Mister Seahorse should come as no surprise. :P Actually, Mister Seahorse wasn't in the list of the books I wanted to borrow but I always make it a point to hop over to the CAR section of the library to see if there are any appropriate Eric Carle books for Alicia. I was not disappointed that day as I found a spanking new copy of Mister Seahorse! :)

We did a few activities after reading this book - Alicia really loved the activities! Ironically, she loved the activities more than the book itself. She had fun though with the pages where some of the fishes were camouflaged (Eric Carle used transparencies for some pages so that you could turn the page and see the fish hiding behind). 

Here are the activities we did!:

(i) seahorse counting (and spelling of the number word)

I printed 12 seahorses (the exact pic of Eric Carle's seahorses), laminated them then cut them and trimmed the edges and made just enough alphabets (lower case) needed to spell 1-12 (one number only at any one time). The numbers are from the apple tree learning aid I made earlier and the cloth alphabets (in upper case) are from the Spelling Bee.

I velcro-ed all the parts so that they would stick nicely to the felt should I decide to hang up the piece of the felt as a felt board (felt measuring 64cmx64cm was obtained from the thrift store Daiso - here I folded it into about half its size).

We'd count the seahorses together then place the correct number on the felt.

Next, I'd place either the lower or upper case alphabets on the felt to spell the word and she would find the matching alphabets and place them below/above the alphabets that are used to guide her to spelling the number word. (This part of the activity helps with reinforcing matching upper and lower case alphabets and learning the spelling of the number word)

To further extend this activity to incorporate learning of Mandarin, you could get your tot to match the number to the Mandarin word (those with the Mandarin add-on counting cards for the apple tree learning aid could whip those out - kids get bored counting the same stuff all the time so seahorses could possibly break the monotony of counting apples!)

If you don't have time to make this learning aid, you can try this free resource which is slightly different but still teaches spelling of the number word.

We sang this rhyme (you could sing it as you do the counting activity shown above or sing it at any other time!):

Print out the rhyme here.

The seahorse was drawn by me and coloured by Alicia

(ii) Matching the numeral to the number word

I printed out this free resource from here and got Alicia to do the colouring of the seahorses - which she enjoyed thoroughly!

After printing out the pictures, I glued them onto a cereal box before cutting them out and letting Alicia doodle.

To encourage her to do the matching, I coloured the outline of the boxes with the words and she could choose the colours (we did it one number at a time so she could focus on the spelling of the word - I'd read out the alphabets which spell the word before and during the colouring of the outline of the box). After the colouring's done, she would place the seahorse on the correct box.

I also used phonics to guide her to finding the right word sometimes - e.g. pronouncing the /f/ sound so that she could narrow down her guesses to 'four' and 'five'.

Snapshots of the busy artist:

Doing the matching:

We further decorated the base sheet with paint - she's so good at painting... she really avoided painting inside the boxes! :P So proud of her! (the crayon marks inside the boxes were made before I told her not to colour inside the boxes)

(iii) Art (and Science) - exploring how colours blend together

Just as Eric Carle created his paintings for Mister Seahorse via tissue paper collage, I decided to try out this art activity using kitchen paper towels and food colouring.

Alicia posing with the materials

Mix 1 drop of food colouring with some water and place them in shallow dishes so that it's easier to get hold of the colours during the activity.

(You should try out with one sheet of kitchen towel before conducting this activity with your preschooler to have an idea of how it goes)

Fold the kitchen towel into half, then halve it again to make a square, then dip one corner or side into any dish:

Then dip it in another dish using another side/corner:

Repeat the step with the last colour:

Watch how the colours blend together and discuss what colours your tot sees and how different colours blend to make more colours (e.g. blue and yellow make green).

You can fold your kitchen towel into different shapes - for variety and also for teaching/ reinforcing shapes with your tot:

Alicia made a total of 4 pieces! (The fifth one was my experiment before conducting the activity):

Hanging on the grill to dry!

The dried pieces of art:

Some other activities you could consider doing with your tot can be found from this link.

I decided that it's time to move on to the next book - Corduroy by Don Freeman. :)

Learning to count with ice-cubes

Alicia doesn't really like numbers or math for that matter... so I try to vary the way I teach her how to count.

Here's an activity I did with her about two weeks ago: counting coloured ice-cubes.

What you need:

• ice-cubes in two colours (colour of ice-cubes are up to your preference: I had 6 blue and 6 red ice-cubes)
• a couple of scoops
• two big bowls or two basins
• a rag (just in case)

Set up the activity as shown:

Besides the obvious fun the tot derives from scooping ice-cubes (read: improving fine motor skills) and counting ice-cubes as your tot scoops each one over to the other basin, you can also give specific instructions to your tot such as 'scoop a blue ice-cube for mummy' or 'scoop two red ice-cubes'. 

Questions you can ask (for math): 

(after scooping 2 blue ice-cubes and 1 red ice-cube) 

'how many blue/red ice-cubes are there (in the new basin)?' 

'how many ice-cubes are there altogether?'

(after scooping 1 or 2 more ice-cubes) 

'How many ice-cubes are there now altogether?'

You can get your tot to touch ice-cubes as well for the tactile experience.

Once the ice-cubes start melting and the colours start to mix, you can talk about colour changes (science).

Weird pose!

She enjoys pouring the water and ice-cubes after she's scooped all the ice-cubes over

And she repeats the activity over and over...........

Learning to count

Alicia isn't very good with numbers as she is with alphabets so it really takes a lot of patience to teach her the concept of one-to-one correspondence. We're still trying.... lol.

Here's a simple activity I did with her with just her colourful pompoms, paper plates (with numbers) - (beautifully decorated by my mum, which we pasted on her room wall earlier on when she was a baby) and a pair of tongs (optional).

Simply get your preschooler to place the right number of pompoms (reflected on the paper plate) on the paper plate. :)

Count together with her to reinforce the concept. 

*Photos taken on 27Nov 2010*

Fishing learning aid

Since we were on a 'fishing' theme with Alicia - scooping fish and the visit to the Underwater World at Sentosa - I made this fishing learning aid for her. It's a versatile learning aid and I've been wanting to do it up for a long time and finally got down to doing it - and finishing it (those are two very different things!).

It's a versatile learning aid because what's on the fish can be easily changed to suit whatever you want to teach (while the fish remain, well, unchanged).

*photos taken on 18 Nov 2010*


Here she's fishing for uppercase letters in the 'pond' (which really is a big piece of felt I bought to make a felt board for her - it's standing in temporarily as a make-shift pond):

I've prepared alphabets (both upper and lower case), numbers 1-20 and some dolch list sight words (which will come in useful in future). Currently we're only playing with the alphabets and numbers.

I can get her to fish for specific alphabets to spell a certain word or just get her to fish for fun - I guess magnets have a certain hold on children :) Her fav activity though is to 'clap' the fish I caught and make it drop... lol.

Taking out another set of alphabets:

Checking out the googly eye on the fish:

We really have so much fun with this! :P

More sorting activities

Somehow Alicia was extremely in the mood for sorting things in the past few weeks so I took out this old set of learning aids I made for her much earlier.

Posing with the learning aids before the sorting started

And the sorting begins!:

And so she sorted the flowers according to colours and sizes... such a simple activity but so much fun... :)

In the process, we revised the colours, and the concepts of 'big', 'small', 'bigger' and 'smaller' - important concepts for math! :P

Read here for more details about this flower-themed learning aid

Bee-themed lapbook

Alicia has been watching the Bee Movie and she's naturally hyped up about bees so I decided perhaps we could put together a bee-themed lapbook. :)

Since she's only 2 years old, I decided that it should be kept pretty simple, with activities she would love to participate in but yet with some parts which could still be useful for teaching when she is a bit older and more mature.

As she's fond of colouring, colouring pages are a must. :P I extracted the colouring pages from the DVD, printed them and let her doodle away. She's quite into mono-tone colouring recently so sometimes a piece of drawing could really just consist of one colour. Sometimes she looks at her own colouring and exclaims that the picture is 'gross!' Sigh. I wonder what she's up to....

Anyway, here's the cover of the lapbook:

I always like to use her work to decorate the coverpage. I know this isn't the nicest piece of artwork you've seen in your life, but hey, she's 2 and she's my kid, so it gets on the cover :P

She takes great pride in her work!:

A quick glance of the interior:

Items on the left of the lapbook:

I put together a small hexagonal minibook filled with simple facts about bees. 

A simple life cycle sheet is included instead of a life cycle activity as I think she may be too young for that. 

A picture of the bee anatomy is included, not because I want her to learn all the parts of the bee but I think it's important that she gets to see the actual bee rather than the cartoon version which she's so exposed to. :) This could be useful when she grows older. Of course, she can identify simple things like wings and legs and she can tell that the bee's black and yellow. She's 2. :)

On the right of the lapbook:

Colouring pages at the top layer:

Beneath the colouring pages, there are two other activities.

Here's the first:

Simple matching of picture to word with a little bit of help from the shape. I chose not to print out the pictures with the words in grayscale because I think that would be too obvious and I think she can handle the challenge of simply matching the picture to the word with that little bit of hint given.

Here she is, fiddling with this activity, and completing the puzzle was peanuts to her... Didn't even need to pause to think: just grab the piece and stick it on! I was quite impressed :P

 

 

The last activity: number-word matching game (featuring numbers 1-12) (picture can't be disclosed, unfortunately) -

She loves this little activity and we're currently still working on her word-number recognition. :)

And that's it! A simple lapbook for a 2-year-old! :)