Thursday, February 23, 2012

Following the Toddler

Good Morning!

Today I wanted to share how I have changed up Liza's sensory table. She was losing interest in her Valentine's set up and I was growing tired of having pink rice throughout the house. It's still a little too early for me to create a St. Patrick's day table, so I decided to throw some cotton balls and a few Arctic animals and trucks in to hold us over a few days.


She's had some fun with it and we've had a few snowball fights, but the other day while shopping, Liza spotted some plastic Easter Eggs and really, really wanted me to buy her the "circles." I bought them and figured she would soon forget about them and they could sit in my closet until closer to Easter. Well, she found them and insisted that we open them. She is just too cute sometimes. We dumped them into the sensory table and added a mini muffin pan.



She's been busy ever since. Just goes to show how important it is for us as moms to give up control sometimes and follow the lead of our kiddos interests.


It makes me super excited to see her start sorting, counting, and talking about colors. I am so surprised that she is into it right now. I didn't expect it for a while. I'll be honest, it makes my teacher self a little giddy. 


I think in a few days I will add some colors to the bottom of the muffin tin and see what she does with it. Maybe she'll match up the eggs to the colors, maybe she won't. I'm just curious to see what happens. I'll probably add some little pom poms to the table so she can put them inside the eggs.

We have also done some stamping and painting with shaving cream in the past few days. If you have a kiddo that likes to eat the paint, you coud use whipped cream or pudding! Add food coloring or glitter for even more fun!





It's school vacation week, which means I have a house full of Liza's cousins. We should have an exciting day!

Have you done anything with your kiddos? I'd love to hear about it and maybe steal your ideas :)


XOXO Sarah



5 comments:

  1. I never thought of using cotton balls! I'm stealing this idea! Yesterday I put oatmeal (dried) in Emily's sensory table and she had a blast. Much like the rice, it ended up all over my house, but it was well worth it (and nothing a quick vacuum couldn't fix) because of all the fun she had and all the "coffee" and "ice cream" (can you tell what mommy's favorite things are?!) she made. Keep up the posts! I love reading them!

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  2. I have been obsessing over the sensory table thing and didn't even think of cotton balls, or plastic eggs or anything like that!! Totally doing that this weekend! I need a little table like you have though, that would be perfect and fit well in our living room!

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  3. I love this idea! The rice clean up scared me, but this is totally doable in my house.

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  4. Becky, I plan to try some dry oatmeal soon!

    Melissa, DON"T STRESS! First of all, there is no need for a table. I would have never, ever bought a special table. Liza happened to get this water table for her birthday so I brought it up from the basement (usually for outside). Just use a plastic storage container...something shallow so that little hands can get in there. This way you can place it on a table or on the floor and you can cover it up and put it away when you are done. Secondly, just walk around your house and find things that you think B might have fun with. How about soapy water and some cups? You could stick some yarn in there, tissue paper, newspaper, etc. ANYTHING! have fun with it! I'll post more ideas and the internet is full of fantastic inspiration.

    Amber, let us know how it goes!

    Thanks so much for reading and commenting!

    xo Sarah

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  5. That looks like so much fun! You should check out my preschool posts and sensory bins. The first one I did was an ice cream sensory bin (http://karlamcurry.wordpress.com/2011/08/04/ice-cream-sensory-bin/) with a whole bunch of pom poms and cookie dough scoops - the kids LOVED it! They played with it for ages and the pom poms aren't messy like rice (ugh... I still find bits of it here and there). I also did one with birds and bird seed, little pretend eggs in a real nest that we found outside, a branch for the birds to sit on, etc. Afterwards, dump the seed outside for the birds!

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