This month we are exploring the forest and talking about where bears hibernate. The kids were having fun building tall trees in the forest and letting the forest animals create their homes in the cold winter snow!
This month we are exploring the forest and talking about where bears hibernate. The kids were having fun building tall trees in the forest and letting the forest animals create their homes in the cold winter snow!
Looking for some winter day fun over the holiday vacation? Once the first snow hits, this will be a great snowy day activity.
What is it? An art project involving icicles and frozen blocks of colored ice
What will I need? Food coloring, water, ice trays, molds, muffin tins and other containers
You can’t have as much snow as we do and not have an abundance of icicles. We decided to incorporate some of ours into a sculpture, joining them to ice blocks made by freezing colored water in ice-cube trays, Jell-O molds and yogurt containers. We placed all the materials on an outdoor table, and everyone took turns building totem poles, monsters and free-form sculptures, gluing the blocks of ice with a little dribble of water (it quickly froze).
Helpful Hint: For consistency of hardness, consider making your colored blocks in the freezer rather than outdoors.
Ingredients
What you do:
Mix the dry ingredients. Add spices a small amount at a time until the dough smells and looks like you want it too. Mix water and oil together first and then add them to the dry ingredients and stir. In a pot, cook the mixture for two to three minutes, stirring frequently. The dough will start to pull away from the sides of the pot and stick together. When this happens, take the playdough out of the pan and knead the dough until it becomes soft and smooth. Allow the dough to cool and then store it in an airtight container.
This week in the sensory table the kids are wrapping up all of their presents and giving gifts to each other. It was so fun to watch as they tried so hard to “wrap” their boxes! The best part was watching them give their wrapped presents to their friends!
The kids had fun this afternoon in the sensory table filling presents and matching the right lids to the right presents. They were using their imaginations to fill the presents with toy cars, dolls, trucks and many other things!
sensory table colored pasta
This week our sensory table is full of colorful noodles! The kids have been digging their hands in this colorful pasta and scooping and dumping it! They have been using spoons to scoop the noodles into the bowls and pretend they are making soup! Since all of the noodles are different colors this has been a great way to practice our color recognition as well!
how fun is this!
This morning the sensory table was full of slimy pumpkin seeds and a big old pumpkin! The kids loved looking inside of the pumpkin and some were even brave enough to stick their hand inside to feel around! It was sure a slimy mess!
sensory bugs
This week the sensory table is full of dirt and creepy crawly bugs! Most of the kids couldn’t wait to get their hands on the snakes and spiders but a few didn’t mind standing back and watching! The kids have been using their imagination and making the bugs crawl up their arms and slither all around!
treasure hunting at the sensory table
This week we have added rice and colorful jewels to our sensory table! The kids have loved feeling the texture of the rice and sorting through it to find the shiny and colorful jewels! We had quite a crowd at the sensory table today scooping and dumping the rice over and over again! The rice was used for many different things today. Some kids were “building houses” while others were “cooking different foods.” The jewels were also a big hit for finding “treasure” and talking about the different colors.
The chartreuse wigglers literally glow in the dark and are at the sensory table all this week
The Sensory Table is quite a hit this week with our creepy crawling, night crawlers. These glow in the dark worms have made themselves a home in our Sensory Table Center for the next few days and the kids sure love handling these wiggly, squiggly creatures!
Creative Tots has specialized in the private education of both toddlers and preschool age children for over 15 years. We began in the heart of Madeira and now also have a new Mason location. We are specifically designed to focus on early childhood development for children ages 18 months to 5 years.
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