St. Patrick's Day Sensory Bin

I brought out the new themed sensory bin today.  The kids loved it.  I think I am going to add to it.  I added some rainbow coloured beads.  Little Monkey and Little Princess really liked the beads, but our extra Princess still likes to put things in her mouth....so we took them out for now.

Little Monkey really liked the beaded necklaces and tried to hog them for himself.  I convinced him he should share them.  He really liked wearing them and then finding places all over the house he could hang them from.  They hang really nice off the light switches.  That is the only way he is turning off lights today.  He went around and turned all our lights on and used the necklaces to turn them back off.

Little Princess really liked beading.  I think we need to do more of it.  Maybe I will do some beading and make rainbows.  Now I have to think about how to make that possible!  Weekend project :)

Tissue paper shamrocks round 2

We did tissue paper shamrocks again today.  Little Princess and our extra Princess got to join in this time.  They had lots of fun.  I let Little Monkey cut the tissue paper.  He really likes using scissors and I thought this would be great practice for him.  Little Princess couldn't be left out, so she got to rip the tissue paper.  We had lots of fun scrunching the tissue paper up into little balls.  Little Princess gave up on this pretty early on, so the kids had snack while I finished scrunching.  

I ended up putting the glue on the shamrocks for the kids just to make things go a little smoother.  Little Monkey ended up doing a few of them.  He did them pretty fast and wasn't interested in trying to taste the glue like the two Princess's!  Once they are fully dry we are going to string them up and put our shamrock garland on the fireplace.  Little Monkey was very excited that his work was going to be a decoration.  

Next week we are going to be doing lots of rainbows and pots 'o' gold!  

We got them up!  I think they look great :)

18 lucky days....a few days late!

Yikes, it is already March 6th!  Where has the time gone?!  We did a bunch of fun St. Patrick's Day crafts last year that I will link up.  We will being doing some of them again, because Little Princess didn't get a chance to do them.  We will also be doing some new ones!  I am in the process of putting together our sensory bin.  Once it is done (most likely on the weekend) I will post some pictures.
I have been featured over at Triple T Mum.  I am very excited about it.  It is my first time being featured! Here are a few links to some of the things we did last year:
Marble Painting 
Button Rainbow
Shamrock Handprints
Tissue Paper Shamrocks (We are going to do this one tomorrow)

I am trying to do something fun everyday, but I might not get posts up on the weekends.  I have started back at work (just weekends) and I am still trying to find my groove!

Unexpected Rainbow

Little Monkey and I were sitting around playing with cars while Little Princess napped this morning.  I was trying to figure out something more interesting to do with the cars.  We usually park them and line them up over and over again.  Then I remembered I had bought a large roll of paper from IKEA and we hadn't used it yet.  Then I saw our button rainbow on the door, and it hit me....why not make a car rainbow?!  We rolled out a big piece of paper and drew our coloured sections on.  Finally it was time to find their parking spaces!  Little Monkey had so much fun doing this.  He was very excited when we had parked most of his cars and he noticed that there were much more red ones.  It was a great way to spend some quality time on the floor playing!  I think we might roll out another piece tomorrow and make a road.  That will be a fun activity for daddy to do :)

Button Rainbow

I found a whole bunch of coloured buttons at the dollar store not too long ago.  I couldn't resist picking them up!  What was I going to do with them?

Seeing as St. Patrick's Day is just around the corner I thought it would be fun to make rainbows with them.  I got out my white cardstock, a paper plate, and markers.  I thought about colouring in the sections but Little Monkey knows all his colours so I wasn't too worried about him matching them up.  I would suggest colouring in if you have a little one that isn't familiar with their colours....you don't want them to get too frustrated.

Next we organized the buttons into coloured groups.  I think next time I might leave them a little mixed up for more of a challenge locating the colour he wanted.  I did the colour sorting myself at this stage (honestly I didn't even think of getting Little Monkey to help).  

For this craft I used a tacky craft glue.  I wasn't sure if regular old white glue would hold the buttons on.  I put the glue on and Little Monkey used a foam brush to spread it around.  I let him decided what buttons he wanted where.  He had lots of fun with it.  I think he was more excited that I was actually letting him play with all the buttons.  He had found the button stash a little while ago and I told him he wasn't allowed to play with them.  YAY for finally getting to play with the buttons.  When we were done Little Monkey wanted to help put the buttons away.  I am glad he was thinking.  It turned into a great sorting and fine motor activity.  He put away a good amount before he declared "I'm done" and went off to play with his cars! 

  We really had fun with this one.  I am trying to figure out something else to do with buttons.  Don't worry I am sure I will come up with something :)  

Next up for the blog is, tissue paper shamrocks, green yogurt chips, and an adorable outfit for Little Princess.

Shamrock Hand Prints

We got to the shamrock hand prints early.  I have the pleasure of watching Little Monkey and Little Princess' Little Cousin!  (wow that was a lot of little's)   Little cousin is such a sweetie and is right in the middle (age wise) of my two.  We had lots of fun with this craft.  I didn't end up painting their thumbs as they don't like to close their fingers when pressing them to the paper.  I thought it might look a little more like an inverted daisy than a shamrock :)  We also added some sparkles because that is always fun.  We will be sparkly for days now.  I really like how they turned out.  This is one that I have never tried before and we had lots of fun doing it.  I am a fan of painting the kids hands myself instead of letting them dip their hands in the paint.  I only do it this way when there is a specific part of the hand (or foot) that needs to be painted.  We do lots of plain old finger painting as well.  I let Little Monkey and Little Cousin to paint the stem on by themselves.  Sorry about the Christmas paper plates.  We use paper plates a lot when painting so I tend to stock up when they are on sale.  The sparkles I got from the dollar store (see I am there all the time).  They are perfect because they have little holes in the top so the sparkles don't come out all at once.  They also fit perfectly into toddler's hands.
It is going to be a busy weekend.  I am working on an adorable outfit for Little Princess.  I am also going to attempt to make puffy paint and finger paint.

Next up for the blog is a button rainbow.

Shamrocks

I will probably have quite a few posts over the next week because I have a lot planned.  Little Princess was in the hospital for almost a week so that is why there hasn't been any recent posts.  We are back and feeling better and ready to get creating.

Shamrocks are the theme of today!  This morning we got to lace shamrocks.  We used foam shamrocks and pipe cleaners.  I got the foam shamrocks at the dollar store.  They came in plain green and sparkly green.  I am saving the plain green ones for another fun activity for next week.   Have I mentioned my love of the dollar store?!?!  I will save that for a whole other post. :)  I just used a small hole punch to punch little holes around the outside.  Some shamrocks had lots of holes and some had just a few. Little Monkey did great with it.  He had lots of fun repeating, 'pull, pull, pull' over and over again each time he put the pipe cleaner into a new hole.  We started out with me holding the shamrock until he got the hang of it.  He has now done 5 of them all by himself.  I think we might be ready to move onto string or ribbon to lace from now on.  I will keep that in mind for Easter ideas.  This afternoon we are doing shamrock hand prints.  I will get as many pictures of that as I can.  I am hoping to get Little Princess in on this one.  I am guessing the camera might be a little green by the end of the day.

-Rachelle

.