Monday Activity, The Color Train

Chalyse loves to line things up and call them choo-choo trains. She also likes to collect similar objects from around the house. She really enjoyed this simple activity.
The Color Train:

Line up a row of cups, bowls, or lids. I used the rectangular plastic baby-food containers. This will be your train. Then go around the house or rummage through the toy box to find objects of of the same color to put in each car. A red car, a blue car, a purple car etc. Here is our color train:

Also use this activity to help teach counting and numbers. Use beans, buttons, small toys, cereal, or anything else small enough then put one in the first car, two in the second and so forth.

Writing the number or color on the car will help your child begin to recognize how it is written.

Batty Family-Monday Activity

Here is a fun art activity to do with you kids for Halloween.

First trace your hands on paper at cut them out.

Cut out a  rain drop shaped body and a circle head with two pointy ears. 

Glue you bats together and give you bat eyes, a nose and some fangs. 

You could use colored or patterned paper, fabric, craft foam, felt or any other medium you can think of. You may want to use white paper and color it or decorate it using buttons, beans, eyes, sequence, pasta, popcorn or anything else you may have.

Here is our family of bats:

A Paper Autumn

Here in Point Hope we are too far North for any kind of trees...or most anything that grows more than two inches off the ground. As a result Fall is very different than what we are used to down in Utah.

Here are a couple of activities we have done so we could enjoy, at least to some degree, the joys of trees:

Thankfulness Tree

Last year when we were missing trees we decided to make our own. We used packing paper from various mail-orders that we've made for the trunk and limbs. The greenery was "donated" by the school. We also missed fall colors, so we made leaves out of colored paper and wrote on them things that we're thankful for. One thing that we're all thankful for now is our thankfulness tree. It is happy to have a tree in our house..

Jumping in the Leaves

 Every kid loves jumping in a big crunchy pile leaves...and most adults for that matter.

I spread out a long piece of packing paper across the floor, gave the girls some markers, and set them loose to color me an Autumn. After that we tore the paper in to small leave-sized pieces. They thought it was great, especially Ellora who enjoys ripping up books and the such. Then we piled them up and went crazy throwing rolling and jumping. It wasn't quite the same as the real thing but we had a lot of fun.

Monday Activity: Bunny Hop and The Hungry Alligator

Ok, so I know it's Thursday but better late than never right?

Some of our favorite activities are songs or rhymes that have actions. These activities are especially good for helping my girls get enough exercise, which can be hard when it is 20 below outside. They also help toddlers develop gross motor skills, and and get out their pent up energy. I chose two of our favorites to share today. They were both taught to me by my little sister Bethany. I think she learned them in nursery.

Bunny Hop

The word and actions go as follows:

"Little bunny in the ditch, bunny sleeping in a ditch." (Lay down and pretend to be sleeping)
"Little bunny if your wise, you will open up your eyes." (Open your eyes and lift head)
"Bunny hop, bunny hop, bunny hop." (quickly get up and hop away, jumping on each "hop")

Here is a movie so you can see the tune.

The Hungry Alligator

This one doesn't have a melody:

"Five little monkeys swinging in a tree" (Put up five fingers and swing them back and forth)
"Teasing Mr. Alligator 'Can't catch me, you can't catch me'" (Put your thumbs to you temples and wiggle your fingers about)

(My girls love the next part)

(Quietly) "Along came Mr.Alligator quiet as can be" (put you hands together and move them side to side like they are a hungry alligator swimming through the water)
(Loudly ) "AND SNATCHED A MONKEY RIGHT OUT OF THAT TREE!" (Clap your hands together on the word snatched)

Continue with four more verses with one less monkey each time until you get to the last one. Then you say: "AND SNATCHED THAT MONKEY RIGHT OUT OF THAT TREE!" on the last line.

Monday Activity, Boxes

Every kid loves boxes! and we have more than our share of them considering most of the things we have in our home, including our food came directly to us in the mail. Here are some of the fun activities that we have done with our boxes:

Jumbo Building Blocks

I took all of our recent diaper boxes, emptied them and taped them shut. They made great building blocks. We made towers, stairs, forts, and choo-choo trains. They are light weight and even Ellora enjoyed carrying them around and stacking them. They were a little tipsy when the girls began to climb on them, though. You may consider using them to store stuff in and then letting the kids play with them.  That way you could save on space and make them sturdier for climbing. I like my sisters idea of storing baby clothes in diaper boxes because then you can find them easily and you can store each size in a different box.

(Just so you know, this is not an endorsement for a particular type of diapers. We actually ordered a different brand but they sent us these by mistake.)

 

Play House:

 This is our play house that we made from a large box. I taped the top flaps up together to make it taller. I cut differently shaped windows, and some with shudders, a mail box and a door. In the door and cut a circle with one side still connected for a door knob.

After the girls began to grow tired of it I gave Chalyse a marker and let her decorate it. She loved being able to color on the walls and ceiling.
Doesn't every kid love to color on the walls? It's like a dream come true!

We also have done some fun things to recycle packing paper. Stay tuned...

Monday Activity-Alphebet Soup

Hi every one. Guess what, I am taking a blogging class at Ilisgvik. I am really excited about it. We are learning how to make our blog appeal to more people and get more readers. One thing I have decided to do to accomplish this goal is to have weekly post for people to look for. My first one is on Mondays. I will post an activity for you to try with your kids to help keep them entertained, engaged in learning, and also to learn how to focus.


I read in the article: Children can be taught how to cut through the culture of distraction.
July 29, 2008 - by Maggie Jackso


"Two-thirds of children under six live in homes that keep the TV on half or more of the time, an environment linked to attentional difficulties. Mothers multitask an average of 80 hours a week, up from 40 hours in 1975. Racing from activity to activity, families have little time to sit down to eat, to converse, or to be in the same room. They have no time to be together in the deepest sense of the word."

Jackso goes on to quote Ellen Galinky, president of the Families and Work Institute who said,
“We all live in an overwhelming, overstimulating, information-overloaded world,” says Galinsky. “And unless you can pay attention, you can’t think, you can’t problem-solve, you can’t learn. It’s an underlying skill that is to me front and center to success at work, and at home.”

In an article entitled "How to teach your child the importance of concentration"
by Nan Keltie she says:

"Since toddlers are often distracted and on the go, this stage is probably the most important of all in the training process. Your child's natural curiosity is a valuable tool, so use it. Toddlers love to play, and you can train them while doing something fun."

By doing focused activities with your young children even once or twice a day you can help improve their ability to focus which will later help them do well in school, be more successful at work and have more meaningful relationships.


Here is my first Monday activity. This is a silly little game but Chalyse really enjoys it and she is really starting to recognize her letters.

You will need each of the letters of the alphabet that are easy to handle and see from any side as they will be tossed around. We bought some big foam letters at Target. They can be found by the bath toys in the baby section. When we moved to Utah for the summer we left our letters in Alaska so we took 26 of the clear rectangular lids that come on Gerber baby food and wrote on them with permanent marker. Both worked well.

We then put all the letters into a big mixing bowl. Usually we talk about each letter as we put it in the bowl. We may line them up in order first.
Then comes the fun part. We mix all the letters up, using our hands or a big spoon. We sing, "Alphabet soup, alphabet soup, we love alphabet soup." or something like that.

We are not careful to keep all the letters in the bowl :). As the letters fly out of the bowl we name them and talk about them.
Chalyse enjoys being able to make a mess and I love that she is starting to recognize most of her letters. As she gets older we will begin to talk more about the sounds each letter make and start to make words with them.