Toddler activity: the easiest (and wettest) way to make a rainbow

Setup difficulty: Easy
Equipment needed: Water, several small plastic containers, food color, pipettes

Boo loves playing with water and we do that often. I decided to try and vary our routine by throwing some colour into the mix. I wanted her to see the results of mixing colours and to learn how to use a pipette - great for fine motor control.

Setup

Pour water into plastic containers. Add food colouring to each container. Make sure you have some empty plastic containers handy for mixing.
We played on the kitchen floor, with a splash mat down to contain the mess. This is a great activity for the backyard as well. 

Play

Boo was in a tizzy of excitement when she saw all the coloured water and containers. I had to get her to calm down a bit and show her how to use a pipette (press it, leave it, pick it up - repeat magic formula ad nauseum). She eventualy got the hang of it though, and was so pleased with herself. Boo found the fancy pipette from our Learning Resources Fine Motor Tool Set (the one with the blue bulb in the picture) difficult to use, but mastered the cheap $3 for a hundred variety in no time at all.


We mixed colours and marveled at the results (ooh purple! wow orange!) until we had mixed everything with everything else and ended up with the depressing brown that inevitably results from an excess of colour mixing. 

Boo eventually moved on from the pipettes to shoving her hand into the plastic containers, pouring the water from container to container and dumping the water on to her pants. An excellent time was had by all!

Toddler sensory activity: colorful, edible beads

Setup difficulty: Moderate
Equipment needed: Water, several small plastic containers, basil seeds, food color

Basil seeds, sans water, are as unassuming as Bruce Banner. Basil seeds, in the presence of water, Hulk Up, and they do so nearly as quickly as Bruce does, but are far less dramatic about it.

Setup

Add a teaspoonful or two of basil seeds to each of your containers. Squirt a different food color (or mix of colors) into each container. Fill with water. Pour yourself a glass of wine and wait. 

Depending on the size of your containers you might have to top them off with more water a few times - basil can be very, very thirsty.

I bought my basil seeds on Amazon. The packet cost me $8 and will last for around five sessions of play (assuming I make the same amount of beads every time).

 

Play!

I put all the beads into a large plastic container, placed the container on a concrete surface in our backyard and let loose the Boo. She was a bit cautious with the beads at first. They have a squelchy, slimy texture and Boo spent some time deciding if that was something she was going to enjoy or something she was going to cry about. Luckily, she decided on the former.

I introduced a couple of spoons into the mix and Boo enjoyed mixing and dumping the seeds.

Why have I said that the setup difficulty for this task is moderate? Because these seeds are not easy to clean up. An extra note of caution if you play outdoors like we did - remember that they are seeds. So unless you have a million recipes that call for basil that you can't just wait to try out, cleanup is going to be more involved than just hosing down the area.

Toddler activity: transform cornstarch into oobleck

Age range: 10 months to I'll let you know when Boo loses interest
Setup difficulty: Moderate
Equipment needed: Cornstarch, water, a large bowl, a splat mat

Water is to cornstarch as red underwear is to Clark Kent. It is transformative. Cornstarch mixed with water turns into oobleck. And with a name like oobleck it has no choice but to be weird and fun. Oobleck (aka as a non-Newtonian liquid) has the interesting property of acting as a solid when pressure is applied to it and liquid when the pressure is removed. It is a very, very interesting substance to play with.

Setup

 

Pour about a cup of cornstarch into your bowl. With a toddler I recommend using a heavy bowl, one that they can't accidentally tip over with ease. I used a glass baking dish. Add water slowly, mixing with your hands as you go. I find that using your hands is key - it is very easy to tell when you've got the proportions right if you use your hands. You've got it just right when you have a thick liquid that flows slowly and if you squeeze it you can make a ball. Remember that mistakes are very easy to fix. If it is too runny, add more cornstarch. If it is too thick, add more water. 

Put down your splat mat, place the bowl on the mat. This activity really works well sans clothes, as you will see from the pictures below.

So what is the deal with the 'moderate' difficulty rating for this simple two ingredient activity? Clean up. This can get very messy and require some effort to clean up. It is well worth it though, I promise.

Play!

 

Boo, her squeaky shaker firmly in hand, makes her first foray into oobleck land. K's curiosity is piqued too.

See what I meant about messy? She had such a great time picking up handfuls of the stuff, rolling her toy in it, putting her foot in it.

Here is Boo in action with the oobleck.

K loved oobleck too. He really, really, really wanted to eat as much of it as he could, so he ended up being rather helpful during cleanup.

Toddler activity: painting cardboard

Age range: 19 months to I'll let you know when Boo loses interest
Setup difficulty: Easy.
Equipment needed: Toddler friendly paint brush(es), paint, containers for the paint, cardboard to paint, optional: protection for clothing and a splat mat.

Boo loves to paint. We do a lot of  basic painting, you know the old fashioned kind, involving brushes, paint and paper. But every now and then I like to mix it up. How did cardboard painting come about? I bought some glass dishes and the box they came in had this weird shaped piece of cardboard in it to protect the glass (you'll see pictures of this below). Not only did it look like the terrain from a war themed video game, it also had an interesting texture. I knew right then that it deserved a better fate than an immediate dump into the recycling bin. A few days later Boo said "paint, paint" and as I set up for the activity, there was our weird piece of cardboard, just begging to be made pretty. We grabbed it and voila, a new art form was born.

Setup

Ideally, toddlers should paint with no clothes on. If the weather or mosquitos or whatever make this impossible, you'll need something to protect their clothes. I love these full coverage bibs from Ikea. They are cheap, full sleeved, super easy to put on and take just a few seconds to rinse off in the sink.

We use Melissa & Doug's jumbo paint brushes. Boo seems to like the chubby handles, she finds them easy to hold and control. She also gets a kick out of picking a brush of a particular colour (they have coloured handles) and, perhaps more importantly, picking which colour I should use. At the ripe old age of getting close to two Boo tends not to put everything in her mouth any more, so I've graduated to store bought paints. We're currently using Crayola washable finger paints.

I squirt a blob of paint into a plastic cup - one cup for each colour. The paints we're using are thick, so if she does knock a cup over, I typically get to it long before it spills. Boo tends to be careful with her paints though, she will move the paint cups to a different location with great deliberation if they start to knock against her arm.

Play!

Here is Boo at work on the Weird But Awesome piece of cardboard.

She found the surface more interesting and challenging than regular paper, and we 'used up' only about a third of it in one sitting. I liked the fact that she not only got to do what she loves, but she also had to do a bit of problem solving along the way. She figured out how to hold her brush differently while painting horizontal and vertical surfaces and learning how to properly aim her brush (to get into a particular nook or cranny) was good practice for her motor skills.

Toddler activity: threading toilet paper rolls

Age range: 21 months to I'll let you know when Boo loses interest
Setup difficulty: Very easy. Under 5 minutes.
Equipment needed: A pair of scissors, used toilet rolls or paper towel rolls, string or ribbon and, optionally, a box

Setup

Sit down with the pile of rolls that you have been oh so patiently accumulating for weeks. Cut them (holding your scissors parallel to the opening of the roll) to create 'beads' that can be threaded. I cut mine into 'beads' of various sizes. So in some cases I cut a single roll into 4-5 'beads', sometimes I just cut the roll in half and some rolls I did not cut at all. The idea is that when you first try out this activity and your toddler is still mastering this new skill the narrower beads are easier to thread and give them a sense of accomplishment. As their level of skill improves they can work with full toilet rolls, and eventually, you can cut straws and have them thread those.

If you, unlike me, are ambitious and/or talented you could choose to decorate your rolls - paint them, stick stuff on them, cover them in pretty paper, go to town. I left my beads unadorned.

Tie one of your 'beads' to the end of your thread/ribbon to serve as a knot, so that when your toddler starts threading the beads don't fall off the other end of the thread.

Dump all your newly minted 'beads' into a box, if you have one handy.

Play!

Present the box to your toddler with much fanfare. "Come! Play! This is the best thing since sliced bread!" Boo examined the box for a minute, then, as is usual, dumped the contents out. She started out by examining the 'beads'.

Here she is busily threading.

She ended up running around the house trailing a bunch of rolls behind her. The dog found this vastly amusing and a good time was had by all.

11 month old activity: no mess painting

Messy play is so much fun. Babies are cute. Messy babies are even cuter. There is one problem though: cleanup. Babies are not big fans of cleanup. Boo likes her bath, but I am generally not up for multiple baths in a day. And Boo is prone to react to a non-bath cleanup as if I am trying to murder her. If your baby is like mine, you'll be glad to have some non-messy play ideas up your sleeve.

So, for lazy days, I recommend no mess ziploc bag painting.

Take a ziploc bag. Squirt/pour blobs of different coloured paint into the bag. Seal the bag. Then tape the bag onto a horizontal or vertical surface. I chose to tape it onto a sliding glass door and the effect of the light on the paint was an added bonus. Introduce your baby to the setup. Show your baby that they can move the paints around with their hands and mix the paints and their fingers remain clean!

Here is Boo with our ziploc bag setup.

No mess painting is easy but I will admit that it doesn't keep Boo occupied for nearly as long as actual painting. She has never kept at this for more than ten minutes at a time. On the other hand, I leave it up all day, or even a couple of days if it is warm, and she will visit it more than once.

11 month old activity: two ingredient, five minute safe to eat baby paint

When Boo was 11 months old I was curious to see how she would take to paints and painting. I did not want to use store bought paint though, because she was still a great believer in experiencing the world using her mouth. So I needed to make paint at home, and it had to be super easy, because I have ten thumbs and zero patience. I did some internet spelunking and found a bunch of recipes  - but that was the problem - they were recipes, and involved heating, cooling, stirring and getting proportions just right. One thing did pop out at me though - a bunch of recipes used kool aid. So the next time I was out grocery shopping, I got a bunch of kool aid. Now I had colours, but I still needed a medium. Inspiration struck a few days later during lunch. Lunch included yogurt. We love yogurt around here (the South Indian portion of my genetic makeup is strong in this regard) and always have some plain, unsweetened yogurt in the fridge. Also, though Boo hadn't yet had any cows milk, she had had spoons of yogurt before, so I knew it would be ok if she ate some. And just like that we were off to the races.

I put a couple of spoons of Wallaby's yogurt into each plastic cup, added kool aid bit by bit and stirred until it looked pretty. That was it. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

I set up our painting station on the front porch where it was sunny and where cleanup would be a breeze. Here is Boo all ready to dive in.

I first set down a water resistant picnic blanket and then put our smaller splat mat on top of that. I used painters tape to hold the paper in place on the mat, put 4 blobs of paint on the paper and then let loose the Boo. She is wearing a onesie because I did this in March and it wasn't as warm as I would have liked. This activity is best undertaken with as few clothes on as possible because it can get really, really messy. Boo explored the paint with her feet......

........ and then came the inevitable tasting......

 Here is our masterpiece.

We had a lot of fun and Boo was occupied for nearly 25 minutes (for those of you not familiar with toddler time, 25 minutes = forever and ever).