Afternoon Activity: Bathtub Painting

Rose and I are stuck at home for the better part of today while waiting for a contractor to come and patch up a hole in the garage ceiling. Luckily, we were able to run to the late story time at our library where Rose had an awesome social breakthrough and detached herself from me for a whole 5 minutes to play with the parachute. It was a big proud-mama moment.

After we came home and ate lunch, we were pretty bored and didn’t know what to do with ourselves. I thought about finger painting but I really didn’t feel like cleaning up the big mess that was sure to come with that activity, which of course would lead to a bath. That’s when it hit me. Why not skip the middle part? Why not make the mess IN the bathtub? Well, that’s exactly what we did. I prepped Rose’s paint tray (icecube tray), attached cotton balls to the ends of some clothespins, and let Rose go at it in the tub.

I made sure to use washable finger paint. I recommend the Crayola brand, but you could always experiment making some DIY finger paint (although be careful when using food coloring, it may dye your child’s clothes and/or your bathtub).

My favorite things about this activity is that the prep time was minimal (around 2 minutes) and Rose enjoyed playing for about 30-35 minutes! After about 15 minutes of play Rose started getting bored with the cotton balls, so I introduced some q-tips and she continued playing with those for another 10 minutes. Once she decided that she had enough of painting, I turned the water on and she had even more fun playing in the colored water and helping mom clean the sides of the tub. The one “bad” thing about this activity is that it left a lovely red ring around my tub; but since I used washable paints, it was easily removed with a wet rag.

Overall Rating: 5+ Stars!

Below is a quick summary of why this activity was so awesome and received a 5+ rating:

• Minimal prep time
• 30-35 minutes of play time
• Sensory play: cotton, water, goopy paint
• Learning opportunities for colors, counting, and letters
• Creative play: making art, mixing colors 
• Easy clean up

Afternoon Activity: Cotton Balls and Contact Paper

This post is a bit late and this activity was actually done a couple of nights ago. My one-year-old was a bit restless since we had been inside all day and I, myself, was tired from cleaning the house. That being said, I wanted something that was both easy to clean up and fairly simple to set up.

I have been trying to find ways to utilize a couple of bags of cotton balls that I had previously purchased for a crafting play date earlier in the month and discovered this idea on Pinterest. Five minutes later I had the contact paper taped (upside down) to my daughter’s activity table and gave her a bucket of cotton balls, q-tips, and Styrofoam packing peanuts and let her go crazy.

She played with the whole set up for about 15 minutes. Her favorite part was to take the cotton balls and stick them to the contact paper and pick them up so they left cotton fibers. But eventually she got bored with it and soon discovered that the packing peanuts could be torn and shredded into smaller pieces (that were so much fun picking up afterward). She did this for about another 10 minutes.

Overall, I’d say this was a pretty successful activity. It lasted for about half an hour and clean up wasn’t horrible. If we keep with my previous rating system, I’d give this activity 5 stars. 

Afternoon Activity: 2 Ingredient Fake Snow

If you search online for winter activities for toddlers, you will be bombarded with a zillion different “recipes” for fake or artificial snow. Rose and I are going to go ahead and make several of these over the next several days and post our findings on which snow is the best snow. Here’s day one:

Ingredients:

• ½ cup Shampoo
• 3 cup Baking Soda

 Activity:

We made a smaller version of this recipe since we will be making a lot of snow over the next week. Since the recipe is a simple 1:6 ratio, I began with 6 Tbs of baking soda and eventually added the 1 Tbs of shampoo later. But first Rose played with the baking soda. This is quickly becoming her favorite part of almost all of our activities. Whether it be baking soda, flour, salt, or whatever. I then added the shampoo and helped her mix it in. It should clump like in the picture below and you should be able to compress it into a shapes.

Rose then played around in the fake snow, while I made her a snowman using sprinkles for his face. I apologize for the lovey dovey face the snowman is giving. Unfortunately, all I had were Valentine’s Day sprinkles. Rose played with it for a couple minutes but quickly grew bored. That’s when I pulled the vinegar out. Rose and I melted that poor snowman sucker. 

Conclusion:

Pros:

• 2 Ingredients
• Smells lovely. I used coconut smelling shampoo.
• Multiple opportunities to discuss colors, sounds, textures, smells, and maybe even taste with little ones.
• Making it took around 5-10 minutes and playing with it took around 10-15 minutes.
• “Melting” the snowman with vinegar is fun and is probably the best part of the activity.

 Cons:

• Depending on which shampoo you use, the smell may be a bit overkill.
• Rose quickly grew bored with the snow itself. I don’t see this as big of a problem with older kids.
• If you do the vinegar step, you cannot keep and reuse.

Overall Rating: 5 Stars

I have no other fake snow to compare this recipe to yet, but I’d say that Rose’s overall experience with this activity was great! She enjoyed playing with the baking soda by itself at the beginning, and then had fun mixing in the shampoo. She may not have completely understood the concept of playing with the crumbly snow, but as soon as I brought out the vinegar and droppers she was back at having fun. The overall activity took around 30 minutes from beginning to end with a quick 10 minute clean up time. So it ate a good chunk of our afternoon boredom away.

Other Variations:

• I would definitely suggest this activity for a play date. Let each kid make their own batch of snow, then play with it, and finally let them turn it into a goopy sludge.
• Add glitter to the shampoo prior to mixing your two ingredients to make glitter snow.