fall color walk

Oh man, fall is my secret love.  Secret because, being named Summer, summer is supposed to be my favorites season.  It's great, but I love the cool weather and the vibrant colors that make up autumn.

It is imperative for my mental health to get out of the house each day, and it is super good for the boys too. Today we got to combine our walk with a color search!  Fall is perfect for this since there are SO many colors to see.  Mono always likes to collect treasures on our walks- rocks, sticks, and berries are among his favorites.  I can't even tell you how often I find his treasures in random places in our home.  Anyway, he thought it was so fun that mama was collecting treasures with him today.  He helped me look for all our fun colors, and it was the first time I heard him say many of the color names!  It was a great activity.

He also loved helping me arrange our colorful leaves and berries.  We sorted by color, size, and shape.  But his favorite thing was putting the leaves all in a bowl, them dumping them back out.  The white poster was the perfect background, since it brought out the vibrant colors!  I'm thinking tomorrow we will collect leaves again, then I will color the poster different colors to help Mono figure out the sorting by color a little better.

 Aren't these colors just amazing?  We didn't go anywhere special - just our usual walk around the neighborhood.  My favorite leaf is the second from the left in the picture below- the green and yellow combination is so vibrant!

Do you do a color walk or drive?

toddler play: milk cap treasure chest

Hoarding milk caps is old news- there are so many awesome things to do with them.  Most of the ideas I've seen before revolved around cutting holes out of plastic lids.  I had saved up a huge collection, but when I did my lid-cutting it came out super awful and a little sharp.  In the end, it was not a huge hit.

However, a few weeks later, I finished up a box of pampers wipes.  I prefer huggies wipes, so I was going to toss the box but Monkey Boy was fascinated with it.  After watching him play, a light bulb clicked and I ran a grabbed our milk caps.  What do you know?  They fit perfectly into the wipe cap opening.

Mono played with these pretty often.  He loved that he could dump them all out and make a mess.  Some of the lids were juice lids, and the milk lids were smaller and could be snapped inside the juice lids.  He loved that.  After a few weeks my hubby had the idea to paint all the lids like coins.  So I whipped out my gold and silver spray paint (actually, he did it) and spray painted the lids.

It was like a brand-new toy.  Monkey boy thought the lids were SO cool and is playing with them all over again!  Amazing what a little spray paint can do.  Now all I need to do is grab some brown and we can paint the box like a treasure chest.

 Do you save your milk caps?  What do you use them for?

toddler play: pipe cleaners and straws

There are some days when getting dressed and leaving the house are just too overwhelming for me.  It's fine and dandy for me to stay home all day, but it makes Monkey Boy crazy.  He has so much energy, so on days when I don't take him outside to run around and be free, I try to come up with a new activity or game for him to play with me inside.  With winter coming on, there are more and more fowl-weather days and I know we are going to be stuck inside much more often! I'm working on coming up with new activities that promote play and learning.  As I scour the internet, I'll share my favorites here with you!

This week is an activity that I like to think I invented- straws and pipe cleaners.  I'm sure someone else has thought of this before, but I'll take credit for it anyway.

Set up is super easy.  I keep pipe cleaners in different varieties on hand, and all you need to do is cut up straws into varying sizes.  The bendy part of the straw was really fun for Mono.

I usually put the straws in a container to keep them from rolling all over the place while he plays.  Of course, they end up getting dumped out.

For a little while, Mono enjoyed trying to thread the straws onto the pipe cleaners.  When he got frustrated with that (it takes alot of focus!), he wanted me to thread them so he could pull them all off.

Obviously, threading the straws is great for fine motor practice and teaches patience.  For younger kids this can get really frustrating, and until now (20 months), Mono hasn't really tried threading the straws.

 When he was done with the threading, he had alot of fun dumping the straws out and picking them up.  Whatever keeps you occupied, kiddo!

What do your kids do with pipe cleaners?  I've seen so many ideas, but I'm looking for something new.  We've done pipe cleaners in the colander about a million times!