Flying High In the Sky

This easy to set up sensory bin is perfect for little hands. It is fun to sort thru and play in, and it has a really fun feature for night time play; this Flying High in The Sky Sensory Bin Glows in the DARK!

We have been making sensory bins for about 8 years now.Even though Rolf is a tween and is generally too cool for my projects, even he wanted to get his hands into this one. I used things we had in our craft supplies, but for your convenience I added affiliate links to help you find some of these items that you may not have.

Supplies:

A Storage Bin with a lid

Neon Blue Food Color

Glow in the Dark Paint

A zipper seal baggie

White Rice, Uncooked (2 cups)

Rainbow Ribbon

Toobs - In the sky

Tongs

Glow in the Dark Stars

Cotton Balls

To dye the rice

Place 2 cups of white rice into a zipper seal baggie.

Add 2 tablespoons of non toxic glow in the dark paint (I used art deco brand) and 10 drops of neon blue food color to the baggie.

Seal and shake well.

Pour the rice on a paper towel, paper plate, or something like an old cookie sheet and allow to dry for about 4 hours. You may need to stir halfway through the drying time.

To assemble the bin:

Cut several sections of rainbow ribbon in various lengths from 1 to 3 inches.

Gently "fluff" several cotton balls to resemble clouds.

Pour the dry, dyed rice into the storage bin.

Bury several sections of rainbow ribbon in the rice bin.

Place the remaining rainbow ribbon on the top of the bin.

Bury several plastic glow in the dark stars in the rice bin.

Sprinkle the remaining stars on top of the bin. 

Add fluffy cotton clouds to the bin.

Add the planes and helicopters from the tube of Toobs 

Add a pair of tongs to the bin and invite your child to explore.

The tongs add a challenge to the bin, which is excellent for practicing fine motor skills.

I like to make sensory bins in a container with a lid,so we can snap the lid on it when play time is over and revisit the activity later.  For bins like this that are fun to play with anytime, that comes in handy because my kids want to dig around in this one all the time!

Here is the bin after dark. We LOVE glow in the dark activities! 

Some of our favorite glow in the dark activities include:

No Electric Night Lights

Galaxy Glow in the Dark Slime

Find more sensory ideas here:

Sensory Play

Mud Ice Cream

This mud ice cream station is so much fun for kids! It is easy to set up and is the perfect use for those leftover ice cream cones from summer, while serving up a bunch of good old fashioned fun!

I am always looking for great ways to keep my kids playing without turning to their video games.This mud ice cream activity kept them entertained with dramatic play all day. They naturally got filthy dirty which is half the fun! If you do this with your kids, opt for old clothes and shoes and do it outside!

Supplies:

Ice cream cone

Sprinkles

Old dishes like a bowl and spoons to scoop with

Mud

Directions:

Fill up a bowl with mud.

Offer your children spoons and scoops , sprinkles and a few ice cream cones.

You might like to add a few old bowls to the mix for variety.

Allow your child to scoop mud into the cones and dishes and add a generous amount of sprinkles!

Both of my kids were enthralled with this idea. It might have been one of the best activities I have ever set up for them. They laughed, they mixed up mud, served it to each other and got so incredibly dirty. It was wonderful fun!

Both kids agreed that this would be fun to try with snow too! Should we be so lucky this winter to have enough snow to play with!

When playtime is over, simply spray the tools your kids used to play with the hose, and toss the ice cream cones! I love easy clean up activities! If the weather is warm enough, your kids might enjoy a splash in the sprinkler, or the garden hose to clean off a little bit before going inside.

You can find more kids activities here

Play Doh Fine Motor Rainbows

Pine Cone Rescue

Play Doh Food Themed Puzzles

Do you need an easy way to keep the kids entertained? This play doh puzzle idea is perfect for challenging them with items you already have on hand!

It is no secret that we LOVE play doh! Homemade versions, ideas to play with it, and just the joy of squishing it in your hands! No matter how you do it, it is fun with play doh.

The kids have been out of school for a long time now; 6 weeks and counting. Keeping them learning, playing and happy has been a challenge. I have had to get creative in my efforts, but some of the best ideas are born out of idle time and basic supplies.

This play doh puzzle can be as challenging or easy you want it to be. We used play food because we have a lot of that.

Affiliate links are used in this post. If you make a purchase, I will earn a small advertising fee at no cost to you.

Supplies:

Play Doh

Several Play Foods

Directions:

Roll a can of play doh out until it covers about a 6 to 8" area

Press assorted play food into the play doh, leaving a little room in between the food to create impressions that you can match up.

After you have filled the play doh with imprints of play food, lay all play food around the play doh and invite your child to match up the play food to the imprint that the food left.

Repeat with more play food, or even other objects from around the house.
Make more imprints for more challenging puzzles, or fewer for an easier play experience.
We loved that we could make this fun for both kids without having to buy anything!

You can find all of my play doh ideas here

Reader favorites include:

Play Doh Flower Counting

Play Doh Multiplication

Paper Plate Lion Craft

This easy paper plate lion craft requires basic supplies and makes for a roaring good craft for the little ones!

I am an advocate for crafting with kids! I think that with simple supplies you can open up an entire world for the kids. This easy paper plate lion craft is a perfect activity for preschoolers and kindergarteners. It utilizes fine motor skills and it gives kids a chance to explore their own wild side as they give their paper plate lion a personality!

To make this easy craft we used:
Kwik Stik
Uncooked Rotini Noodles
A clean paper plate
school glue
2 googly eyes

Begin by painting the rim of the plate orange
Paint the center of the plate yellow
glue rotini noodles on the rim of the plate to make the mane
Add eyes
Draw on a face with your Kwik Stik

We love to make easy crafts! With 2 kids under the age of 6, I grab every opportunity I can to get crafty with them! Some of you might be familiar with my crafting show on facebook live, where we make a lot of adorable and easy crafts, if not, I hope you will join me on the Quirky Momma facebook page on Monday or Friday nights at 8:30 pm, or Wednesdays at 9 am eastern or 7:30 pm.

Fine Motor Name Practice

Roo is enjoying his summer break, but I intend to send him back to school on track. I don't want him to lose any of the skills he developed last year at school and I want to send him back with a whole new set!

We try to do a variety of things, like dot to dots, writing, sight words and refreshing on colors, shapes, letters, numbers and etc. Several days a week. I like to give him chances to further develop his fine motor skills while having fun spelling his name.

To do this activity you will need:
Foam Sheets (I get them in a multi pack at Wal-Mart or Dollar Tree)
Foam sticker letters that spell your childs name, you might want to have letters to do this 2 or 3 times on one foam sheet.

To get my son started I simply peeled a tiny edge back for him so that he could work on getting the backing of the sticker off. These foam letters were pretty cheap and even I had a hard time peeling them, so I guess we both got some fine motor work in on this one!

I told him he was going to spell his name, but I wanted him to sound each letter out as he placed it on the foam sheet.

Roo did pretty well with this activity, it took about 5 minutes to put together and complete and it gave him a chance to practice 2 skills!

A Simple Fine Motor Activity

I like to keep Roo learning and developing skills even though he is on summer break. I also like to create tools for learning from items we already have at home.

I had an idea for a super simple fine motor activity that I could make in a matter of minutes. I had no idea how much bot of my kids would enjoy working on such a simple activity with such great fine motor skill practice.

You will need:
Pom Poms
A pair of plastic tongs
An egg carton

The rest is pretty self explanatory. Put the pom poms in the egg carton, then demonstrate how to pinch and pick up then sort the colors.

As you can see I used smaller pom poms for Roo exclusively so he would really have to work at pinching the pom poms with the tongs.

Harper isn't ready for the tongs yet, but using her fingers to grasp the varying sizes and the fuzzy texture of some compared to the hardness of the smaller pom poms is good for her fine motor development too. I use assorted sizes when working on this activity with her.

Winter Weather and Missed School

It seems as if my family has not had a regular week since Christmas break began. We have had snow, snow, snow for about 2 months now. Delays and of course school closings have been in abundance.

Wouldn't you know it, on top of missing so much school due to the weather, Roo was ill and he missed several of the days he could have attended in January. 

The scene in our backyard

We received blizzard bags from school as we have exceeded our calamity days. Roo blew through them in a few days. 

To make a long story short, I was growing concerned that he was going to start losing skills he has acquired, so we took a more intentional approach to learning at home.

One day we took a plastic cup and added some water to it after breakfast. We placed it on the deck and went about our business. Later I asked Roo to check on it. He was quite pleased to see a cup of solid ice awaiting him. 

We then sat the cup on the counter in the kitchen. It was 3 pm. We timed it to see how long it would take to melt. When I went to bed that night at 11, only a touch of ice remained. The next morning, my son was thrilled to see it was all melted back into water. He then proceeded to insist on having a bath... he carefully carried the cup of melted ice water to the tub. He climbed in and poured it over his head and laughed... Boys, I tell ya, they are funny creatures!

We practiced writing daily. We worked on shapes daily too. Write your name, write abc, make a cross, make a square, etc. He is pretty good at shapes. His handwriting is messy, but if you let him write really small his letters are great, if you can read them. 

We read a lot of books! We discovered the fun of Pete the Cat and the Don't Let Pigeon... titles. We spent minutes (he is only 4 after all...) pouring over look and find books at different times in the days of never ending winter...We delighted in old favorites such as The Little Pumpkin Book, all of his Dinosaur Train books and Several from the Little Critter series.

We went to a pet store and looked at different animals. We talked about how birds come from eggs and what they eat. We oohed over guinea pigs, and pleaded with Daddy to get a bunny.

We observed footprints in the snow from a cat and a bird, then we checked out our own tracks and tried to write our names with footprints. Roo marveled at the cat prints. He thought they were "really cute".

It is funny, but initially I worried that winter would have negative effects on my son and his education, but I found the opposite was true. I found that the things he was not doing at school, he could actually do with just a little one on one attention. I will even admit, for about 9 minutes I indulged the homeschool fantasy. Then both kids were crying, the dog was barking and I said a silent prayer for good weather and I gave thanks for his preschool teacher.

The Day We Made a Straw Flute

I was working late one night when I got this idea... we could make straw flutes tomorrow. I wrote, in blue ink, the words STRAW FLUTE on the back of my hand.  Before I knew it I was waking up with a stiff neck on the sofa. I had maneuvered myself under the sofa cover and caught a few zzz's.

The next morning I noticed blue ink on my white leather sofa. What the heck? I examined it... backwards it read, STRAW FLUTE. A sighed a heavy, irritated sigh. Oh shoot. Well since this project was so important to me that I wrote it on my hand and created a new mess to stress over we might as well make the damn flutes...

So we did.

I have no idea if we did them 'right' but I know we had fun with the flutes for a few hours on a winter day.

I had 8 straws on hand, so we used all 8.

I cut them and put them in order from shortest to tallest.

Then I secured them to one another with clear tape.

My son grabbed it and ran with it, he was having fun making noise, on a very small scale.

Excuse the poor quality of the photo I was literally chasing him to get a pic!

So there you have it folks! We made an easy peasy straw flute and the 4 year old was busy and happy for a few hours that day.

Fine Motor Feeding Fun

I don't blog about kids activities very often, but... I have kids. We do things! I take photos when I remember that my snazzy phone has a snazzy camera too... why not share some of what we have been up to?!

If my son had his way about it, from sun up to sundown he would wake up and play with his trains, dinosaurs and action figures. He would get a bath some time in the day, and he might want to go to school... only to come home and resume his constant play session on the dining room table. 

I have a knack for butting in and encouraging him to try new things. He is not always happy about it, but some days I can get him engaged in something new that has added benefits like fine motor skill practice.

The last time we visited the pet store my thoughtful kids wanted to get tennis balls for our old dogs. Roo had this idea of playing fetch. So I agreed that they could try to play fetch with the dogs and bought the balls they clamored for.  I had an extra ball and a few minutes of time, so I created a fun fine motor activity for Roo.

I found a box cutter and cut a slit into the tennis ball.

Then I made it fun by adding googly eyes.

I told Roo he needed to feed this dude his lunch, but he was being fussy. I gave him some varying sized pom poms and demonstrated how to get the dude to eat his food.

My son thought that was awesome! He was eager to feed the "dude". 

And there you have it folks. A 90 second (if that) project that combines fun, fine motor and best of all, no batteries or screens!

Roo likes feeding the dude pom poms and I love that he is working with his hands to develop coordination and improve his scissor skills which need practice.

What kind of things do you do with your kids to work on fine motor skills?