Archive for the ‘Outside activities’ Category
Hot Dog Craft
I am not a big meat eater, but somehow my son is a huge carnivore. He has recently discovered hot dogs and I feel like it may be the end of healthy eating as I once knew it. That or I’ll go broke buying the organic nitrate free ones! Either way I explained we were taking a break from eating hot dogs but that we could make one for art time today. Here is what we did!
- Gather your materials. You will need a brown paper grocery bag ( or other paper) , a brown or black marker, some glue, red and yellow paint, scissors and ketchup and mustard containers. You could use real ones but the beauty of these are that they are solid , washable and kids can’t see that there is only a tiny bit of paint in them. Since there is so little the mess will be manageable.
- Pour the red paint into the ketchup bottle and yellow into the mustard. I thinned it out a little.
- Cut off a large piece from your grocery bag, and draw a bun and a sausage.
- Cut them apart.
- Glue the sausage to the bun.
- Add your condiments. Ignore my impromptu strap in the picture!
- Let dry and cut out.
Song
I’m a little hot dog
here’s my bun
Put me on the grill
until I’m done
Add some mustard
and ketchup
take a big bite
and gobble me up!
Book
Posted in Age 2-3 years, Age 3-5 years, Cooking, Food Activities, Hot Dog, Outside activities | 
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Spray Painting!
- Gather your materials. You will need some craft paper, some small spray bottles, liquid washable paint and masking tape.
- Pour some paint into the spray bottles , add water and shake. You will want to use dark colors, because the water dilutes it .
- Tape your paper to your fence.
- Start spraying! Your child will have fun but is also giving their pincer grasp a great workout. We had fun spraying it up close ,
and far away. 
Older kids can try to make a picture or have fun watching the drips like we did.
Nature Scavenger Hunt
This is so simple to make, and can be used over and over again. Learning colors in a book or while using paints isn’t bad, but when you are able to go outside and find colors in the natural world there is a spark! I was overjoyed to see my son yell “Look mama flower is yellow”. I love bridging learning from inside to outside and incorporating all different ways to learn into one activity.
- Gather your materials. We used a baby food freezer tray but an ice cube tray, or egg carton among other things would work well. Also scissors and a color of foam ( can you tell I bought a big thing of foam a few weeks ago?) or construction paper for each section. A backyard, beach, park…
- Cut your foam/paper into pieces small enough to line the bottom of the tray/carton. For younger kids choose colors that you kn0w they have a chance of finding a match. You don’t want it to be too easy , but too much of a challenge just frustrates everyone. If a child is frustrated they won’t learn, our goal is to challenge and learn!
- Head outside – my son couldn’t wait to get outside so as you can see he’s as per usual in his pjs!
- Start finding things to match. Start off by choosing a color with your child and both go looking, if they have a hard time finding a match find one, and go to it but don’t announce you have found it. Say something like “Hey Bug I think there is a match over here, can you find it” narrow down the are for them, if they still can’t pick up the object and have them match it in the tray.
- Continue working together or if they want to work all alone, watch your child explore and make connections, that is exciting and fun too!
- After you have made all your matches, talk about what you have found- how it feels what it does ( rock lines a path for us to walk on, a flower provides pollen for bees etc…).
Books!
Five Senses: Stop Did you Hear That?
- Gather your materials. You will need some construction paper, plain paper, markers, a ruler, scissors, stickers and glue or double stick tape.
- Make a simple chart , one space for the sound you are searching for and a small box for a sticker or a check mark.
- Add things you hear often around your neighborhood or where ever you will be listening. We did sirens, dogs barking, birds, cars, etc…
- Tape or glue the paper on the construction paper and head off on your walk.
- I gave the chart to my son
and told him we were looking for all those sounds, we talked about hearing things, and although he was quite convinced we hear with our eyes, he still got it. - I helped start things off my closing the garage door and asking him what he heard.
when he said the garage door , I asked him to look on his chart to see if that was on it. When it was we got a sticker and put it in the box. - The next up was our neighbors barking dogs!
Then birds… we were only a few hundred feet from our door and we already had half the items on our safari.
As we kept walking we found more and my son pointed out ones we didn’t have like the lawnmowers the gardeners were using. That tickled me because that was the point of this whole exercise to learn about using our ears to hear and identify sounds. These were our final safari findings:
Books!
” Sounds Funny” and ” Sounds Tough” by Kevin Somers are exactly the type of books I have been looking for. They have super fun illustrations that dominate the pages, and the text is simply the sound that the pictures would make. A perfect way to engage young preschoolers and toddlers about sound. Also I found it rather interesting that the motorcycle sound in ” Sounds Tough” is ” Na Na Na” since my son calls motorcycles nanas. maybe he knows something I don’t! Either way there are many books about how sound works and the five senses that are far too complicated for really little guys, these books are perfect!
X marks the spot
- Gather your materials. You will need some white paper, permanent markers ( see why it’s not a toddler activity?), used coffee grinds in the filter, and some ribbon.
- Using permanent markers draw a treasure map. I like to use things in my backyard as the “stops” in the map. I have our trees, a basket ball and blocks – you don not have to use real things. However for the activity below using real things will make it easier.
- Taking out most of the coffee grinds
rub the outside of the filter all over your map to make it look old and dirty! 
Let dry. You can also use tea but it takes much longer and we all know how much kids love to wait. 
- Randomly rip the edges to make the map look more authentic!
- Roll up and scrunch and secure with a ribbon!
Treasure Hunt
Here is where I snuck in some totally unrelated learning. At the stops the challenges were things like : Sing the alphabet, find something blue, jump in the air 5 times, find a word that rhymes with pig… anything but they loved it. After a few times playing with me they became the masterminds and developed their own challenges- pretty cool for children who weren’t even potty trained!
With my toddler we went to the park and hid his new ball. We busted out the map( that I made ) and followed the pictures. We counted to ten, reached up high, found something red and touched our noses! As you can see you have to fit the challenges to the specific child but trust me, everyone will be having so much fun they won’t even notice all the learning they are doing!
