Dinosaur Sensory Bin

Remember that little dinosaur obsession Eva developed two years ago?  Well it's still going strong.  It's amazing how much dino info a four year old brain can hold!  This past week Eva was pretty sick so we were home bound and getting a little squirrelly.  Hours upon hours of pretending to be dinosaurs and playing with dinosaur toys can get monotonous so to shake things up we created a dinosaur museum.

The sensory bin became a paleontology dig, filled with various dried beans, rocks and dinosaur skeletons.  (I found five different packs of two at the Dollar Store.)  Eva carefully digs them out and cleans them off.

Then she looks through her dinosaur cards (a Target Dollar Spot find a few years ago) and matches the skeleton to its info.

We also made a display that allows Eva to sort her toy dinos into groups- Sauropods, Theropods, Stegosaurs, Ornithopods, Ankylosaurs, Ceratopsians and Other Reptiles.

She also added some pictures she's drawn lately of dinosaurs.  

Now every morning, the first thing Eva does upon waking is setting up her museum.  Stop on by, she loves giving tours!

Fun with Plastic Easter Eggs

This year, instead of coming up with activities for Eva to do with plastic eggs, I gave her a basket full of them and let her creativity guide her.  Each day she has come up with something to do with them.  She has used eggs tongs to transfer them from the basket to a tray.

When she got bored with that, she dumped the eggs on the floor and then used the tongs to collect them again.

Here's a list of a few other Easter egg activities she came up with:
*  hide the eggs and then find them again (great training for Easter egg hunts!)
*  open the eggs and see what will fit inside (she's tried everything from dinosaurs to crayons to buttons)
*  put something in an egg and have someone else guess what it is by shaking it
*  sort eggs by color
*  sort eggs by size
*  roll eggs to see which ones will go the farthest
*  put small objects in two eggs and use as shakers to make music

Happy Valentine's Day!

We hope you have all had a wonderful Valentine's Day filled with love, laughter and fun!  Yesterday we sorted candy hearts using a graph.  I found the printout for the graph here.

After sorting them all out according to color, we talked about which color had the most and which had the least.

For dinner tonight we tried our hand at making homemade pizza dough and made a heart shaped pizza.  Pizza is always a hit and such a great meal to cook with a little one!

Happy Valentine's Day!!!

Valentine Activities

We have been having a lot of fun preparing for Valentine's Day.  Eva has been enjoying sorting heart erasers into heart-shaped baking cups.

She also has been testing out different items to find out whether or not they are magnetic.

Wednesday we were all finally over our colds so we went to story time at Barnes and Noble and Eva got to make a pretty heart garland.  She threaded different sized hearts onto ribbon and then decorated them with markers, foam stickers and even some heart glitter.

It's Christmas Time!

We are in the home stretch- it's Christmas week!  We'll be finishing up some of the things we didn't get to last week and trying to squeeze in a few more holiday activities before the big day arrives.

Crafts
Laced Stocking- this will be Eva's first attempt at lacing- we'll see how it goes!

Hand and Footprint Reindeer- Eva's little prints will be transformed into an antlered friend

Cotton Ball Santa- how many cotton ball will we need to make Santa's fluffy white beard?

Activities
Bow Sorting- we'll have fun finding various ways to sort our big collection of gift bows

Jingle Bell Rock- it's not the holidays without some music- we'll have our own Christmas dance party

Cooking
Reindeer Feed- this snack isn't for us but rather for Santa's hoofed helpers

Books