Tot Activities this week

~ Micah and Mackenna are 21 months old ~

I have been working on some more intentional, stimulating play activities with M and M. I'm not sure where we are going to go from here. I don't plan on getting extremely structured, but the planner and teacher in me is hard to beat down sometimes. I would like our times at home (specifically wed - fri) to be engaging, stimulating, enjoyable times for all three of us.

Here are some things we have tried with the limited resources that I have found around the house:

~ We attempted a real object matching game where I found pairs of objects around the house (clothespins, play hot dogs, legos, etc.) and put them in a container. The kids then dumped out the container and tried to put the objects back in, a pair at a time. I intended to see if the twins would take turns doing this back and forth. That didn't work. Mackenna kind of got into this and did it successfully maybe 1 and a half times. Micah really only wanted to take the container and put his own cars in it and carry it around the house (anything that can become a car holder - will become a car holder).

~ I saw an idea here to play a "too big/just right" game with varying objects and an empty 2-Liter bottle. This was a hit. They loved putting things into the bottle. I loved observing their different approaches to this. Micah quickly learned what objects were going to be too big, and wouldn't even attempt to put those in, they stayed in the bag the whole time for him. Mackenna seemed to know what was going to be too big, but she still liked to attempt it and say "no, big" to herself as she was doing it. Dumping it out was a big hit also.



(Here is proof that Mackenna was involved in some of these activities this week, even though she wasn't pictured above or in the next part. She is helping get the bottle ready.)



~ I purchased some pom-poms and some magnet discs with the intention of making pom pom magnets so that we can do activities like this. I definitely have not gotten around to it yet. I decided the other day to get out the pom poms and see if they could do some color sorting with them. They had other ideas. They loved playing with them, throwing them, touching them, squishing them, holding them up and hearing what color they were (they would then always say the color we had just said for the next pom pom they held up - but they were never right!). I got the 2-liter bottle back out and they loved putting the pom poms into the bottle; they actually took turns with this one pretty well. Shaking it out was fun as before.

~ Today Micah was home with me from church. I used our alone time to see if we could do a little more structured play with the pom-poms. After modeling it for him a little bit, he got really good at sorting four colors of pom-poms into clear glasses. He would even say "no" as he would start to put one in the wrong glass. He also would go in and pick out any that had gotten put in the wrong glass. He also had fun pouring the pom-poms between glasses some too. (And stacking the cups and wearing them on his head as a hat.) It was encouraging that even though we are a long way from really knowing our colors, he can make some matches for now. He also got some colors right when Daddy played with him after church.









See what I mean about everything becoming a container for cars!



For more tot inspiration - visit the link up at 1+1+1=1