Toddler Tuesdays: Bees

 Hello, thanks for joining us again. This week we have a lot of black and yellow around the house. I'm talking about Bees! Our sensory bin is full of wild rice (I was going to use honeycomb shaped pasta, but could not find any safe for Panda), sparkly yellow pom poms, a bumble bee or two, a beehive (I'll have instructions on how to make that later), tweezers, and a tube for pouring things through. 

 This was a new activity. I had Panda suck up nectar (colored water) with a turkey baster and put it into the honeycombs (ice cube tray). He did surprisingly good, There were of course some spills, but he caught on to the turkey baster right away and loved it. 

 I scavenged the spice jar from last week and used the other side of the cap. Panda had to stuff yellow and black pipe cleaners through the holes. While he usually focuses real well on activities on like this he kind of had a been there done that attitude with this activity yesterday. Of course it was a holiday and having Poppy home was a huge distraction. Sunday he loved this activity.

 Panda ignored the tweezers for this activity since we've done activities like this in the past without them. Then about halfway through he found the tweezers and tried real hard to use them to sort the pollen balls (pom poms). I call it a success.

 I got the idea for these adorable pool noodle bees from this blog. I added felt wings and googly eyes, but the credit is all hers.

Instead of having Panda go up and down the stairs with them like she suggested, I hooked them up outside and Panda LOVED running them back and forth. This might stay up longer than this week out there.

Last of all I had to post this cute garland I made. It will stay up for the rest of summer. Next year I plan to hang them outside in the trees. Maybe we will get lucky and birds will use them for nests. I got the idea from the local grocery store. They made their bees with large coffee cans. I fell in love with their cuteness and down scaled it to soup cans. We have other fun things planned for this week, like Panda's first taste of honeycomb, a trip to the nature center to see the glass wall with a real beehive inside, printing honeycombs using half an okra for a stamp, and even a craft making honeycombs with bubble wrap and paint! There is a buzzy crazzy week ahead of us. Please keep us in your thoughts. Hopefully things will start to slow down after this week. Fingers crossed. I can at last see a light at the end of the tunnel.

Have a blessed week and shine on!

Toddler Tuesdays: Butterflies

Hello, welcome, and thank you for bearing with us. Toddler Tuesdays are a bit sporadic lately and I'm sorry. Hopefully this will be the last week of upheaval in our home. We are switching to a new OT for Panda and things should calm down once we have therapy times in place. 

This week we are working with butterflies. I wanted to do this for Mother's Day, but.. you know.. Upheaval.. Our sensory bin has fresh cut grass, the four stages of a butterfly's life, flowers, rocks, a butterfly sipping pool, a net, magnifying glass, and tweezers. This bin went over real well. 

These are the books I've chosen for this week. I know we've done 'The Very Hungry Caterpillar' before, but he really likes this book.

 As Panda enters his 'squashing bug' phase of toddlerdom I thought this would be a good poem for us this week. It is in the 'Treasury of Poetry'.

I made a caterpillar out of a clothes pin and then printed out several pictures from 'The Very Hungry Caterpillar' book. Panda had a lot of fun "feeding" the caterpillar by tossing it through the holes in the fruit while making loud lip smacking noises. It was adorable and an exercise in imaginative play and fine motor skills..

 

I put a paper butterfly in a baggy with paint, and then taped it to the table for Panda to squish. He did not like touching the squishy bag one bit. Oh well, we will try again today. It's a new sensation. When the butterfly dried I slipped the clothes pin caterpillar on the wings and Panda was in love. He played with both the caterpillar and the butterfly for a long time. The painted butterflies for the rest of the week will be saved for cards.

 I cut butterflies out of felt for this activity. Then we matched like color butterflies with like colored blocks. It was a simple activity for color matching. Not all activities need to be spectacular. 

This is an idea I got off of Pinterest. I didn't have the energy to make cute beaded felt butterfly wings so instead I opted for printing out pictures of real butterflies.

 

This last activity was the favorite one of the day. I bought a tube of butterflies at the craft store and cleaned out an old spice jar. The butterflies only fit in sideways, so Panda had to concentrate to get them in right. He LOVED this activity so much that he emptied out the jar and stuffed them back in 5 times!

Thank you for stopping by. I hope you like this weeks activities. I've wanted to do Butterflies for a while now. Hopefully things will be quieting down soon. Till then, thank you for your understanding. Shine on!