The little boy in this picture is so thrilled at himself right now. He was literally giggling as he did this. My husband thinks I'm nuts, but these little pom poms have given the kids endless minutes of fun. I say minutes because I would be lying if I said hours. The fun lasts less than half and hour before it gets out of hand and I'm saying, "Ok, you're done, let's clean them all up now." That also lasts minutes upon minutes because as soon as they get them close to cleaned, usually Peter tries to be Mr. Funny Man and tosses them all out again. So, he showed John this trick and the little one thinks it's great fun.
I saw this idea of playing with these at the Children's Museum last year. I need to get some containers with slots in them like they had there ( just cut from yogurt or oatmeal containers), but they pretend it's popcorn and put it in pots, or "neat balls" which Ella says (meatballs), ice cream...they have great imaginations.
I think we are going to try noodle necklaces soon.
Do you have any really fun ideas to keep the kids busy without lots of cost and mess?
This summer I turned to my book "365 TV-Free Activities You Can Do with Your Child" for a lot of fun stuff. Some of these are more for big kids but could probably be adapted!!! I already had these ones typed out so here you go:
ReplyDelete1. balloon volleyball
2. body tracing
3. cereal box city
4. chain laughter (lay on another belly)
5. checkers
6. clean up games
7. cloud watching
8. coin toss
9. color mixing (food coloring in water)
10. memory game with magazine pics cut in half
11. card making
12. crayon rubbings (key, leaf, etc)
13. flannel board
14. color with a crayon between toes (ha!)
15. finger puppets
16. fingerprints
17. flip book
18. word search
19. hand shadows
20. cup stacking
21. puzzle
22. obstacle course
23. paper cutting
24. popsicle stick architecture
25. play office
26. potato prints
27. sewing card
28. sock puppets
29. spoon relay
30. straw sculptures
31. streamer dancing
32. play with bubbles in sink
33. tabletop hockey
34. ten-tube bowling (TP tubes)
35. sorting small items into egg carton