Chinese New Year: sensory play

Today we did something we haven’t done for a while – a sensory box! I tried to link it to our Chinese New Year theme as much as possible.

We used the Rainbow Rice we made back way before Christmas. Because it was red and yellow it was vaguely Chinese coloured. I added in some bits of black and red wool, red and black pom poms of various sizes, red and black feathers. I chose red and black as these colours suggest China to me. I also found some laminated red fish from the days when I was a teacher that had basic sight words on. Harrison and Alex are too young to read them but fish ate symbolic in Chinese culture so it just added to it. They also have paper clips attached to make them magnetic to play magnetic fishing games with.

I gave them the tub inside another, larger tub to try and contain the mess (still ended up everywhere!). The large tub is an underbed storage box – a smaller and cheaper alternative to a tuff spot. They had all the usual equipment that we use for activities like this – accessories from the play kitchen , cardboard tubes and bowls. I also gave them some chopsticks which our local Chinese takeaway kindly gave us for free!

Their imagination soon went wild. They had great fun trying to pick things up with the chopsticks and stirring the rice. The bits of wool soon became noodles and then we ended up bringing the play kitchen into the lounge so they could ‘cook’ the noodles and rice. (Excuse the fact Harrison yet again has no trousers on, we are potty training!)

This activity led to some maths investigation. We counted how many cups of rice it took to fill a bowl, talked about which bowl had more rice in and started to look at ‘more’ and ‘less’.

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Under the Sea: dioramas and counting octopus

Well, we’ve kept to the plan so far!
Today we made two things – dioramas and counting octopuses.

The diorama was fab to make and looks brilliant. It was only meant to be a crafty ornament type thing but Harrison has loved using all his sea creature toys in it as a small world backdrop.
A diorama is a 3d picture or scene created in a small space. Ours was an ‘under the sea’ scene to fit in with our theme.
We used a shoebox as a base. Last night I painted the inside blue and painted on some seaweed, but older children could do this themselves. I had also printed out some sea animals from here and cut these out. Harrison had a bit of a scribble on them but then asked me to colour them in. Whilst I did this, he stuck on some little crab stickers that came in his sticker book. Alex was quite happy in his highchair playing with sea creature toys.
When the pictures were coloured and cut out, Harrison chose where he wanted to stick the octopus and crab. I taped some blue thread to the back of the star fish and jellyfish and taped it to the inside ‘roof’ of the diorama. However,they did twirl round so we coloured some more in and stuck them back to back.
We then glued in some grey pom-poms as rocks – we used the glue gun to do this so they stayed put. Harrison finished by sticking some crabs on to the rocks, remembering them from our trip to the Sea Life Centre

We also made a counting octopus. I cut a paper plate in half and we glued on some googly eyes. We drew on a friendly smiley mouth. I’d cut out some strips of coloured paper. We chose eight strips and glued them on to the back of the plate for tentacles. At the end of each tentacle we glued on a circle and labeled each one from 1-8.

Harrison adores his octopus, having lots of fun counting the tentacles and even cuddled it when relaxing for his nap!

Circle printing

In the summer, we started working on shape and colour with Harrison. As we were lucky enough to have had such nice weather (for once!) we did most of our art and crafts outside.

We decided to start with circles, as it is the easiest shape to draw, its difficult to confuse with other shapes (rectangles & squares) and a circle forms a base for many letters.

We started off by going on a circle hunt. We went round the playroom and the kitchen finding as many things as possible that were circular.

We found:
Cookie and play dough cutters
Lids to jars (all different sizes)
Bowls
Cups
The little measuring thing you use for washing machines
Tubs
Building blocks

It’s amazing what you find when you’re looking! We then chose a colour. At this point Harrison knee that red and blue were colour words but I don’t think he could actually identify the colour, son we chose red. We put some paint on a plastic plate and then got to work dipping the circles into the paint and then printing it into the paper. I kept repeating the vocabulary – ‘ that’s a nice red circle’, ‘can you print me a big red circle?’ etc, and we counted all the circles. We noticed that some were big and some were small, and that the cookie cutters made a wobbly edge!

The great thing about this activity is that you could choose different shapes and colours to focus on.

Invitation to Play: Playdough and Pasta

I was looking through the pictures on our Facebook page (link( and found photos of our very first ‘invitation to play’.
When we did this activity back in January there was absolutely no planning involved. I just remember there being thick snow outside, Gray was working 12 hour shifts, I had a 9 week old baby and 19 month old toddler to amuse! This was a spur of the moment activity before I’d ever heard of Pintrest or anything like that, and it kept Harrison amused for ages!

The set up was really easy and quick. On his little table I gave him a pot of play dough, and a tub with dried pasta tubes and dried spaghetti and left him to it. Within minutes he was making balls of dough and sticking the spaghetti strands in, and then threading the dried pasta onto the stands. It was a perfect activity for developing fine motor skills!

Now he’s a year older I’m going to do this again,and let Alex have a go. I will challenge him more this time by asking him to count the pasta tubes. I’m going to provide a bowl of cheerio-type cereal for threading as well, and see if we can thread x amount of cereal on the strands of spaghetti.

A brilliantly simple and quick activity that kids will love!