I finally finished a cardboard house that I started building for my daughter this week. Even though it was unfinished this whole time, she used to sit inside it every day. It is big enough to fit the two of us. This is a very thick cardboard and I had to ask help from my husband a few times since it was so hard to cut. I used hot glue gun for the roof and painted the house with acrlics.
When I saw my daughter’s reaction to my cardboard town, I realized that I should continue with this theme. Here is a playground for our town’s kids.
Тоday, she tested the structures. Since she was swinging the swings really strongly, I reinforced the horizontal piece with a sushi stick. The swings are attached to that piece with two threads.
There is semolina in the sandbox but you can put sand in there too.
I've been asked multiple times how this playground was built so I created a manual for those who want to do it. I marked places where you will need to put glue with red (I used hot glue gun). Fold along the doted lines. The diagrams are not to scale.
We were painting with different kinds of flowers. It was interesting indeed but painting with feet is still our favorite so my daughter walked on the painting with her feet covered in paint.
Then she took a small rose, separated the petals and glued them to the painting with a glue stick. Some of them quickly fell off but some stayed.
This is my town made of cardboard. It took me a few days to cut the pieces out, glue them together and paint them with acrylics. I used cardboard boxes, we have plenty of them all the time mostly from Amazon.
This town provides endless opportunities for role play. One of the little guys is pushing a shopping cart with groceries, another one is waiting for the train, kids are playing in the park. We played with it for days and my daughter didn't want any of her other toys.
The three houses, the grocery store, train station, road signs, traffic lights and the board itself are made of cardboard. No pieces are glued to the board, everything can be rearranged, removed or replaced with other buildings. This game reminds me of SimCity a lot.
The great thing about it is that I can add another board next to it and continue to build the town in any direction. I am planning to add a police station, a school and a playground.
Painting with balloons is a really fun activity. You need to blow a balloon and dip it into paint. The only problem was that my daughter loved popping balloons by squeezing them with her nails while painting. Our entire kitchen was covered in paint within moments. Therefore, my advice - use easy washable paint.
We collected some flowers and leaves and made a painting with them. There were three stages to the process. First, we poured Elmer's glue on paper and my daughter placed flowers over it. We left it to dry overnight.
The next day glue became dry and transparent and we were ready to paint over it. My daughter used brushed, hands, sponges, balloons and even her feet to paint.
The third stage was to glue the rest of the flowers after paint dried.
She loved this part the most probably because she learned to squeeze
glue out of the tube herself and she was doing the entire process on her
own.
We went camping over the weekend and brought new things to use for my sensory bins. This is one of my favorite sensory bins because it is exactly about us. This is the type of vacation our family likes.
Together
we helped Lego men collect wood, start a fire, cook food and put
them to sleep in a tent. They met all of the forest animals, went
swimming in a river, walked on the bridge and climbed trees. There are
endless opportunities for role play with this bin.
The
light looks like it's coming from the fire but it is actually light
from a flashlight located underneath the bin. I placed the bin on two
chairs and there is a flashlight between them.
This is what it looks like without a flash from my camera:
The
bridge and the table are made of sticks glued together with a hot glue
gun. The little saucepan is made of foil. The tent and the fire are made
of construction paper.
We tried painting with feathers using them as a paint brush before. This time my daughter glued feathers to paper using Elmer's glue and painted with glitter paint using a big sponge. This is a continuation of our previous 3-D painting experiment, same approach, same paint.
I got bored with hand painting which we did a lot recently and wanted to do something 3-dimentional. I searched around the house and found a few small objects which could be easily glued to paper. You can use anything: leaves, pasta, buttons, pom-poms, thread, flowers, foam stickers. When glue is dry dip a big sponge into paint and stamp it over the objects on paper. We used Crayola Kids Paint with glitter.
We haven't done any science experiments for awhile and I thought doing something with ice would be great because it's really hot outside, it will melt quick and especially because my daughter loved painting with ice cubes which we did recently.
I froze water with toy fish in a large round container. The idea was to use salt to save fish and free them from ice. It was great that the fish ended up being on top because I wasn't sure she will have the patience to wait for the whole block to melt.
After ice partially melted and fish were free, she squeezed food coloring over the ice block. This activity is great because it is both art and science. Just let your child explore the little tunnels that salt creates and watch how they get filled with paint.
