Activity Course with Balloons

Every child I know has a fascination with balloons.

At every birthday party, every kid wants to take one home.

They are usually the highlight of the party.

[unless you have one of these at your party.]

So this week I thought :

Why do the balloons only come out at birthday parties?

They bring lots of entertainment in just being balloons.

But there's so much more you can do with them!

[Check out the previous post : Balloon Badminton.]

I asked Henry what he wanted to do today.

As usual, his answer was to build a road with his mat.

[this has been a daily request, and almost a daily activity since we started using our ABC Mat for a road.

Check out this post and this post to see what fun can be done with your ABC Mat].

I wanted him to be more active today

and I've been wanting to build him an activity course for awhile now.

[check out the activity course by Messy Kids that I featured on last week's High Five!]

So we compromised.

An activity course built with our ABC Mat!

And balloons!

First things first,

we built the road of the activity course with the ABC Mat.

To extend our course, we didn't connect them all.

Make sure they're close enough to jump from one to the other!

We used our large mat squares as our activity spots.

3 rules :

1) Stay on the mat at all times. 

[this was not adhered to, but made it fun to try]

2) Transfer the balloons from the beginning of the course to the end.

3) Do the activities on the course.

Activity #1:

Hit 3 hanging balloons.

[Henry liked to use the balloon as his hitting device]

Activity #2:

Jump 3 times!

[Henry has just learned to jump and actually clear the ground

- it may be only an inch or two -

 so this was great practice]

Activity #3:

Spin 3 times! 

Activity #4:

The Tunnel

[Henry experimented with pushing, kicking and hauling the balloons throughout the activity course.]

The course ended with Henry putting each balloon into his barn.

Henry also tried taking more than one balloon at a time.

Was it easier? faster?

Henry tried it to find out.

He quickly found that it was too hard to hold onto more than one balloon at a time.

Henry also experimented 

with hauling the balloon in his dump truck and pushing it with his blue tractor.

His dump truck made it through the course time after time.

Proving very easy to haul the balloon.

However, Henry found the balloon had a hard time staying in front 

of the blue tractor to be pushed.

It only made it through the first half of the course.

There were 7 balloons to be transferred to the barn.

Henry hauled 3 balloons in his dump truck.

Pushed 1 balloon with the tractor half way through the course, finished with carrying it himself.

Kicked 1 balloon.

And carried 1 balloon through the entire course.

Blue dog even tagged along did the course once.

The tunnel was a favorite at first.

But it quickly turned into a 'let me try this' activity.

The experiments were much more fun.

Henry's mind thinking hard trying to figure out the best and easiest way to accomplish a task.

Problem solving at its best.

And burning off a lot of energy in the meantime.

   

Tweet    - Henry is 3 years -