30 Days to Hands on Play : Play in a Box

DAY 26 CHALLENGE:

PLAY IN A BOX

DAY 26 CHALLENGE:
Spend [at least] 15 minutes playing with, in or around a cardboard box! Let the imaginations of your children decide what it will be today. Add any elements needed to create it.

Inspiration:
Tinkerlab had a cardboard box challenge last May, you can check out our Cardboard Box Ramps, as well as 24 cardboard box ideas that are all linked up to her challenge.

Some quick ideas for a box:

• a boat or a vehicle [car, truck, tractor]
• a kitchen or refrigerator
• a table for all sorts of fun
• a magic box!

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Box Flap Bridges & an Experiment

I think I can now be certified as a 

civil engineer.

What?

Experience would be needed?

Experience:

ABC Mat Road

Bubble Pop Road

and the latest : 

Box Flap Bridges

I had a ton of box flaps that I cut off from a previous road project.

(ha, more experience!)

This time I thought some bridges would be fun to add in the mix.

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Bubble Print Shamrock Diptych

Before we made our Bubble Pop Roads, Henry made a print with his bubbles [or pops].

  I'm loving that St Patty's is coming up 

because I can always give Henry the choice of color, and the answer is always green!
[I added yellow and orange for him to use so we could get some gold in there, too]
Henry went to town sponging the paint on.

Once we got the bubble wrap covered with a nice coat of green and yellow-orange paint 

we flipped it over 

and pressed it onto a piece of 12x12 scrapbook paper.

Henry also did a little finger painting once we peeled it off, 

so we pressed it on again.

And again!

Henry liked seeing the prints it made.

This is Henry's finished piece.

I then cut a shamrock out of it.

I was disappointed though, 

I loved the outer edge of the paper, it had the nice dots showing through.

So, I decided to make both the inside and the outside work 

and make a diptych of the shamrock print!

Two for one!

[Though, I'm bummed because I don't have two of my 12x12 frames yet!]

- Henry is about 34 months -

Bubble Pop Road & More

  I order a lot of my baby supplies (formula, baby food, diapers) online.
My latest shipment came with a ridiculous amount of packaging. 

I ordered a stovetop's worth - it came in 3 gigantic boxes (above) and had about 1 1/2 boxes worth of packaging. 




Since I had no control over the first R (reduce), we moved onto the second one - REUSE!
Henry and I spent a morning making a road.We laid out the bubble wrap on the floor and taped it with painters tape [my latest friend, it doesn't ruin my wood floors]
I think the most fun was in making the road because it popped as we crawled a long it.

We made hills going over the boxes.

[This made it very hard to take the the dump truck over though :

we had to support the bubble wrap with pillows.]

Henry found that the bigger dump truck popped the most bubbles, 

but the smaller vehicles were easier to drive along it.

But running on it made the most noise!

And now its Recycled.

---

Our next activity turned out kind of funny and gross looking.

When I saw this Dinosaur Excavation at TinkerLab I thought the slimy jell-o might be fun!

TinkerLab has great directions on how to make the mold.

I had troubles finding toys that would sink into the jell-o. 

We ended up using flat marbles, 

a Lego, and googly eyes (they floated).

Oh, and we added food coloring.

[I thought this would give a nice swirl of color in the mold... 

as you can see below, it did not]

I probably should have let it set up overnight, instead we only waited about 2 or 3 hours.

[not quite long enough]

Henry then went to work excavating.

Turned out the food coloring mistake that I thought looked gross, 

ended up looking like black dirt!

Henry spent a lot of time digging out the marbles.

Once everything was excavated,

he put all his findings in a strainer in the kitchen sink 

and ran water over them until they were sparkly clean.

---

This next activity happened completely by accident. 

I got out our large containers (formula and oatmeal) to do a fishing activity that I wanted to try, 

instead Henry made his own Noisemaker!

[I love it when the activity is completely ran by Henry]

I bookmarked these in a High Five! a couple weeks ago : 

Noisemakers at Family Fun Notebook

Since this wasn't planned, we didn't get to decorating the cans at all. 

And Henry didn't even get the lid on some of the cans : which made it kind of fun! 

Whoa, there goes the G!

---

Here's more Reuse for our boxes!

Henry and I put together this 'parking garage' of boxes.

All I did was cut off some flaps and used them for ramps and taped them together.

I wanted to make a two-decker something with the boxes.

Playhouses work well for girls, what can you make for boys?So we came up with the parking garage.

What do you make with boxes?What activities do you do with packaging materials?

Hammering & A Spaghetti Flop

Henry worked on his hand-eye coordination 

with his love for tools. 

All you need are some golf tees (thanks Mom) and Styrofoam.

And, of course, your boy's kid's toy hammer(s).

The Styrofoam had slants around the edge. 

For some reason or another, 

this is where Henry liked to nail his tees nails in.

It made for a really difficult angle for him to hold onto the tee and hit it, so I held the tee nail for him a lot.

No bruised fingers either : Henry has pretty good accuracy!

No, Henry is not hitting the tee nail with the wrong end of his hammer [above].

He had to get this hammer out 

because it has the claw 

so he could take out his tees nails.

(Completely his idea, he must watch Dad pretty close.)

---

I had this awesome idea that I found in the Toddlers Busy Book for...

Spaghetti Mobiles

I decided to use corn syrup and food coloring instead of white glue and paint. 

Why? I'm not sure. To make it more kid friendly, I guess. 

I put some corn syrup and food coloring in each container. 

Henry added some cooked spaghetti to each color

and stirred them up.

He took them out and placed them on a foam tray.

You could make some very nifty designs if you wanted to.

We just piled the spaghetti on the foam in any way that it fell.

(Though Dad joined us for tray number 2 and made it a rainbow colored mobile).

The product we left with was very bright and pretty. 

I left it to dry for a few hours.

When I came back to check it, it wasn't drying at all.

How long should it take?

Here's the flop:

I'm inpatient, and stuck it in the oven at 200 degrees.

Kind of forgot about it.

It wasn't in there long though... maybe 20 minutes.

Corn syrup is sugar. Sugar crystallizes.

Do you think I put it on foil?

I didn't leave it on the foam tray either... plastic would melt.

Nope, right on my jelly roll pan.

Nice and stuck on there.

Hard as a rock.

Oh well.

It was pretty.

[The plan was to hang it up with a ribbon - hence the 'mobile']

Henry is 34 months.

---

I didn't think we did much...

Getting ready to post this tonight, I didn't think we had done much this week. But thankfully, since I'm doing Project 365 - I take pictures every day now, so I catch more on camera than I think.

-- and we do keep pretty busy!

'I Spy' Sensory Tub
I pulled out the Indoor Sandbox that we put together in December.

I found some miscellaneous items around the house (small foam letters, paper clip, a small padlock and key, pom poms, etc) - I drew a quick sketch of all of them on a piece of paper - trying to keep it color coded as best I could. I threw all the items in the sandbox and let Henry have a little scavenger hunt for the items. This stayed out all morning long - granted it made a mess, but a sheet makes a much easier cleanup.

Idea from No Time for Flash Cards

Scissors Practice
I've never let Henry have at it with scissors before. Actually, until he went to daycare, he never had used one. The first day there, he did. So I thought it should be time he learned how to use them carefully. He's a bit awkward with them, using both hands to open and close them, and most of the time holding it sideways.

For practice, I cut a bunch of scrap paper into strips so he could do one quick snip through them.

Sock Sorting
Henry has been really into matches and pairs lately. Sock sorting may be a new chore for him! I gave him a pile of his and George's socks and told him to find the pairs that matched.

And yes, he used the loader to haul the pairs away.

Shed Building / Decorating
Henry always has a cardboard box on his table to use as a shed. Well, the shed we normally use isn't large enough for a couple many of his vehicles. He was getting frustrated. So I was building him a bigger shed when his Dad and Grandpa came in and started telling me how I should do it... So, they started over with a fresh box and created this shed with a peaked roof and an opening on the top for Henry to reach into. Henry has spent the last 2 days decorating it with markers.

ABC puzzle matching
Henry has this wooden alphabet puzzle. It really bugs me because there's no way to match up the letters without knowing the order of the ABC's. So, every time Henry does this, I sing the ABCs and stop at the letter he's on. I repeat it like this twenty-six times. This time, Henry was cleaning out his toy box in his room after he put it together and we came across his foam letters and numbers. So I had him match up the letters. This seemed like it would be an easy task for him since he knows his letters already - what was hardest was finding the letters. He also had troubles when he dug out a foam number and didn't know what to do with it. This helped him recognize that numbers were different than letters.

So, I guess we've kept pretty busy this week again.

Tot School - Henry is 34 months