Glass Jars

We've been really missing our Unplugged Projects lately, so this week I wanted to make sure we did an activity incorporating the theme: glass.

We've acquired an impressive collection of glass jars over the past few months so I decided to take a few jars of varying sizes and show Little Bit how cool it is that they all make different sounds. I aligned them by tone from lowest to highest and tapped a few of the jars with the spoon to demonstrate. Then I handed the spoon over and let her go at it.

She tapped the sides and the rims for a few minutes,

then thought it would be more fun to make "chocolate milk" by stirring the spoon around in the jar.

Apparently the chocolate milk was very tasty.

So she poured some from jar to jar

and shared with her sister. She's usually very thoughtful like that. :)

Not quite what I had in mind, but I always enjoy watching her play pretend and I'm glad she was able to adapt my little project in a way that she could have fun with. To see more Unplugged Projects using this week's glass theme, visit Unplug Your Kids.

Sticky Project in Pictures

Busy weekend.

Very tired.

Unplugged Project: Sticky

Tissue paper on sticky side of contact paper.

"Can I stick it here?"

"I want to try!"

Two artists at work.

Viola!

Found this at The Artful Parent. Go there. Also check out other sticky projects here.

Off topic: Very behind in my blog reading. Hope to get caught up this week!

The World is Her Canvas

We love to paint with Little Bit, so this week's Unplugged theme, paint, had us very excited. We decided to bring the paint outdoors and let Little Bit have free reign over our sliding glass doors!

We poured our tempera paints into a muffin tin and mixed a few additional colors for variety.

Then I explained to Little Bit that she could use her paint brushes to paint on the glass doors.

Little Bit was a little apprehensive at first and she's still learning how to use brushes as opposed to her hands, but she started getting into it after a few minutes of exploration and a little modeling by yours truly.

Of course, I should have know that the painting would soon extend to other surfaces.

Subsequently, she abandoned her brush and went back to using her fingers.

Can you tell she had a blast?

Once she had decided that she'd had enough, we made a print of her artwork on a blank piece of paper (inspired by this idea).

And clean-up was easy-peasy with the hose!

This was a fun project and one that I know she'll ask to do again. And, it was a nice "easy" material to work with for this week's Unplugged Project. Actually, I've been meaning to do this activity with Little Bit ever since the weather started warming up, so this week's theme gave us the perfect excuse! Wouldn't this be so much fun to do with a group of toddlers, like at a paint party?

To see how other participants in this week's Unplugged Project used paint, click here!

Toddler Measuring Activity

I think I reverted back to my senior year in high school this week. I kept waiting for Mr. Clagget, my walrus-looking English teacher, to pop out from around my sofa and lecture me (read: yell and shake his finger at me) about procrastinating.

But, we did finally come up with an idea for this week's Unplugged Project involving ribbon and completed it. We used the ribbon to measure each of our family members and then we adhered the ribbon to a wall for comparison.

First we got everybody measured:

Then we stuck the ribbon to the wall, side-by-side, and briefly compared the different sizes. We talked about the biggest and smallest pieces. And I asked Little Bit questions about which ribbon belonged to who.

We also glued faces from magazine cut-outs onto paper plates, and then attached them to the ribbons at the top for little heads, but they turned out really weird looking. I think we'll use photo printouts of all of us instead.

We haven't made growth charts for the girls, so I thought that this ribbon measuring activity would be a great way to introduce the concept of measuring with Little Bit.

To see what others did with ribbon this week, click here!

Newspaper Streamers

Hooray for newspapers!

What a great theme for this week's Unplugged Project. So many possibilities...we made streamers!

We used strips of newspaper, a round plastic lid with the center cut out, a popsicle stick, and yarn and tape to hold it all together.

This picture shows pretty well how it all came together:

I think this was Little Bit's first experience with streamers and it was an instant hit! She loved swishing her new toy all around her body...

or just carrying it around with her.

 

And, not wanting to leave Bitty Baby out of the newspaper fun, we folded a newspaper hat!

We had actually planned on doing a couple other newspaper projects, but Little Bit fell sick at the end of the week and we just didn't get to them.  But never fear, I'm sure we'll do them soon!

Go check out what other folks did with newspaper at Unplug Your Kids!