Tot School

Hunter is 16 months old.

We had another fun week!  We are still focusing on the color yellow and Earth Day.

We dyed some rice yellow.  I used food coloring mixed with a little vinegar and mixed it up in a ziploc bag with some help from Hunter.  The rice looked mostly orange though and I didn’t have enough to cover all of the rice:-(  I added some yellow water color and that turned the rest of the rice yellow.

We ended up with an interesting colorful mixture.

I decided that rice is an outdoor activity so Hunter enjoyed playing with it on the deck.

We also made a yellow discovery bottle.  You can’t really tell from the picture, but there’s lots of stuff in there- and as long as it makes noise Hunter loves it.  So I made sure we included yellow beads so it would rattle when he shook it.  Hunter put everything in the bottle- he did really good putting each piece in, his fine motor skills have improved a lot.

Success- he loved it!

We made a paper plate earth for Earth Day… you can see the whole post here.

We also made a vase and flowers using recycled materials.

This was the finished project, mostly done by Hailey but Hunter did help make the flowers.  You can see the whole post here.

Check out my Earth Day Pinterest board for more ideas for Earth Day.

Other stuff we did:

It was finally warm enough for Hunter to play in his water table… he loves it!

Hunter does a great job with puzzles and they keep his attention for a long time.

He was a helpful little boy and mowed the lawn for daddy.

He had so much fun playing with bubbles 🙂  I love this picture!

Hunter enjoyed playing in some shaving cream 🙂

Stop by 1+1+1=1 to see what the other tots were up to this week.

Be sure to like me on Facebook and follow me on Pinterest so you don’t miss any of our fun activities.

Vase and Flowers

Here is cute Earth Day project, that I saw on Pinterest, using recycled materials.

You’ll need a water bottle, cardboard, bottle tops, pipe cleaner, glue, paint and some tissue paper to for leaves.

Hailey painted the water bottle.  We used acrylic paint which will stay on the plastic very well.

Hunter made one of the flowers…

He didn’t really want to give up his bottle tops and when he got down to having 2 left he kept saying, “no, no, no, no!” when I showed him where to put the pieces.

Hailey made the other flowers

She used pipe cleaner for stems and then added tissue paper for the leaves.
I used a hot glue gun to glue the water bottle to the cardboard.

 The finished vase and flowers.

See more of our Earth Day activities!

Be sure to like me on Facebook and follow me on Pinterest so you don’t miss any of our fun activities.

Paper Plate Earth

You’ll need: a paper plate, blue paint, green tissue paper and possibly glue.

Hailey painted her plate blue for water.

Then she added green tissue paper to represent land.  Hailey did hers while the paint was still wet, so she did not need glue.  At first I told her to try to make it look like the actual earth but she said she just wanted it to be fun so I let her just do it however she wanted.  But if you wanted to make this into more of geography activity you could put the green tissue paper on to represent actual continents.

We waited until Hunter’s plate was dry before adding his tissue paper, so he needed glue.  He really loves the glue stick.  Putting the pieces on is not as fun as putting glue on everything 🙂

Hailey’s completed paper plate earth.

Hunter’s completed project.

Paper Mache Earth

Since Earth Day is coming up, we made our own earth out of paper mache.

Here is what you’ll need: balloon, newspaper, tissue paper (blue and green), brushes, and the paper mache glue.  There are a lot of different recipes for the glue, but I used 1 part flour, 2 parts water, and some white glue.  I didn’t measure the glue, I just added some in.

Dip the newspaper strips into the glue and put them on the balloon until it’s covered.  We then brushed the glue on top of the newspaper to make sure it stuck really well.

Then add green and blue tissue paper to represent water and land.

When it was all done I hung it up from our chandelier to dry.  It took a couple of days to dry.  Once it all nice and dry we popped the balloon.

Our completed paper mache earth 🙂