Great Idea from Grandma!

I don’t know why I have never thought to do this before, but it was a real winner while visiting Grandma.  We plan to save our containers from here on out! ; )

We liked stacking the containers to the ceiling and building pyramids!!  The best part was knocking them down! ; )

Mixing Colors

We all know the primary colors are: Red, Yellow and Blue but did you know you can get the other color of the rainbow by mixing 2 primary colors together. Okay, so you probably knew that but do your kiddos?? They will think mixing colors is AWESOME and its simple, inexpensive, not to messy and fun!!

Mixing for the Kids

You will need: 9 plastic cups, Red, Yellow and Blue food coloring and water

1- Fill up 6 of the 9 cups with water

2- Add each color of food coloring (2 drops) to 2 cups (Leaving you with 2 of each color and 3 empty cups)

3- Mix away! Example: pour the yellow and red together to get orange

(Refer to the picture below for mixing fun!)

You can also just fill 6 cups with water and add dye straight to cups but I thought that would be to messy for my toddler. After we made all the colors of the rainbow we lined them up to look like a rainbow...

then I pulled out some skittles and had my kiddo match colors by putting the skittle in the matching cup.

when we ran out of skittles i let my little guy stir it up and then

drink it...it tasted good a little like kool-aid

Rainbow Pinwheel Game with Tutorial

I made this super simple pinwheel game for my little guy to help him learn his colors! He loves games and so I thought he would respond to it well...he did! Here is a little tutorial so you can make one too...if you want :)

You will need:

1 piece of each color paper (Orange, Red, Yellow, Blue, Green and Purple)

Glue or double sided tape

18 clothes pins

Directions:

1-I cut out a half circle from each piece of paper using a dinner plate for my pattern

2-Then I stacked the paper like the photo below tucking half of the paper below another colored paper

example: the green paper would be placed over the purple with half of it under the blue

3- I then secured the paper by putting double sided sticky tape under each piece of paper

4- I laminated the finished pinwheel so it would last longer...this is optional

5- I then cut out little strips of paper and tapped them to clothespins (I did 3 of each color)

This is what the final product should look like:

This stored perfectly in a Freezer bag!

My little guy loved this game...we have played it multiple times a day for over a week. At first he struggled with being able to open the clothes pines by himself but when I showed him how to open them (like an alligator) he got it!

We started out playing the game by matching the clothes pins to the pinwheel and then we started to look for other things in the room that matched the clothes pin. We ended up finding something in the room to match each color and stuck the clothes pins to the items we found.

Rainbow Game

We made this simple and fun game from 1 sheet of cardstock/paper, markers and 2 dice. Here is how:

1-We cut the cardstock/paper into 6 different sheets

2-Then used markers to draw little circles on the paper like the one pictured below. (HINT:If you are horrible at drawing circles you can do what I did and draw on your marker lid and stamp a circle on the paper rather then free hand it)

3- Cover 2 dice with paper and color each side a different color then tape paper over dice.

We used a package of M&M's and Skittle's for our markers (HINT: M&M's don't have purple, Skittle's don't have blue)

The goal of the game is to be the first to cover your card...we played if you already had the color filled that you rolled you got to eat the M&M/Skittle :)

My goal/purpose in this game was to help my little guy learn his colors! :)

Hope you enjoy this as much as we did!

Skittle Fun!

There are so many things to be done with skittles. Does any one remember the skittle game from Junior High days? Some of the things that we did were:
We played a guessing game. I would say a color and if my son picked up the correct color he would get to eat it.

We set ours up like this.

When we were tired of that game we sat down together and made piles of the different colors.

Then we made a rainbow.

When we were done with that we pulled out the markers and made this:

Just FYI: This is just a scrap of Christmas wrapping paper….we colored on the back side.
The bottom section with the dots made a fun stand on the color guessing game. I would say a color and my son would stand on it…..this quickly turned into a hopscotch game. ; )

The top section was made to be a rainbow. We cut it out and taped it over the top of a baby toy. To remember the colors of the rainbow just remember ROY G BIV.
RED
ORANGE
YELLOW
GREEN
BLUE
INDIGO
VIOLET

He loved crawling through this “rainbow”.

Fruit Loop Sorting Game

I made this simple game with styrofoem, kabob sticks and markers.

I colored each stick a different color and then stuck them in the styrofoem.

We then put the matching colored fruit loops on the sticks!

Ocean

Activities
One of my friends snapped these cute pictures of her kids "Pillow Surfing" They got all dressed up in their swimsuits and grabbed their pillows and went surfing right in their own home in the middle of winter. Aren't they adorable? The kids watched Soul Surfer and wanted to give surfing a try.

We found some cute coloring pages and interactive ocean things here.


We played ocean memory. Busy bee has cards already made that you just print and cut out. We laminated ours so they would last a little longer. Click here to find ocean memory.


A two year old isn't the greatest at playing memory the way it's supposed to be played so we put the cards right side up and searched for the match.


Then we lined them up like a train. ; ) Not with the this weeks theme but he just loved it!


We also watched lots of ocean/under the sea movies. We watched Finding Nemo, The Little Mermaid and the Reef. These matching fruit snacks were fun to eat while watching.
















After watching Nemo we blew some bubbles of our own. This was a great way to release some of this guys energy!

We also bought a fish and learned how to take care of it. We bought a Beta. This little man loves feeding it each day.

The little pellets that Beta's eat are pretty easy to measure out. Another fun thing to do is hold a mirror up to the fish and watch his face fan out. Betas are fighting fish so it's a defense mechanism.

We also made "Waves in a bottle!" This was super easy and fun for the kiddos to make there own waves. We used an empty pop bottle but you could also use an empty water bottle. Then we added water to the bottle with a couple drops of food coloring and topped it off with vegetable oil. I also tried to explain how water and oil don't mix to by 2 year old but he was to excited making waves to care.

We had lots of fun doing fun ocean activities we always do like reading books about the ocean or doing this fun puzzle. One of my favorite things about "Theme Week" is that a lot of the activities that we do a lot seem to become fun and exciting again and not so boring.

We watched The Little Mermaid in these laundry basket boats. After the movie was over we put a bunch of toy fish/bath toys on the floor and caught them with our net.

You could also watch a movie on a beach towel or in your swimming gear.

We also went sock fishing! This was by far my little kiddos favorite activity...we did it at least 5 times through out the week. It was really simple too. We just put magnets in the toes of random socks and lay them out on the floor behind this chair. I tied a ribbon to a stick and glued a magnet to the bottom and then let my little guy fish away.

We made this simple paper plate fish and then colored it.

We also made this "Under the Sea" sensory bag. We filled a freezer bag with blue hair gel from the dollar store and then put beads in it.

We also got this Turtle from Wal-mart for $1 and had fun watching it grow and then shrink again. They have all sorts of Under the Sea animals like a Starfish, Crab, Turtle, Eel and an Octopus.




Here are a few other ideas of things to try:

• Let your child Snorkel in tub
• Go to an indoor aquarium and learn about all the fish
• If you live near a beach or lake take a walk along the beach, gather sea shells.
• Play the game Go Fish
• Explore salt water....just add a tsp of salt to water and let your child taste it.
• Go fishing in the bathtub.
• Play fish, fish shark instead of duck duck goose.

We also sang the fish song while doing the actions:

Fish Song

One, two three, four, five (hold fingers up while counting)

Once I caught a fish alive,

Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten (hold up more fingers)

Then I let it go again.

Why did you let it go

because it bit my finger so

which finger did it bit

this little finger on the right.