Wednesday, January 20, 2010

More Toddler Busy Book

My favorite activity book (The Toddler Busy Book) continues to come through with easy activities to keep Owen occupied and both our brains engaged. Last week's activities included:

Tape City - I think I was more excited about our network of roads than Owen (I am a Civil Engineer after all) until my parents showed up, and then he couldn't wait to drag Papa onto the floor for some serious driving. The only problem with this one is that having blue painters tape all over my living room drove me crazy, so the city only survived 24 hours.

Spaghetti Art - cooked noodles dipped in diluted glue with food coloring can make a pretty interesting sculpture. It also makes a pretty monumental mess and takes FOREVER to dry, but that gave us an excuse to have some fun with the hair dryer, which may have been Owen's favorite part.
Animal Toss - I'm finding that half the battle with a 2-year-old is just giving a simple activity a cool sounding name. In this case, we gathered up the stuffed animals, placed an empty box in the hallway and used a door mat as our "launching pad" from which we tried to toss the animals in the box. No, I didn't need the book to come up with this one, but flipping the pages helps to get my own creative juices flowing.

Color Hunters - This one I did get from the book, and it was a great success. Two baseball hats and a flashlight turned us into color hunters, scouring the dark house for the color ... red! It was actually really fun to see what objects Owen would pick out and watch his brain at work.

We also revisited the magic mud that I posted about here, and experimented adding food coloring - still fun!
And what does Josh do during all these activities, you might ask? Zonks out in the Moby wrap. A parenting godsend.

1 comment:

Colleen said...

I LOVE that book! The magic mud is awesome, but I've not tried the others, I will have to give them a shot!