Projects for New Works to come

I've been perusing blogs this week during my free moments on the computer (which are far to few these days!), as well as combing through a book my MIL (Mother-In-Law) bought for me when she was here when Four was born, called "The Toddler Busy Book."

The laminated sheet that you see has a couple different projects on it. The small pieces of paper you see are something called "Find the Oddball." Each strip has 3 of the same stickers or drawings on it, and one "oddball." The two larger pictures are for our vocabulary building/sorting/pre-reading set. We often discuss what the object in the pictures are, and we are moving into sorting them into groups, and then we will move into laying them out left to right, top to bottom as a pre-reading skill. I have a fairly large set of these cards, and I'm almost constantly making more. Anytime I have a spare spot on a laminating sheet I throw a few on there. :)

The ziploc bag has 3 different kinds of pasta in it, for a pasta sort game. I will give him the pasta in a larger bowl, with 3 small glass bowls to sort the different pasta in to.

The cube you see that has a red top is 2 milk carton bottoms put together to form a cube. We are going to cover each side with a different color. This will the base for several different games. First game being obvious, colors! We will toss the cube and whatever color lands on top we will find something of that color in the house. Second game, I will tape shapes to the sides, as well as an outline of the shape on the floor. We will toss the cube and whatever shape it lands on everyone will run to and try to stand inside of! Third game, numbers. Fourth game, alphabet. You get the idea, right? :) Another idea from the book.

Lastly, the clear container that is half filled with oatmeal. This is an idea from Totally Tots called Hide-N-Seek bowls. The oatmeal was a suggestion found in the comments section. I had some extra oatmeal that I had for reindeer food back in December so I grabbed it and made this easy activity. I think he'll like it, and someday in the future I'll change it to beans, then maybe pasta, then maybe rice to keep the activity new.