• 1 cups mud
• 1 cups of flour
• 1/2 cups salt
• Water
• Plastic Dinosaurs

Mix all the ingredients (except the Dinos) and add water slowly. Once you get a playdough consistency, cover your Dinos in it. Leave it to dry. It is raining here but ours were dry in 2 days, so if it is hot – it will dry pretty quickly.

I used the coconut shell, husks with it to give it a *earthy* feel. And added water to one shell as well. We need WATER always in our bins!

He worked really hard to get the baby dinosaurs out of there shells. Love his concentration in this picture.

Of course the baby Dinos all needed a bath right after they came out of the shells.

Later I gave him some shaving foam and water to clean ALL the dinosaurs because ALL of them were dirty. Triceratops is Aarya’s FAVORITE dinosaur in… like… forever. So he got his bath FIRST.

Can you tell he LOVED it? Sure you can

Another day we tried this fantastic sensory bin with Baking Soda and Vinegar shared by 123 Homeschool 4 Me. I will share that in the next post.

Linking upto these wonderful blogs -
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Let’s Hear it for the Boy — #8

Aarya in general doesn’t like anything MESSY. He likes water, and he loves colors – but not painitng. You can see him get up and wash himself every 2 minutes in between. I introduced shaving cream, but only one finger would trace, it took him a while but now he loves the shaving cream.

Still we enjoy a lot of painting once in a while. Here is a round up of all the things we have used so far and different materials.

#1 favorite painting involves balls, rolling and making the ball jump and such. We have tried ball painting a lot. You can see him here making a snowman globe for the Snow week. Below he is making an adorable Valentines card. This we did around Valentines day and was a gift for his teachers They LOVED it.

#2 favorite way to use paint will be Bubbles. Bubbles are Aarya’s favorite. I can get anything done if I provide him with some bubbles to play. Bath time, wash time, brush time – every time – BUBBLES. He loves them so.
This involves bubbles, colors and mixing – and just putting the paper over it to make prints. They turn out GORGEOUS.

#3 Cars and other things-that-go-into-the-painting. Yes, this is one way I think all boys like painting. But our car did need a bath couple of times.

The glass was used to make circles after this

#4 way we paint is to use random stuff from the kitchen. We have used spoons, forks, various print-making with kitchen sponge, steel sponge and even used glasses to make our circles.
Here we made snow-flakes.

#5 Paint involvong Sensory materials. Here I mixed salt and glue and white paint to make this snowy day scene inspired by The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats. He painted on a blue paper. But soon he touched and felt it and *painted* everywhere. It was the texture, the thickness and the grainy feel – but he iked it and he really was proud of his paintings because they *looked* a lot like the illustrations of the book. This was inspired by a blog (which I found via Pinterest) but unfortunately I cannot find it now because I forgot to pin it. I am sorry, but I will find the post and put a link soon.

#6 Making different prints. Here we did a spin-ff on the spin-art. Of course it is not the traditional way but still Aarya loved the results. We uses a plastic lid (kitchen), put some drops of water colors on the paper and just used our hands to spin it up. Using 2 colors made some gorgeous prints. Giving him a huge sheet helped me a lot because he wanted to try it again and again

#7 Bubble WRAP See this post on how we have used it.

These are only a few of the things we have tried. We also have tried the tape-resist painintg, crayon resist painting. Coloring with crayons, crayon-rubbings etc – but they have not really been a huge HIT in our place. But the above 6 have been done again and again and loved.

What are your kiddos favorite way to paint… please do let us know and we will definitely give that a try.

As you can see that in almost all the paintings Aarya uses red. yes, you guessed it right Red is his FAVORITE color and he has to have it always in some way or the other Pink and Blue are a close second

1) A tub with Flour + cocoa+ water = yummy-smelling-mud.

2) A smaller tub of water with a little blue food coloring

3) Brown beans (Rajma)

4) Lot of Dinos. 1 set same from a Crossword and the other one Wild Republic (via Babyoye.com)

Aarya did not like the mud… he smelled and tasted it as well ( but did not like it..LOL!) The dinos which accidentally fell in the mud were taken to the basin and washed He played the longest with just the water and the dinos.

All the Dinos he did not like were left in the mud

We also made some mud prints…

Chocolaty mud prints.

Then we made some fossils

chocolate playdough in tiny lids of which the impressions were made again and again

Lot of pressing smoothing and pressing

Linking to After school Link up @ Little Wonders’ Day, Tot School Gathering place @ 1+1+1=1; Teach Me Tuesday, Share It Saturday @ SugarAunts

Today I am going to share a very simple activity which include toffee wrappers. If like us you have some lovely Uncles visiting, chances are they will bring chocolates for the kiddos among other things. So when Aarya’s Uncle brought him this, he was excited for obvious reasons.

Yummy assortment of awesome chocolates

We had so many colorful wrappers left that I thought they would lovely in a project. So here is what we did with them -

Things we used -

Wrappers  of different colors (ours were mainly violet, orange and yellow)

Pipe cleaners

Over-enthusiastic kiddo

Vase- optional

1. We “thread” the tissue papers into the pipe cleaners. It is very easy, you just push the pipe cleaner around the middle ( our papers were square- cut)

Please ignore the chocolate smeared face (looks more red than brown) The pipe cleaner threading was easy but we also had a lot of torn wrappers from over-enthusiastic threading

2. Push in as many as you want. (Minimum would be 2)

3) Keeping a portion of the pipe cleaner on top. scrunch up the paper together and “wrap” the pipe cleaner around the bunch. This will make a lovely flower look with the pipe cleaner as the stem. (Aarya struggled with this part, so I did this after he threaded the papers. Older kiddos would be able to do this easily.)

Make as many as you like And put them in the Vase along with your favorite pic I also added some twisted pipe cleaners to the vase.

Thank you Rachel for including us in this fantastic series.

We had Aarya’s Grandparents visit us this month, so this was the perfect reading companion for us Our set included 4 books -

Don’t let the Aliens get my Marvelous Mum! by Glillian Shields

My Dad is Awesome! by Nick Butterworth

Stories for 3 Year olds

Hello! Is that Grandma? by Ian Whybrow

Our first activity idea came from the kit itself. We made a scrapbook style collage of our family near and dear ones. We started with working on a About Me page that I downloaded from Miss Pam’s Room (which I found on Pinterest).

Yes Red is his favorite color.

I added his picture. Then let him glue the letters in his name which are actually newspaper cut-outs (he lost the Y).  Let him draw his fathers face ( the one in brown bottom-left). And I added everything else

All done!

Then I gave him a blank paper, some sketch pens and stickers -

Yes, 2 pens is the way to draw

Then he squeezed the glue to stick our pictures,

An then added the stickers -

I gave him some heart stickers, car stickers and such. He added a pink sticker for his Grandma (not in the picture) because she likes pink… too sweet!

All DONE! Here is a samplae of what we managed

One of the pages we did together This is his Grandparents, Aunt and his Dad (all in one set of pictures. The dog sticker is for Vava our dog, whose picture I forgot to print out. We also did his cousins in another. And his Uncles and Aunts.

We did all in all 3 pages and he was done. In these 3 pages I tried and let him glue all the people. The result is not beautiful by any standards but he was mighty proud of it and showed his father and also named everyone He especially loved this and his cousins page. He looks at it daily and I am sure the sketch pens have been used on the pictures also

i will be sharing more activities in the coming days.

A little about Little Readers Nook.

Devaki Bhujang Gajare (owner), an Electronics Engineer from Mumbai, worked as a Software Analyst in Pune and New York from 2004 to 2011. She’s mom to 3 year old Mihir – the inspiration behind Little Readers’ Nook!

Contact her by going here. (Don’t forget to mention me to her )

I bought “Step into Reading” book version of this book and instantly regretted doing it It is, but a sad copy of the original. But we watched this video, which was amazing!

This is such a beautiful story! I love it and Aarya really enjoyed it too  To accompany this book we did this rather fun but lovely “Snowman on the Globe” art which I saw on Pinterest.

Please excuse the “sauce” on the face look. The minute he saw the ball and white paint, he just wanted to dive right in!

All you need is -

1) Blue paper (construction paper will be good)

2) 1 ball or as many as you want, really.

3) white paint ( We also had yellow dropped in as aarya wanted it)

4) 3 circles in different sizes for the snowman body

5) A rectangle – small for the hat

6) Add the sketch pens if your kid is crazy about them (like mine is)

I will let the pictures do the talking.-

He dipped the ball in the white paint but then also wanted to use the brush.

Once he had played to his hearts contest with the ball and the colors. We left it to try. Then I stuck the snowman ( on the left) to show him how it is done. He had his own ideas about where everything would be.

Then he wanted the sketch pens to “draw” the face.

All done!

This book was part of the “S” week (snow)!

Now this site will feature -

• Books and there reviews
• Aarya and his books and there reviews
• Activities ideas of the books we review
• Some random stuff about life and Mommy-hood.

Mama and Aarya after our Holi bash!

I hope you guys find something that interests you here and as I have said before lets start connecting again. Thank you for all you people who leave wonderful comments, that encourages me a lot!

To all my friends, I hope you had a blast on Holi and Happy Easter too!

**These posts were written in Jan-Feb, but due to some real bad things happening followed by my exams, I was not able to post these. **

To follow-up on the winter activities. This is another sensory activity that we did. The idea is from Montessori Moments(link to the winter activities post) who blogged about it in the ‘Sifting Snowflakes’ post. I had a feeling that Aarya would love it.

Items we used -

*salt with small alphabets (hidden) (snow)

*sifter (from the kitchen)

*foam alphabets to match ( at this point I wish I had lower case alphabets too )

Thanks to Lori! Does it look like he Loved it?

Love Calvin and Hobbes

I started doing Alphabets with Aarya sometime back but I never did “themes” with him. This was before I was a “Pinterest addict”, now I follow a LOT of blogs religiously who have helped me design and given me the courage to do a theme with Aarya

I decided “S” was the best alphabet to do in Winter and “Snow” is a concept that Aarya just absolutely LOVES We have never had snow here, but when I was in Northern states of India I have seen it. But Aarya and his Dad have never seen snow but we see it on TV, videos and BOOKS all the time and Aarya LOVES it.

I started by introducing “S” letter and sound – Aarya could not make the sound at all. He was disappointed and left the scene (so typical of him). I persisted by making him realize all the words he knows by saying “Oh! This is Sauce… s s sauce”; then another day “This is s s spider” or”This is s s s seal”.. “look s s sea” and finally ” s s s snow!” … there I had his attention there . He tried it and it came out as “No”.. and I now here it all the time “No Mama NO! Look!” (so cute! but we still did not have the “s” sound)! After some days he magically said “ss sauce” He still goes “No” instead of Snow but that is ok! he is got the sound.

After we got the sound right I put out a small sensory bin. I put the thermocol that comes in packing (this thermocol was broken by Aarya earlier one day and I had saved the “snow” balls) He added the animals that were kept nearby to it (which reminded me we needed to do animals in winter later because Cow should not be in this bin) -

Next we did Pattern Block “S” which I downloaded from Confessions of a Homeschooling Mom. Download it here.

The same day night I filled a container with water and put a Doraemon toy in a plastic cover and asked Aarya to fill it with water, then we put it in the freezer.  (I added the eyes and nose with sketch pen which got wiped off when we took it out. I found this idea on Teach Preschool blog, who did Snowman in a bottle and Snowman in a bag activity with her preschool kids. There she used real snow, here I just froze some water. Next time I would take some ice and crush it and use it to do this activity – it will look more realistic.

Next up we made snowman from a cornflour/ flour dough. I did not have enough cornflour to make this sensory activity so I added some flour and salt and warm water to make a mouldable snow dough. This was fun too.

Snowman also needs excercise lol!

Our next activity was Snow Sifting which is a very simple activity – here i have used Salt and “hid some tiny letters. Montessori Moments added “snowflakes” in it. Anyhow this was the 2nd favorite activity after the snow-bin above.  Before, during and after the activities and all through the day we checked on our snowman which I kept outside so that it melts.

Colored Construction Paper, White paint and some lids.

Next up some ART, no activity is complete without ART and BOOKS. So we made snowflakes from some white paint and some bottle caps and knick-knacks I found in the kitchen. Aarya decided to cover himself in snow too lol!

We did more activities; and this has been he most successful theme yet.

We read A Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats on We Give Books site( a great site where you can read a lot of Children Books – I am thankful to them a LOT) , because I could not get it here and it was too costly to buy online. Activities on that in the next post.

<<Aarya is 33 months old>>

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