We had been using aluminum foil for a school project.  Once we were done, my kids started playing with their leftover foil scraps.

It really is fun to play with foil!

Then they started asking for more.  And more.

Aluminum foil is inexpensive and so much fun to create with that I let them use all they wanted. 

**I did have a rule that I had to tear it off the roll for them because I didn’t want them accidentally hurting a finger from the cutter on the side of the box.

I love letting them create freely without any direction or instructions.  It’s the best way to let their imaginations run wild.

My son came up with some really great creations.

He made lots of things but my favorite was this little foil box.  I didn’t understand it when he first showed it to me.  Then he pulled back the foil to open the box and I saw the box held a little foil ring.   The box really was crimped to hold the ring upright just like it should!  He took the ring out and said that he thought I needed some new jewelry.  Aww!

Then he and Rachel proceeded to make fun shapes, plants, and animals.  Below you see a sting ray, a Hershey’s kiss, and a swordfish.

Since he apparently has an ocean theme going, he took it a step further and built a cool Viking ship out of the foil.

If a boy has a ship, then he’s going to ask for some water so he can float it.

So he did.

Then he also made a wider boat that was an aircraft carrier for his two jets.

Later, Nicholas pulled out his Star Wars action figures and wrapped Hans Solo in aluminum foil.  He announced that it was Hans Solo sealed in Carbonite when he was delivered to Jabba the Hutt in The Empire Strikes Back.  Yes, we are sci-fi geeks and I loved this!

Then they decided to wrap other toys in foil…just because.

While they were goofing around with the foil, I picked up a few of my 3 year old’s toys and completely wrapped them in foil.  I put them in front of her and asked her to guess what they were.  I was surprised that she only got one out of four right but oh my!  What fun she had guessing and then unwrapping them to reveal the answer!!

My kids could literally spend HOURS playing with aluminum foil.  I’d love to hear about fun ways your kids have had fun with foil?

I love it when play turns into a thing of beauty.

This theme was inspired by Sun Hats & Wellies Boots amazing outdoor art {stick heart in the middle of picture below}.

They weren’t the only ones to turn play into art…

Make, Do & Friend went to the park for some beautiful photos of play.

Putti Prapancha makes Runnies.

Childhood List froze pretty ice sculptures.

Blue Skies Ahead freeze colorful snowflakes.

 
All these posts were linked up to last week’s It’s Playtime.

We hope you will join in on the fun today!

Many thanks to our co-hosts, for making this weekly link-up a lot of fun {what fun is it to play alone?}!  If you are ever looking for more ideas of ways to play with your kids, check out their blogs:

Note: Only family-friendly, kid-based posts are accepted. By linking up you give us permission to use a picture, feature you and add you to our weekly email reminder.  As always, links back are loved and cherished!

Let’s play!

I heard repeatedly, “I just don’t understand what I’m doing!”

That’s a sure sign to put on the breaks and slow down.  I went back through my Teacher’s Guide for our math curriculum & found this amazing tool:

I cut it out & taped it to the desk.  The steps are so simple.  But it WORKS.  My once frustrated, lost child was able to follow this sequence and after about 4 problems, he declared himself

THE KING OF DIVISION.

Success can sure boost a child’s self esteem, & long division was no longer a confusing maze of numbers for my son.  It never occured to me to write the steps this way.

If your child is struggling with long division, make your own chart (or print out the photo above!) and see if this little tool will  help.

Your child will soon become the MASTER OF LONG DIVISION too!

“In the last two decades children have lost 8 hours of free play per week and 30,000 schools in the United States have eliminated recess to make time for more academic study.”  - Kathy Hirsh-Pasek

This statistic freaks me out!

I worry – are my kids playing enough?

Am I making sure they have enough critical development through play?

I have to admit, sometimes my girls, who are three years apart, didn’t get engaged in playing together.

Ever have that problem, too?

So recently we began creating play kits for ideas that both girls wanted to play.

The play kits gave my kids purposeful play experiences, which built important cognitive connections and lasted for hours and sometimes days.

Yay!

Last week, we decided to make a Post Office Play Kit after finding cute little mail boxes in the Target $1 bin. (LOVE Target $1 bin!)

Like the play kits we had made before, we found a shoe box in which to keep the kit. The best part? Both my girls found everything for the kit. We created a master list including a few things we didn’t have.

Here’s our list. Use it to find supplies for your own post office kit.

Post Office Play Kit

• Mail bag
• Mail boxes (*If you don’t have your own mailboxes, make you own out of cereal boxes or shoe boxes.)
• Stickers
• Stamps, stamp pad
• Scissors
• Envelopes
• Pencils, markers, pens
• Paper
• Labels
• Index cards
• Stationery
• Tape
• Date stamp
• Scale
• Storage shoe box
• Money, cash register
• Scale

Learning Through Post Office Play

Now that your kids are engaged in play, you can facilitate learning with a few suggestions.

Ages 3 – 5

• Teach new vocabulary words associated with the post office: delivery, address, postage, scale, sort, mail carrier.
• Count and sort letters.
• Draw and dictate letters and postcards.
• Practice writing your own name.

Ages 5 – 10

• Write postcards and letters.
• Weigh mail.
• Sort, count, and deliver mail.
• Practice writing your address and addresses of others on envelopes.
• Practice letter writing formats.

Additional Learning – Post Office Books

• Max and Ruby Bunny Mail
• Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type
• Toot and Puddle
• Post Office non-fiction books

Now, watch the imaginative play unfold!

And, as Valentine’s Day approaches, this is a perfect way to write and deliver Valentine’s cards, don’t you think?

Finally, the cool thing about DIY play kits is you can pack up and store them easily in a shoe box or picture box for another day.

Other play kits we’ve made recently:

• movie theater
• writer’s toolkit
• pirates
• beauty salon

Additional Resources – Importance of Play

Do you want to read more about the importance of play?

You might like these favorite books:

• Einstein Never Used Flashcards
• Brain Rules for Baby
• NurtureShock
• Mind In the Making
• Tools of the Mind

 Children need the freedom and time to play. Play is not a luxury. Play is a necessity. – Kay Redfield Jamison, Contemporary American professor of Psychiatry

I’d love to hear if you make your own play kits, too.

What are your kids’ favorite pretend play themes?

Melissa Taylor is a freelance writer, an award winning educational blogger at ImaginationSoup.net, an award winning teacher with a M.A. in Education, the Book Editor-at-Large for Colorado Parent Magazine and a parent of two children.

As a teacher, she won Outstanding Teacher in Douglas County Schools.

A cartoon is a line drawing that our brains can interpret as something more realistic.  Drawing a cartoon still requires proper scale and a recognizable amount of detail to make it familiar in its stripped-down format.

Kids are exposed to this simple art from the first day they sit down to a coloring page.

Coloring pages are simple art.

Until you try and make your own!

That is why I was very impressed when my 8 year old brought home this cartoon he drew of himself and his favorite stuffed dragon from art class at school:

It looks just like him!

It looks just like his dragon.

How did you do this?

We took a picture at school and then traced it on the window.

Oh!

Can we do this at home too?

Absolutely!

And so the planning began for his next cartoon.  Reid is into all things knight, so it was clear that this theme would continue into his next cartoon masterpiece.

I let him plan the photo.  He got dressed and the appropriate props and let me know when he was ready.  Here is the picture that he composed:

I let him choose the pose, but made sure it was on a plain background and as simple as possible.

It was really fun watching him get creative with this project.  If I had made all the decisions, I can promise that he wouldn’t have willingly participated to this level.

I then printed this photo out on an 8 1/2 x 11 piece of paper on a low resolution setting on our home printer.

Reid held the paper up to the light of the window and drew the main lines on another piece of paper.

With smaller kids, taping both to the window would work the best.

And here is the final cartoon, Reid the Knight:

While tracing the important lines of the photo, a child is learning basic art concepts:

• What ARE the main lines of the picture?
• How much detail should be traced?
• Reinforcement of scale
• Introduction to basic shapes and lines – like eyes, nose, mouth, etc.

Once Reid finished this, the other boys started dreaming up cartoons they want to “draw”.

I have spent the afternoon as a cartoon photographer…it isn’t a bad gig.

After brainstorming a few challenge ideas with M and M, I made Challenge Cards on the computer.  (Grab a copy by clicking on Challenge Cards.)  I let Big M cut our Challenge Cards.

The idea is simple, and so are the rules.

1.  Pick a Challenge Card.
2.  Complete the challenge.  YAHOO!
3.  Make it a competitive game and compete to have a winner.  Or make it a competition against yourself and work on completing the challenge.  Or make it a cooperative game and have all players working on the same piece.
4.  Play by yourself or with a group.

We folded up the cards and tossed them into a hat.  We took turns picking a challenge without looking.

Big M may have peaked… but I pretended I didn’t notice.

We pulled Occupation Scene.  No surprise that Big M went for a crane.  Most of his creations have wheels.  I love the alligator farm made by a neighbor friend who stopped by for a quick game.  I contributed a fireman putting out a fire.

The 3 Minute Timer challenge yielded unfinished creations, but it sure was fun to race against the clock!

So what’s the best part of the family Lego Challenge?  All the learning that goes on while the kids are having a blast.

Oh look at those fine motor muscles working!

When the challenge Use 50 Pieces was drawn we practiced sorting and counting by 10.

Of course reading the Challenge Cards as well!

For more Lego ideas, check out the blog, A Mom with a Lesson Plan.  It is filled with lots of games and ideas of how you can learn with your kids.  Written by Jillian, a stay at home mom who loves to learn…and teach. She started AMomWithALessonPlan.com to share some of the ideas that she enjoys with her kids. She wants Moms [and Dads] to know that adding a little learning to playtime is fun and easy.  Thanks Jillian for guest posting today!

I will share five ways we get creative with coloring pages.

Coloring Activities

Outline picture with colored glue

Add some tempera paint to a liquid glue bottle and stir it into the glue.  Trace the outline of the pictures with the colored glue.  Once the colored glue is dry, fill in the rest of the picture with crayons or colored pencils to create a contrast.

Cover the coloring page in pulses

Pour a layer of glue over the coloring page. Sprinkle items such as fennel, lentils, rice, or grains over the top of the picture to create a natural looking piece of artwork like our mandalas.

Make a Placemat with Colored Art

Cut out a rectangular piece of contact paper to be the size of a placemat.  Let your child cut out pictures from a coloring book and place the pictures on top of the contact paper.  Cover the completed collage with another matching piece of contact paper.

Use glass, craft marbles to cover a coloring page

Collect an assortment of flat, craft marbles and allow your child to fill in the picture with the marbles.  A picture that has already been colored can be used for this.  No glue needed because this will be a temporary piece of art.

Create a small world scene

Choose animals from a coloring book that share the same habitat.  Glue the pages onto cardstock, cut them out, and then glue each animal onto a toilet paper tube.  Create their habitat using a cardboard box, construction paper, glue, and natural materials.

This post was brought to you by Rebekah, a stay at home mom, who believes in joyful, playful, and thoughtful parenting.  Over at her blog, The Golden Gleam, she shares ways to light up kids’ lives through play, crafts, learning, and positive parenting.  

.

We had a blast today at the park playing with our homemade Marshmallow Shooters!

They are very easy to make with some basic supplies.  Here is all that you need to make two shooters:

Supplies:

• Plastic cup – I used a Glad disposable food storage cup. The tops had cracked but I couldn’t bear to throw away the little cups because I just knew a fun project like this would come along. I like these cups because they are sturdy. I’ve also used regular disposable drinking cups for this and that is fine but they aren’t as sturdy.
• Balloon
• Marshmallows (mini works best)
• Scissors

Step 1: Cut off the bottom of your cup.  This was the hardest part of the whole project because I had to stab the bottom of the cup with my scissors to get a hole started so I could make the cut.  This step is for adults only.

Step 2: Cut about 1/2 inch off the top of the balloon.  Tie a knot as you usually would.

Step 3: Slide the open end of the balloon over the open end of the cup.

Step 4: Put some marshmallows in the opening.

Step 5: Pull back the balloon by the knot and release.

Step 6: Watch the marshmallows go flying!

Both of my kids had so much fun with this.  It was easy to load and easy to launch.  My son experimented with different size marshmallows and different numbers of marshmallows.  He says that the jumbo marshmallows are too heavy to travel very far.  The mini marshmallows travel the farthest.  While it is fun to load up the cup with lots of mini marshmallows, they won’t travel very far.

He says that 2 mini marshmallows at a time is his favorite way to shoot it.

You can adjust the height and distance that the marshmallows travel by where you aim the cup and how far back you pull the balloon.  Here is the farthest that my son was able to shoot a marshmallow.  Impressive!

We also tried shooting little craft pom poms instead of marshmallows.  They are lighter and seemed to travel a little farther.

But marshmallows are just fun and much tastier than pom poms!

Today we are highlighting some of the fun science posts that you have linked up in the past…because science is silly!

Many thanks to our co-hosts, for making this weekly link-up a lot of fun! If you are ever looking for more ideas of ways to play with your kids, check out their blogs:

All these super fun science-related contributions are from last week’s It’s Playtime:

Raising the Cameron Clan had all sorts of fun with vinegar and baking soda.

Preschool Powol Pockets made toothpaste for elephants?

Messy Kids were…well, messy with solids and liquids.

Science Sparks are “magically” extracting an egg yolk with nary a crack.

Jellyfish and Twins at Play are both playing in the dark.

A Mom with a Lesson Plan is bending wood!

Tot School is making raisins DANCE.

The Learning Hypothesis is having a gas.

Now it is YOUR turn!  Please join in the fun by linking a playtime activity below.

Note: Only family-friendly, kid-based posts are accepted. By linking up you give us permission to use a picture and feature you and add you to our weekly email reminder. 

As always, links back are loved and cherished!