Bubble bubble toil and trouble

Children are drawn to water. I am drawn to letting my child play with water. It's a win-win situation as far as I'm concerned. This activity is quick, easy, and a lot of fun. Set your bowl down on a towel to make clean-up even easier.



To make a similar bubble bowl, fill a large bowl or pot with water and a generous squirt of dish soap or bubble bath. Give your child a straw, and let her go to town blowing bubbles in the water. As she blows, the soap will foam and bubble up. Gretchen finds this completely delightful, and whatever makes her happy makes me happy. If you have a little bit of extra time and don't mind a little bit of extra mess, you can add a bit of tempera paint (powdered works best, I think) to the water and soap. Have your child blow into the straw, and then gently press a sheet of paper on top of your bubble cloud for colored bubble prints.

Beep beep!

The idea for today's post comes from Little Family Fun one of my new favorite blogs. Linda's ideas are fantastic and accessible for even the most novice project planners.



Gretchen tapes our floor.

Cars are big fun around here. One of Gretchen's favorite things to do is "tape the floor", where we use strips of masking tape to lay out roads, parks and buildings. Taping the floor is fun and all, but it wastes a lot of tape and it is a pain to pull the tape up off the carpet when we are done. This weekend I decided to find something as flexible but a lot less sticky. Road cards!



Making your own road is easy and inexpensive. You'll need:
12 3x5 inch index cards
2 pieces of black construction paper
3 pieces of yellow construction paper
double sided tape or a glue stick
a white crayon
scissors
ruler

Using a ruler, mark a series of 3x5 inch rectangles on the yellow construction paper - I think I got 4 per page, but I can't remember. Cut the rectangles out and glue or tape them to your index cards. Cut 24 2x3 rectangles from the black construction paper and position them on the index cards. Use the white crayon to mark the lines on each card. If your kids are rough like mine are, and you want this project to last a while, you may want to laminate the cards with contact paper.


Each card is a laminated 3x5 index card.


These cards are cute but my obsessive side is really bothered because they're not exactly even. I won't even tell you how many times I started this project over again because it wasn't just so...but it was more than twice. In retrospect printing an image would have been easier on my brain and easier to laminate. With that in mind I made a little template in Picnik.


Let me know if you'd like the file, and feel free to use the image for your own projects.


These cards new in our rotation but I would venture to say that Gretchen will like them as much or more than floor tape for two reasons: she can play with them at the table and away from her baby sister's drooly mouth, and they can be arranged endlessly in one sitting (unlike floor tape - once floor tape is down, I'm not peeling it back up).

I love s Linda's idea of making this into a game into a counting game with dice! Even very young children can place the cards, roll the dice and count how far they should move with a little bit of adult help.