Flower Power: Garden Sensory Tub

This post is from my personal archives, back when the air was under 110 degrees in the morning and the grass in our yard was still green. 

L and I are very lucky to attend/work for a preschool where gardening is part of the curriculum. The children and teachers are responsible for maintaining a garden where we grow food that we then eat as part of our meals and snacks. It's really quite amazing. As you can guess, this makes L very interested in things that grow, and even more so in DIRT. So I put together this sensory tub for exploring dirt and flowers, and it was a huge hit.

For this tub, I threw in a bag of soil and added silk flowers, a bucket, garden tools, and gardening gloves. L loved scooping and pouring the dirt, and she really surprised me by spending a good amount of time sniffing the earthy scent. Perhaps I have a future gardener on my hands?!

Table Top Traffic

Want an easy peasy way to bring new life to all those toy cars you have lying around? (I mean, that's not just my house, right?) A little tape, a table top or other flat surface, some toy cars, and you're ready to go!

I just stuck some tape to the table in patterns of roads and parking spaces (and one sad little house), threw in some peg people, and of course, the cars. L was instantly enchanted, which I find endlessly amusing, as those same cars have been sitting in one of her toy bins for weeks completely untouched. The power of novelty, eh?

Of course, after the wonder of the cars and people wore off, there was still a tabletop full of sticky tape just waiting to be unstuck!

Who needs silly old cars when the bright blue roadway will do?