For the Birds!

One of L's many current obsessions is birds. She loves everything to do with birds. She loves pointing at them, shouting out in glee when she hears one twitter, and watching them zoom away when she comes running.  The girl is crazy for anything with a beak and wings! I wanted to capitalize on her love of feathered things, so we recently made a super simple bird feeder using only an empty milk jug, a length of ribbon, and a handful markers.


I used a box cutter to make a large opening in the front of a gallon milk jug that had been washed out and dried. Then I handed it over to L for her expert decor.  We used washable markers which were great for this project, as the colors are bright and showed up nicely on the opaque jug.  Then we headed outside to string it up with ribbon in a bush in the front yard.

Welcome, birds!

First we scouted out the perfect spot to hang the feeder.  I tied it up with a short length of ribbon by the handle.

Once we had determined where we wanted the feeder to hang, I pulled it down so that L could help fill it up with bird seed.  We talked about what might come visit our feeder (maybe a friendly squirrel of two might even show up!) and about how we would come back out and check on it often so that we could keep it filled up.

Now that the feeder was nice and full of delicious treats for our neighborhood birdies, we hung it back up and sat back to see who might visit.  L was so excited about even the potential for feathered visitors that she jumped all over the yard.  Here's hoping some birds will turn up soon!

Easy Peasy Fine Motor Games

Lately I have been all about home made games for L. They are wonderful for so many reasons: they're inexpensive, they help clear the house of clutter, and they are novel, so L is easily engaged and entertained.  Here are just a couple of fine motor games that I've recently introduced to the tot.

The first is super duper easy peasy.  I just took an empty peanut butter jar and filled it with one-inch sections of pipe cleaner.  Throw in a cheap magnet wand and this thing is a fun fine motor activity, in addition to being a feast for the senses. L and I talked about the different colors, we listened to the interesting sounds the pipe cleaners made as they moved around the jar, and we even shook the jar like a musical instrument.  When she gets older, this will be a great introduction to the science of magnets.

The next activity is this fun fill and spill activity.  I used a box cutter to cut out the front section of an empty juice bottle. I taped off the jagged edges with some cute duct tape and filled the hole with pom poms of various colors and sizes.

I left the bottle on L's art table that evening for her to discover the next morning.  It didn't take her long to figure out the concept of putting the poms through the hole at the top and retrieving them through the opening on the front.  This is an excellent way for kids to work on fine motor control, and of course we also discussed the colors and sizes of the pom poms.

Forty minutes later (forty minutes!) L was still going at it, and I promptly gathered the materials to make several more of these little gems for my classroom.  Now I'm constantly on the prowl for more containers to see what else we can come up with!