Smelly Bottles

Here is a quick and easy (not to mention squeaky clean) sensory play idea for your little ones: Smelly bottles!


First, choose the scents you want to use in your bottles.  I chose almond, orange, cinnamon, lemon, peppermint, and vanilla (not pictured) extracts.  A good variety of strong scents will be your best bet for being able to sniff them out once they are in the bottles.

Next, take a small cotton ball and soak it with the extract.  Then shove the cotton ball into a small bottle or jar. I used travel sized shampoo bottles. They are inexpensive and they have the added bonus of a screw-on top that then pops open. No fear of the kiddos dumping extract all over the place!  I also added just a few extra drops of extract directly into the jar. The cotton ball quickly soaks it up and it adds just a little extra punch of smell.

Finally, screw on the top and let the kiddos go to town! This is actually a really fun game for kids of any age, including adults. My husband and some colleagues at work had a blast trying to guess what they were smelling.  (I helped myself by putting a clue on the bottom of each bottle in Sharpie.)

For someone of L's age and experience, this was more of a getting-to-know-new-smells kind of activity, but with older kids it's fun to encourage them to try to identify what exactly it is they are smelling.

L didn't really know what she was smelling, but that didn't stop her from trying out each of the bottles!

She even decided to give a few other things a sniff, including her dot markers! Gotta love that sense of curiosity!

Loofahs: No Longer Just for Bathing!

A guaranteed way to have a super fun painting experience? Take a novel canvas and a novel tool, throw in a couple pie tins full of paint, and go to town! This is just what we did yesterday morning, and it was a grand old time!


For this art experience, I provided L with a couple of loofah bath sponges and a shiny piece of paper I recently acquired.  I threw some paint into large pie tins (which are great in that they are big enough to use just about any painting tool you could want and they come clean really easily) and we got down to business.

I taped the shiny paper to the side of the house because it was pretty large and I wanted to make sure L had plenty of space. That blue blob you see in the paper is actually my reflection while taking the photo. That was some seriously shiny paper!

L got busy right away. As per her usual, she had to get her hands in the paint first, before she was ready to experiment with the loofahs. Testing the waters, I guess.

Once her arms were sufficiently green and yellow, L was able to focus on the new painting element, the loofah:

This was a really fun art experiment. And I seriously just remembered (some hours later!) that the thing is still hanging on the side of our house! Well, lucky day for the neighbors, I suppose!

Music We Love: Frances England

L is a lover of music (what toddler isn't, right?).  Fortunately there is lots of great music out there for kids these days.  One of L's favorites (and mine too!) is the magnifcent Frances England, who captures childhood in beautiful, folksy, catchy tunes that manage never to get stale...even after many shuffles of the old iPod.

One of my absolute favorite Frances tunes is the little ditty "Sleepyhead Mommy," which any mom will tell you is really the anthem of motherhood.

We have and adore all three of Frances's wonderful records and we highly recommend each one for kiddos and parents alike! Happy listening!



Fascinating Creatures (2006)



Family Tree (2008)



Mind of My Own (2010)

Popcorn (Sensory) Tub. No Butter Necessary.

The husband and I are both movie theater concession stand alumni, so popcorn is a pretty popular subject in our house. While we don't let L indulge just yet, you can imagine my excitement when I found some awesome popcorn snack cups in the dollar bin at Target. Now, what to do with these rad plastic works of art (other than snarf popcorn out of them)?  Use them in a sensory tub, of course!

Along with the fabulous snack containers, I added one bag each of white and yellow unpopped kernels.  And as luck would have it, I had recently been cleaning out a section in the garage and found a box full of fluffy white Styrofoam packing peanuts, which gave the excellent illusion of popped corn.

Now admittedly, L doesn't really understand what popcorn is or what it's all about, as her experience has been limited by my necessity to not let her choke.  All the same, the sensory aspect made her lack of knowledge on the topic completely moot. The nice fluff of the packing peanuts complimented the hard little kernels, which made an excellent plinking sound in the plastic containers.  L learned a new word, pronounced "pa-cone" and really stayed engaged in this tub for quite a while.

A word of wisdom from those with experience: if you are planning to do this activity outdoors, make sure it isn't a windy day.  In the midst of all our fun, we spent a good deal of time chasing rogue packing peanuts all over the yard as they were carried away by the gusty wind.  Other than that little snaffoo, I have to say we haven't had this much fun in while!

Stickers are Awesome! Or, Sticker Play for Fine Motor Practice

One of L's very favorite things to do is play with stickers.  In addition to being a great art tool that has virtually no mess, stickers can be used to work on a wide variety of developing skills in kids.  Providing kids with stickers featuring shapes, colors, letters, numbers, and a large collection of various objects not only encourages those concepts, but also provides a fantastic opportunity for kids to practice language. But the best part is, stickers are AWESOME. Period. Stickers rock. They are tons of fun and with so many different types to choose from, they rarely get boring.


I encourage all of the above with L while we work with stickers, but another wonderful thing about sticker play is that it is great practice for fine motor skills. All of the precision required to pinch those flat little stickers goes a long way in helping prepare kids for the future task of gripping a pencil.  As a teacher, I know this to be true. As a mom, I just love it that my kid is having fun.

I like to offer L stickers featuring things she's already interested in, such as the dogs in this masterpiece.

I also encourage L to use markers or crayons along with her stickers for additional fine motor practice. This work of art featuring sea creatures was created after a trip to the aquarium.

A novel canvas is also a fun element to add to sticker play.  This piece of aluminum foil was anchored to L's art table for two days and as a result there was quite the eclectic party happening by the time we hung it up on her art wall.

Confession: I love sticker play as much as (maybe more than) the kiddo. I don't even mind when the back of my T-shirt becomes that novel canvas! Because stickers rock! Seriously!

Mystery Canvas: Styrofoam

Painting on any surface is always great fun, so when I recently acquired a big square of Styrofoam, I knew immediately what to do with it.  L and I set out with a couple bowls of paint, some paint brushes and dabbers, and got right to work.

Hmmm...what to do with this?

I really thought that the whole Styrofoam element would make this experience so interesting that L would be at it for hours (okay, even I'm not that crazy!). But as usual, she surprised me with what she found even more interesting than the canvas...

...her hands, of course!  The activity quickly turned in a different direction, but luckily I always anticipate that and was ready to encourage this awesome sensory play as well.

What a lovely squish!

This looks interesting!

Who needs a canvas with all this clean skin?

Okay, so we ended up with more paint on the kid than on the Styrofoam, but she had a blast and really, what's a little mess to a mama who loves to let her kid explore?

Coffee Filter Art

One of the things I like to do best for art projects with L is to use random things that I already have around my house.  Usually projects like this take little advanced planning and are generally a mystery because you just never quite know how things will turn out.  I channeled some of my earliest teaching days for one of our recent art projects, and it turned out to be a complete blast.  Without further ado, coffee filter art!

To begin with, I invited L to color all over coffee filters using washable markers.

Once the coffee filters were colored to L's taste, I handed over a small spray bottle filled with water.  The idea here is that the water will cause the marker to bleed and the coffee filter ends up with these excellent patterns and mixtures of colors.  

L spent a good amount of time exploring the spray bottle and attempting to squeeze the thing to get the water to come out.  After a bit, she asked for my help, so we squeezed the bottle together and watched the colors bleed all over the coffee filters.

After they had dried a bit, we displayed them in our front window.  It was gloriously sunny that morning, and they ended up looking like lovely sun catchers floating over the living room. L was even more thrilled when we went outside and she could still see them from the street.

This was a super easy project with very little muss or fuss. L was happy and engaged and covered in marker for an entire day...she's a bit of a sun catcher herself, really.