Another week down!

Another week of lockdown completed and we are one more week towards the nightmare that is Covid being over.

Lots of us are fed up and bored of lockdown but try and remember why we are doing it and it’s to keep people safe. It won’t be forever although I admit it feels like forever some days!

Toddler G has been missing gym lately so we have started doing some gym at home and for this we are using his old cot mattress.

This works really well as it’s quite exciting having something big and different on the floor and it is perfect for practicing forward rolls, sideways rolls and just some good old bouncing!

I have been busy doing some tuff tray play too and here are some of our latest

Ice smashing

Toddler G has been loving our walks when it’s icy.

He loves walking through the ice and listening to it crunch so I thought I would expand on that.

I popped the tuff tray outside on a night that it was forecast to freeze and added a few bits and pieces to it like some toys and pine cones and filled it with water.

In the morning it had frozen beautifully and I took it back inside and provided toddler G with a hammer and let him enjoy rescuing the toys and smashing the ice.

Independent baking

Like lots of people we have been doing quite a bit of baking over lockdown and toddler G has been loving it and especially loving all the yummy treats we have made.

He has been asking to do more and more things by himself though so I thought about letting him do it all by himself.

I measured out the ingredients for biscuits and popped them in separate containers on the tuff tray and let toddler G decide what to mix first.

He absolutely loved this and he managed it all by himself with just a little help with the final mixing and the rolling out of the dough.

I will admit they were not the best biscuits we had ever made but they weren’t bad and he had a lot of fun doing this and taking responsibility.

He even wiped the tuff tray down when he had finished!!

Quarry

This had to stay in the tray for 3 days before toddler G would let me dismantle it for something else, he loved this so much.

I used some large stones from the garden a couple of planks of wood and cat litter!! Clean of course. I have discovered cat litter makes a great gravel base for a mini quarry and it’s non toxic so safe for little hands. You could also use gravel that is used in fish tanks too and this even comes in different colours.

Toddler G had great fun filling up his dump trucks using the diggers and mixing some sand with the gravel.

Nothing was wasted as I just popped the cat litter back in the bag to be used later!

Bug hunting

I really enjoyed setting this up and it was easy to do with just foliage gathered from the garden and a few stones to make a little shelter.

I hid some plastic bugs and popped a magnifying glass and some little containers on the tray and let toddler G find the bugs himself.

He loved hunting for the bugs and especially picking them out with tweezers and little scissor scoops.

He put the captured bugs in to the clear containers and we then used our bug book to identify all the ones he had captured.

We expanded on this later on in the day when we went in to the garden to hunt for real bugs.

The delicate work of picking up the toy bugs with the tweezers is great for fine motor skills practice and it was a lot of fun to find the names of the bugs together.

We also counted the bugs legs and grouped them together with colours and sizes so it was a great learning experience as well as a lot of fun.

Snow dying

We didn’t get much snow here much to toddler G’s disappointment but I gathered as much as I could and filled up small containers with a bit of water and food colouring and gave toddler G the pipettes for him to dye the snow with.

He enjoyed this so much we also decided to use the fake snow we had left over from one of our other tuff trays.

This was only a brief activity but it was still a lot of fun and he was very pleased with the pretty snow afterwards!

Drawing with cars

I didn’t expect this to be as fun as it was.

I selloptaped some pens to the back of some of toddler G’s larger vehicle toys and spread a long piece of paper down the hall.

We then drove the cars up and down and made fantastic lines and patterns and shapes.

I drove in different shapes like a square, circle and triangle and I even made some letters which toddler G enjoyed following with his car and it was a great teaching playtime. Felt tip pens work better than crayons or colouring pencils for this game as we discovered.

Well that is it for ideas from this week, I hope you have enjoyed seeing what we have been up to and please carry on sendingme your pictures and ideas!!

Thank you for reading and stay safe Funky Fans!! XX