Blog 7 of lockdown fun!

How are you all doing wonderful funky fans?

I hope you all had a wonderful Easter weekend, consumed your own body weight in chocolate and enjoyed some family time even if it was over video chatting.

We have been loving the sunny weather as it makes staying at home much easier being able to stay and play in the garden.

I decided to be brave and did the shopping myself rather than send the husband, shopping these days is a weird experience isn’t it!

Long long queues to get in and then a one way system all the way around and no flour to be found anywhere!

Here are some of the things we have been up to this weekend, I hope they offer you some inspiration.

 

Shaving foam fun

Simple but a lot of fun. You will need shaving foam and some plastic or rubber toys. Put the foam on a tray or flat surface and let your little ones create a foamy soapy world.

They can make footprints, or tyre tracks, roll the animals in the foam and generally have fun.

A lot of small ones really enjoy the feeling of foam on their hands and fingers, obviously not mine.

As you can see from the picture, I had to supply a bowl of warm water for toddler G to wash his hands with then they got foam on them!

However he did have a lot of fun pushing his cars around and I also got a couple of paintbrushes so he could paint in the foam too.

He has started learning letters so we drew some letters in the foam, as well as smiley faces.

You can also add food colouring or paint to make multi coloured foam.

If you have some pipettes they are great fun for dropping the colours in to the foam and then swirling it around.

 

 

Build a ramp

 

 

An outside or inside game and one that provides a lot of entertainment and very little set up.

We used some cardboard to make a ramp but anything works.

Some boards of wood or if you are inside the sofa cushions work well too.

Prop them up on anything, a chair or a box works well and then you can roll anything down it.Cars or balls are the obvious choice.

To make this more exciting, if you are outside you can did whatever you are rolling in paint and then roll it down a cardboard ramp.

This is great with cars or toy tractors as they leave cool tyre tracks.

You can race several different things down at once and see which gets to the bottom first.

You can learn about how things roll.

Try rolling other things like a block or a cuddly toy and try to get your toddler to work out why they don’t roll down the ramp. Every day is a school day!

 

Make a tunnel

 

Toddler G loves doing this! You need a rug or blanket and then prop it over your sofas to form a tunnel.

You may need to rearrange your furniture a bit but that seems to make it even more exciting for little ones.

It’s a bit like a den but make sure there is a way in and out so they can crawl through.

They can drive cars through and you can challenge them to do things like go through it backwards or with their eyes closed.

When it becomes less fun to crawl through, you could add some cushions and make it in to a special hideaway.

Bring a snack to eat in it and cuddle up and read a story.

 

 

Water Beads

I love water beads! Seriously they are one of the best things ever to play with. You can buy them from amazon and get around 50,000 of them for £10.

Even if you don’t have children and you are just bored and reading this blog you should get some water beads, they are almost therapeutic to run your fingers through.

You will need to prepare the water beads the night before, pop a handful into a big bowl of water. You don’t need many beads at all to have a lot of fun.

Leave overnight and then on the morning they will have swelled in to the size of large marbles.

I popped ours in to the tuff tray but you can use the bath, large bowls or a paddling pool.

 

You can use scoops, spoons or sieves to transfer the beads from one bowl to another or fill buckets.

One word of warning, if you are playing with the water beads inside, watch out as they bounce and they go everywhere!

Toddler G loved filling up a bucket of beads and them pouring them on the garden path and watching them bounce all around.

He also liked sweeping them off the path afterwards so win win!

They are biodegradable so if you leave them outside they will break down quite quickly and just disappear, they have no plastic in them.

You can use them for colour sorting, run them through tubes or just swish them around with your hands.

They really are worth every penny.

 

Go shopping

 

This is currently toddler G’s favourite game.

You will need a toy trolley or a basket to put the “shopping” in and and array of either toys or things from your cupboards.

Line up some things for your small person to pretend buy.

We tend to use unopened bags of pasta, some tins of tuna or pretty much anything I can find that won’t cause a mess if dropped!

I line them all up on the sofas and then toddler G pushes his toy cart around and adds them in.

He then takes them to our “till” which is a chair with our toy till on it.

He loves pretending to scan each item and making the beep beep noise and then popping all the things he has bought in to a shopping bag.

He can play this game several times until he finally gets bored!

This is a great way to exercise your childs imagination and creative play.

When they are very small you have to stay and play with them but the older they get they will be able to carry on playing these imagination role play games by themselves.

 

Well that is it from me, I hope these give you some ideas or add to your existing repertoire of exciting things to do with your little ones.

Stay healthy, happy and sane funky mums and dads and remember that we are all in this together! It won’t last forever! XX


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