The Williams Family: Toddler Activity Bags

My friend Amy Elson saw a fun idea on Pinterest recently (http://pinterest.com/search/?q=toddler+activity+bags or http://chasingcheerios.blogspot.com/2008/06/toddler-activity-bags.html) for making Toddler Activity Bags, and thought it would be fun to make an evening of it for a group of mommies to do an exchange - share activities that they have created, and get the components for fun new things to do with their kids.

Here's how it worked: Each mom put together everything needed for one activity of their choice (hundreds of ideas available online...), and made enough sets for each mom to take one home for their kid(s). Eight moms = eight fun new activities for entertainment and learning! Not to mention having an evening of mommy bonding with dessert and no kids was a welcome break :)

I actually had a lot of fun looking around online at different ideas, and was inspired to try some other activities on my own that I saw on some of the crazy mommy blogger websites (the ones who seem to have endless amounts of creativity).

The activity I did was multi-faceted... I wanted something that would teach the kids some Spanish, but something that they could hold onto and keep using for a while. The dollar store chopsticks were turned into 'fishing poles' for a game called "Pesca" (fishing), in which you put the paper clips on the animal flashcards and try to 'fish' them and practice the animal names in Spanish. The cards could also be hole-punched with a ring to make a portable flipbook to practice the spanish animals names with - good for car rides, restaurants, or airplane travel entertainment. Since the cards are in pairs of animals, they can also use them to play Memory or the traditional Go Fish.

When I played this with Caleb for the first time, we did it entirely in Spanish, and he was doing a great job repeating many of the animal names in Spanish as he heard me say them. Now he is asking to play Pesca frequently :) It was a lot of fun, and I was loving hearing him use the words in Spanish!

(Video of Caleb playing Pesca):

Caleb has been having a lot of fun trying out each of the activities we received....

Building Sticks with velcro circles on each end

Alphabet sticks

Counting Cheerios

It was hard to keep him from eating the Cheerios before he filled the cards... Next time we will have to try it after a meal when he isn't so hungry I guess :)