To keep these little hands and minds busy....

Soo, I've been trying to think of someways to keep Alissa busy without having her destroying the house :) I've decided I'm going to try some montessori trays or shoe box bins, since I have a million of those (Why you ask? maybe I'm a bin hoarder, who knows... :) Timothy?? maybe we have something in common :) ) Anyways, I've got some ideas from: Counting Coconuts, and I figured I might as well blog about my journey...

So, here are the ones I'm going to do first, I'm trying to keep it simple, cheap, and still letting myself be a little creative... But I don't want to go crazy yet, I'll try a few simple ones first and then see how it goes...

1. Rainbow craft - This one seems fun, interesting, and easy. You take a piece of paper, draw outline of a rainbow, cut strips of different colored construction paper, let Alissa tear the pieces into small squares and then sort and glue on the rainbow, a few at a time.

2. Pouring rainbow rice from one container into a matching container - I found a tutorial on dying rice, which I thought Alissa would enjoy.

3. Spooning beans from on bowl to another - This one is easy, I will probably take a mixture of lentils and beans and call it bean soup :)

4. Toothpick pushing - This one sounds like a lot of fun, something I would enjoy doing :) You take something like flag toothpicks or umbrella toothpicks and a short cylinder piece of styrofoam and stick the toothpicks into the styrofoam

5. Tweezing flowers - All you need is flowers off of a lei, tweezers and two bowls. object is to use the tweezers to transfer the flowers from one bowl to the other

6. Sorting - for this one, I can either use a variety of things, but the one that interested me the most was the plastic ice cubes, I love the feel of them and think they will be a fun thing to play with, so I will need those or some beads and an ice cube tray, mancala board or something else of the sort, to sort these objects or to put them in a sequence. I may end up doing two of these..

7. Ice cream sensory tub - Last but not least I'm going to make one of these, Inspiration #1 & Inspiration #2

I'm going to find my supplies at either a dollar store, craft store, or thrift store. Hopefully I can get any supplies I need next week :)