Busy Bag Play Date

We recently took part in a busy bag play date, well, sort of. We were invited, RSVP'd, made our bags and at the last minute couldn't go. We had a doctors appointment earlier that morning that ended up being a 2 hour process between waiting to see the doctor and actually seeing the doctor. What a morning. So needless to say, we did not make the busy bag exchange. Our good friend Kate was nice enough to drag all of our activities home with her. This weekend we actually had some time to pull out our activities and play with them. Owen had a great time and so did I. Check out some of our new activities.

Worm In the Grass-

This is a great fine motor activity for the little guy. Basically the clothespin is your bird. Ours has a cute little feather on it to make it look like a bird or maybe even a butterfly should we let our imagination run free. This teaches the little ones to use their thumb and pointer finger to pinch the clothespin to open and dive in and pick up a worm out of the grass. O really enjoyed this one. We played different variations of the game. First, just practicing the skill of pinching and picking up the worms and then picking up the worms by color as I called them out. So not only were we working on our fine motor skills, but our colors as well.

Velcro Shape Sticks-

O can identify his basic shapes- circle, triangle, square. But from time to time, he'll get confused. I was super excited when I pulled this one out of the bag. I like this activity because he can physically put the pieces together to make the shape. For example, when making a triangle, I can point out how many sides a triangle has and count them as we Velcro them together. The sticks are also different colors, which ties in the practicing of colors as well. Super easy to make and a lot of fun and learning to be had.

Velcro Ice Cream Cone/Popsicle Color Match-

What I liked about this was that it had various levels of difficulty. What I would consider easy and hard. The easy side would simply be the matching of the Velcro popsicle cut out to the coordinating color on the paper. The back side and more difficult side had the name of the color which you would match the popsicle to.

Handwriting Practice Mats (dry erase)-

I was skeptical of this activity. Not the actual materials, but whether O would have any interest or patience for it. Surprisingly, he did. This activity came with laminated sheets to trace, a black dry erase marker and a piece of  black felt to use as an eraser. The sheets to trace included his name, P's name, circles, straight line, zig zag and a couple others.

Math Card Games-

This activity has multiple games at various levels. It includes a basic bean counting, sorting colors, even and odd and greater than/less than. We started with the basic bean counting. We laid out the playing cards, ace-ten and then counted out the corresponding number of beans on each card.

Last, but not least; the activity we made and shared was a color matching, fine motor activity. I am not quite sure what you would call it. The materials were simple. We had different colored pipe cleaners and a colored box,which we found at the Dollar Store. The activity was to put the colored pipe cleaners in the corresponding color hole. Simple, but fun. I know my kids love the exercise of putting things in and taking out.

These games have been a lot of fun for O. They are perfect for the afternoon when I need to keep him busy while I prepare dinner. We also have fun doing them together when P is napping. Hopefully this has inspired you to make some busy bag activities for your little one. Thank you to the mommies who participated in Courtney's Busy Bag Playdate and made these wonderful activities!