Operation Playtime Day 12: heuristic play

The final day of Operation Playtime. :(
For the theme today (heuristic play) we got out one of Em's favorites: beans!!

She (as you can see) intently manipulates the beans and enjoys pouring them into things.

She also likes placing them into trays. This has been a great unplugged series of play days for Emeline (and the bigger girls). It has MADE me set aside time intended just for her which I do everyday anyway but this took me to another level in some areas. We will try to keep the ideas flowing. Check out play-activities.com if you have little ones at home. I was introduced to the site by my Aunt Joann and I will definitely visit it more often to see what other ideas they have.

THANKS!!

Operation Playtime Day 11: Sugar Chalk

Well this was something different too. I prepared the water/sugar solution in the morning, went shopping, and about 7 hours later they used the sugar chalk. I think it worked.

Emmy has enjoyed all of this playtime intended just for her!!

Their first set of masterpieces. Good job girls.

Operation Playtime Day 10: Make Bubbles

Making bubbles what fun. Operation Playtime brought some sunshine inside today. One thing we tried was to do bubble prints.

Georgia blew us a big pile of bubbles.

Emmy's picture came out quite nice. The older girls' looked a little more diluted because our food coloring got mixed up and turned a shade of gray. They sort of resemble the moon though.

Then we played some silly games like pop so many bubbles with your foot, elbow, rear-end etc.

Emeline made sure none were left on the carpet.

Just some shots of Em enjoying the play.

Operation Playtime Day 8: Playdoh, gloop and yuk!

Operation Playtime Day 8:

We made goop.

Well we've done the playdoh thing so we decided to make goop something we were all unfamiliar with.


I'm not sure if the consistency is "right" but it was really pretty neat stuff.

Emeline loved the way it spread.

She also loved making these stringy slimes from her finger tips.

It feels pretty cool when you put your hands in it. Like quick sand the kids said.

After looking at this I was a little nervous about clean up.

Actually it was a breeze. I scraped off most of it and the rest wiped right up. The most difficult part of clean up was finding all the goop Em flung from making her "stringy slimes". I found them EVERYWHERE!

This smile sums up the activity!!

rag dolls 3

Well we sewed around our arms and legs and turned then right-side-out. Then we stuffed them. As you can see the pattern called for very spindly arms and legs. If we make any more dolls I will definitely make them much larger so that this step is much easier.

Operation Playtime Day 8: Kitchen Grocery Store

It didn't take long for the kids to dive into today's Kitchen Grocery Store theme when I told them what was on the operation playtime agenda today.

Along with a grocery store we had a cafe where the babies enjoyed a mid-morning snack.

Mmmm.

Josie also set up a book store and a ...

...pet shop.

The little girls deciding what exactly they should purchase.

Emeline got some funny things out of the cupboard to buy. Bag 'em up Georgia!

Operation Playtime Day 7: Pretend Play

We didn't participate yesterday which was outdoor play, because we were in single digits not counting the wind chill. I tried to find ways to bring the snow indoors by finding a recipe or something it just didn't work out for yesterday. However....

Today's unplugged activity is all about pretend play. Imagination and playtime are NOT lacking in this household but we did do some things differently today.
For example we played dress-up and had a fairy adventure.

One little fairy flitting around.

This is a treasure map to the Queen Fairy that Georgia made. She wrinkled it up and put a hole in it to make it look old. The Queen Fairy happened to be me!! I got to play too.
I took that as a cue and decided to get right down with them today.

We had many adventures with little people. We would start one scenario, finish it, and start with another story line. It was fun!

Operation Playtime Day 5 :Painting

Today's theme: Painting. Emeline loves to paint. We tried something new today and instead of gadgets she was prompted to use her hands. Now she has experimented with her hands and paint before but to be honest I didn't really promote the activity in the past. Today I let her have at it.
She was VERY careful at first.

This is a picture right after I stuck her whole hand in the paint. Whew she couldn't believe it.

After a few minutes my little rough and tumble girl didn't want dirty hands anymore.

I cleaned her up and she went to her brushes instead.

The older girls enjoyed experimenting with kitchen gadgets. Josie liked to use a marzipan tool to make prints on her paper.