Toddler time 1: Rainy Day fun!

I'm always looking on Pinterest or online for fun stuff to do with my little girl. I have a bunch of snack and art project ideas (motor skills) that I want to do and have done, so I'm starting a "Toddler Time" highlight to my posts... (trying to organize or make it easy to find stuff...)

This one's pretty simple... it was a rainy day (surprise, surprise...) so I thought we'd make a raincloud.

Ingredients:
- clear fishing string (wire)
- styrafoam or paper bowl
- blue construction paper
- pencil and kid scissors

I folded the paper in half short ways and drew bunch of LARGE raindrops on the blue construction paper (about 2 1/2 inches long). I had gracie cut them with the kid scissors (with my help of course)

----- we interupt these instructions for a very important motor skill message --- before using kid scissors together, we sing "twinkle twinkle" doing the open shut (twinkling) motions with our hands. It helps her get the cutting motion prepped for using scissors
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and we're back.... so, because the paper was folded you should have a bunch of raindrops that are in pairs (same size pairs). put those aside... then I flipped the bowl over and punched a bunch of holes in the bottom with the pencil. I cut several strips of fishing string in diffenent lengths and had her pull the sting through the holes (**motor skills**). I tied off the fishing wire in a big enough knot that it wouldnt untie or go through the holes i punched (You can burn the knots to make sure they stay but I wouldnt recommend doing this NOT in the prescense of your lil one or they may get some early pyrotechnic ideas... anyways, we took a pair of raindrops on the other end of the string (below the bowl) and glued them each together around the sring. continue with all the raindrops and pull a string through a hole in the middle of the bowl and knot it the other way to make a hook for it to hang... if that makes sense, use that string to hold up or hang your raincloud...

remember to be patient, the raindrops are going to get messed up, you may have to help your little one glue the paper together (not their fingers) and they may only have the attention span to do a couple raindrps... and you'll have to come back and finish after snack...  but the more they're doing on their own (in a SAFE way), the more they're learning...