Corn Shakers!🍿
These fun musical instruments are super easy to make and great for both babies and toddlers to explore!
What You Need:
- Screw-top bottle or jar
- Popping corn
- Glue
- Use a clear container for your shaker such as a small, plastic bottle.
What You Do:
- Add a small handful of un-popped popping corn into the clear container. Don’t fill the entire bottle or there won’t be room to shake!
- Dab glue to the screw part of the lid first, then fasten it shut.
- Give the shakers to your children and get rattling! Learn the words to fall songs or rhymes together then accompany the songs with your new shakers!
Outdoor Treasure Box! 🧺
What You Need:
- Small empty box, basket, or container
What You Do:
- The world right outside your home is full of opportunities for your baby to learn. All throughout the year, nature—even in a busy city—offers new colors, textures, scents, and shapes for your baby to experience. Take a stroll around the neighborhood with your baby, enjoy the fresh air, and collect some natural souvenirs for an outdoor treasure box.
- Allow your baby to get close to the ground and examine natural details—different types of grass, bark, moss, leaves, stones, pinecones, and soil may catch their attention. Collect one of each item into a container or basket. Hunt around for some bugs!
- Talk about which insects crawl and which ones fly. Look up at the sky, and tell your baby about the weather and how it makes you feel (physically and emotionally).
- Trees are full of lessons—help your baby feel the texture of the trunk by placing your hand over theirs and run them along the bark, and count the other trees around you together.
- Practice sniffing scents of flowers, grass, fruits or berries in a garden if you have one.
Acorn Slides!🌳
What You Need:
- Acorns
- Empty paper rolls
What You Do:
- Take a nature walk and collect acorns with your child.
- Tape empty paper rolls to the edge of a large container at different angles and heights in their reach.
- Show your child how to roll the acorn down the slide through the tube.
- Encourage them to try it.
- For extra fun, add water, leaves, and other nature collectibles to the container. This activity is great for development of fine motor skills, hand-eye coordination, problem solving, and visual perception. *Be sure to supervise your child with small objects such as acorns due to choking risk.