Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Ice-Cube Painting


In an attempt to actually try to do at least one fun activity with Shelby each day and also to utilise the learning potential from watching Play-School (her favourite TV show) I went onto their website last week and got ideas of things to do with Shelby revolving around the weeks theme. I picked the AM show theme of Open & Close which I must admit I haven't seen too much of in the show but the activities have been fun. So far, we've made a car/wagon out of a box for Shelby to push/pull her toys around in, had a tea-party outside, made cooked play-dough beads and threaded them onto string and lastly we've made some ice-cube paintings! 


This was actually a lot of fun. Last week I filled up the ice-cube molds with water and added food colouring to some of the blocks. Next time I do this I'll actually just water down paint which will I think make darker, bolder colours and hopefully eliminate the "colour-all-moving-into-the-centre-of-the-cube" problem that we had this time. 

Still it actually worked.  She found it rather cold!! (and so did I when I did a couple of pages, actually!) Now she's outside watching the cubes finish melting and the colours mixing to that lovely icky brown colour that mixing so many colours always acheives. 

The Play-School website has extension activites for most of their themes. If you're interested you can find them here. And even if you don't watch play-school for whatever reason a lot of the activities are easy and fun to do using things that most people have at home already!

One more thing: I have actually video-taped the AM show both days so far and we watched it at a more suitable time during the day. Sometimes Shelby watches the 9:30am show when I shower but othertimes we're out 'n about at that time of the day so I wanted to be able to watch it later in the day. So far that's working well for us.  :)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

How fun! I think my kids would love this, especially with the weather warming up. I adore Playschool.:-P I feel cheated that I didn't have it growing up in the US. I just love how many simple ideas like these that it incorporates. And it helps me remember fun songs I used to know as a child. It gets my vote as the least obnoxious children's tv show ever.:-D

Erin said...

Thanks for the link, can't believe I never thought to look up playschool before - I'm always on the look out for simple ideas to do with kids.