We made a light table!

On Christmas Eve of this year we went to our city's shiny new science centre. Monster and his dad spent a ton of time playing at the light tables, almost as much time as they spent playing with the big (and super cool) water features. I wanted to recreate the same type of play at home but WOW are light panels expensive. Buying one would be practical for a school, I imagine, but for the three of us to play with? Not so much. So instead I set about googling and figured out how to make one ourselves.

Teachpreschool.org had a pretty great tutorial for making their own basic light table, so we started there. Unfortunately I didn't think to take pictures of the process of making our own table but the steps are pretty basic - the most labour intensive part of the whole process was going to the store to buy a light.

1. Find a big plastic bin - we stole one from my mom's craft room (good thing she likes us?). The bin should be a decent size, I think ours is 12x22 and as shallow as possible, no more than a couple of inches. If you can get one with a frosted bottom awesome, if not you'll need to paint the bottom. The most important part is that the bottom is flat.
2. Put a piece of newspaper inside of the bin and tape it down so that only the sides are exposed. Spray paint the sides with white paint - make sure you do the inside, so little fingers can't peel the paint off. 
3. Put lights inside - I used a 24 inch tube fluorescent type, designed to be an under-counter light in a kitchen. It fit perfectly diagonally in the lid to give good, even lighting. The cord is pretty thick but on the right angle the bin still snaps into the lid to keep the light table sturdy.
4. Play! I ordered some cool window blocks but they haven't showed up yet so we stole some coloured transparency paper from my mom (the theme of today's post is larceny) and cut out shapes to play with.

The simplest thing...

I love looking at big, elaborate science experiments online. I get big ideas about the great things Monster and I could do, the cute lab coat he'll wear and the things he'll learn. The problem, of course, is that Monster is not quite two. He isn't ready to sit down and make a hypothesis and explore ninety-three possible outcomes. He wants to see something cool, he wants to figure it out, and he wants to be able to do so independently because he is a "big boy" and no one better forget it. The most basic science experiment that I could think of (that is also 100% safe for him to do independently) was playing with baking soda and vinegar.

Getting started.

Plain baking soda and vinegar is fun but Monster sees me use it to clean and clear drains on a pretty regular basis so I didn't think it would be too exciting for him. To make it a bit more exciting I added a few drops of food colouring (neon food colouring!) to plastic containers full of baking soda and then we got to work. We started off using the turkey baster to add vinegar but it was too big for Monster to use comfortably. Plastic pipettes or eyedroppers are officially on my shopping list.

Once Monster got the hang of adding the vinegar he was on a roll - every container was fizzing and bubbling over. The best part was how many times he could get a container to re-fizz (there's no way that's a real word) just by adding some vinegar or poking/stirring/smushing his hands into the bowls. Eventually he had the soupy dark purple vinegar up to the edges of the casserole dish his project was contained in. I dumped it out and added a bit of fresh baking soda twice before he had enough of this project. 

We'll definitely be doing this again, Monster had way too much fun not to.

Valentine's Day Sensory Bin

I love sensory bins. I love coming up with themes for them, searching out treasures for them, putting them together, and playing with them. Monster, however, is almost 2 and doesn't always have the same love for them that I do. Sometimes I make one that is a big hit and he plays with it happily for a while but other ones are epic failures that he doesn't want anything to do with. If I had a bit more sense I would probably give up on sensory bins for a while but they're so much fun for me to play with that I just can't do it. Instead I just try to figure out what will appeal to him based on what he's been into lately and go from there.
This bin is a bit different because it's Valentine's Day themed as opposed to being related to something he's obsessed with (on a related note, when I figure out how to make a Special Agent Oso-themed bin I might just convert him to the wonders of the sensory bin). I threw this bin together in a couple of minutes - Monster was bored so I searched through my mini toy collection and put a quick bin together while he ate a cookie. It's not fancy or particularly involved but he played with it for longer than some of my other attempts.

The base is just plain white rice - if I had planned to make the bin I probably would have made some pretty pink or red rice. I pulled red and pink feathers and pom poms from a mixed bag of each. The tiny koosh balls were part of a pack from the dollar store (dollar store party favors are amazing for sensory bin add-ins) and the shiny purple & green balls are crinkly cat toys that I found when I was cleaning our kitchen. The teddy bear was one that Monster already had laying around. My favourite parts are the little pink & red hearts, kitten, and bird. They're magnets from Superstore that were part of my mom's Valentine but they matched so well that I had to open the package and add them.
Making this bin definitely taught me that keeping containers of sensory bin toys so that I can throw together a quick activity is a great idea - having a meltdown distraction or something to keep me sane while I make supper is never a bad thing.

Finger Paint..

I love finger painting. Quite possibly more than my son loves finger painting. We started finger painting when he was pretty tiny - at first I just added food colouring to whatever he was already mashing around on his high chair tray and let him play. Once he got a bit older, though, I wanted to do some real art projects. These pictures are from a painting-in-the-backyard adventure we had and I am SO glad it was summer so that we did in fact go outside. He was a disaster, the blanket he was on was a disaster, even my husband and I ended up covered in paint. My son was 14 months at the time and everything (seriously, everything) went in his mouth. I wanted to avoid letting him eat real paint because I have a feeling that digesting whatever the hell is in paint is not on the good parenting checklist. So we made our own.

Recipe #1
1.5 cups flour
.5 cups white sugar
1.5 cups water
food colouring
These measurements are really just guidelines - I added more of all three ingredients while I was mixing to get it to the right texture. I made our paint pretty goopy but depending on your preference it can be whatever texture you want. The food colouring is pretty straightforward - add as much as you want in whatever combinations as you want. This recipe made so much paint that we ended up with five containers of different coloured paint.

There is one teeny tiny caveat with this recipe. We got a lot of it in our son's hair. A lot. He and my husband used it like hair gel to make mohawks. And it would not wash out - we drained our hot water tank trying. We ended up giving up and shaving his head. So just a heads up that, while a reasonable 'oops' amount in your hair washes out fine (it all came out of my hair), soaking your whole head in the stuff is a terrible idea. And for the record, his hair grew back. Eventually.