Toddler Approved Travel Toys

We have done a lot of road-tripping lately including a REALLY LONG 20-hour trip to Florida!  Needless to say, I have had no choice but to be prepared on our trips with lots of fun travel "toys" and activities.  Here are our top 5 favorites from this summer!! 

Water WOW Doodle Book

These have been a lifesaver for our road trips!  They are completely mess free, color very quickly and dry just as fast!  They pictures and colors are super vibrant!  Sweet Girl has spent hours using these!!

Magnetic Dress Up Set

This set comes in a really nice tin which is also used as your magnetic surface.  This has also been quite a hit with Sweet Girl!!

Flashcard Fun

Click here for the post on our flashcard rings!!  They are perfect for the car!!

Our homemade I-Spy Book

I wish I would have made more for our road trips!!  It's always nice to see a little piece of "home" when you are traveling!!

Band-aids, band-aids and more band-aids

Seriously....I think we have been through about 10 boxes of band-aids this summer!!  I usually save them for when we have finished up everything else and Sweet Girl is bored.  She will peel open the band-aids for hours without looking up or making a peep!!  Yes, I usually have a ga-zillion wrappers to clean up once we stop, but it is totally worth it!!

And some of our other favorites are:

Books (I get mine from the dollar store)

Books on CD

Stickers and paper

Sing-a-long CDs

What about you???  How do you and your kiddos make it through those long car trips???

Fruit Counter Cards - Printable

I received several requests asking for copies of the fruit pattern cards we use for our tot trays.  (Can be found on our tot trays here and here).

These are just pattern strips that I created by photographing our fruit counters in different patterns.  I printed mine on 5x7 photo paper and then cut them into strips, but you could easily print on any type of paper.

We use these fruit counters from Lakeshore Learning, but you could easily print off two sets and cut up one set to use as your pattern pieces.

There are five different pattern strips.  I think they are all together on one file, but if not, please let me know.  I'll try to correct it if I can!!!  And as always, please use my printables for personal use only!  Thanks!

Pattern Cards Printable

Enjoy!!

Tot Activities

We were off visiting my family most of last week so I'm keeping the same tot trays from last week out for Sweet Girl to play with.  In addition to those, I decided to add some more "fun stuff" too!!

Tracing lines

I made up this simple little sheet connecting the princess to their "pal".  I laminated them and have included a dry erase marker and little eraser with the sheet. 

(And if anyone wants a copy of this sheet, just leave me a comment with your email address or send me an email and I will forward it to ya!)

Placing stickers on letter A/a

We typically use our Do-A-Dot markers with these sheets, but I thought it would be fun to mix it up a little.  The apple sheet is from 1+1+1=1 and the lowercase 'a' is from Making Learning Fun.

See & Spell puzzles

This is a new puzzle for us so I'm only presenting two words at a time.  It looks a little overwhelming if there are more than two words showing.

Drawing on the Buddha Board

This is just for fun!  I'm addicted to this thing!!

Hope everyone has a great week!!

Art Storage

I love keeping all of Sweet Girl's art and projects but they were starting to take over all the corners of our playroom.  And...I was becoming a hoarder...keeping everything she made and did.  Finally, one day I went through and sorted, purged and saved.  I only ended up keeping a few special pieces and took pictures of the rest of them.  I picked up a scrapbook paper box from the craft store, cut out some vinyl letters and voila....an art box. 

The size of the box is pretty large (12x12) so it accommodates most of her projects.  Some of the larger paper (like easel paper) I folded in half, but I'm sure there will be some that I don't want to fold and possibly mess up.  We'll cross that bridge when we get there.

I love how compact and neat it is!! 

Alphabet Learning Fun

This is a fun activity I have planned for this week.  It's another one of my fabulous finds on Pinterest (addicted!!).  Sweet Girl loves playing with these alphabet puzzles in our busy boxes so I know she will enjoy this too.

I mixed up all of the alphabet letters in the alphabet pasta from our sensory bins.

I added numbers 1-4 because....well...because I'm anal like that!!  I just couldn't leave it "unfinished" looking!!

Shapes Castle and Stickers

Sweet Girl dumped Dora and moved onto princesses.  We're not sure where she picked up her love for the princesses seeing that she's never really seen them other than in some of our books.  It must have been love at first sight because she hasn't stopped yet.

We picked up some princess stickers while we were out the other day and I wanted her to do something more creative than just stick them on a piece of paper.  So we made a shapes castle....similar to the one from NTFFC and the one we made in this post.  After we constructed the castle and talked about all the different shapes, Sweet Girl added all her stickers and played for quite a while.  She had a great time and I hope to incorporate more independent, imaginative play in the future!!

 

Tot Trays

Here are our trays for this week!  We've done lots of fine motor stuff recently so I tried to incorporate some different skills. 

Counting stars

For this task, I'll have Sweet Girl roll the dice, count the dots and then count out an equal number of stars.  My hope is to make this a turn-taking game, but we'll see how that goes!

Matching jobs with appropriate objects

I found this great little "busy people" flashcards from Target a month or so ago.  I've pulled out five cards and then found related objects for each job around the house.  I plan on laying out all the objects and then looking at the cards with Sweet Girl.  We'll talk about the job and then I'll have her try to decide which object fits with that job.  A great task for critical thinking.

Sticker matching

Scooping "ice cream"

Fruit patterning