Dinosaur Swap Sensory Play for a Bit of Summer Fun

Kids universally seem to love to play in water, and a water table or tub of water can be a great alternative to having a pool or sprinkler or larger area of water that kids can play in.

Having themes in the water table is a lot of fun and can draw kids to it. I love this idea of making the water table into a dinosaur swamp, from the Imagination Tree. (Because most kids love dinosaurs, too, right?)

This is actually pretty easy to set up and includes a lot of natural materials in addition to the toy dinosaurs (you could also use other kinds of animals if you prefer). Include some buckets, nets or scoops for collecting and observing.

Throw in a dino-themed story book, and check out some more fun dinosaur activities for kids from Brain Power Boy.

How do your kids play with and learn about dinosaurs?

[Photo: the Imagination Tree.]

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Easy Sensory Activities for Valentine's Day

The other day I shared some crafts involving fall leaves, but there are a lot of fun leaf-related activities that don’t use real leaves, so I wanted to share some of those, too.

Like these watercolor leaves from The Artful Parent. These are so pretty and would be great to make a garland or decorate the table for Thanksgiving. You could experiment with different kinds of paper, combine watercolors and crayons, use an eyedropper to apply liquid watercolors — there are lots of different ways to play with this one!

Because I’m a knitter of course I love any project that involves yarn, so this fall leaf lacing craft from Our Kid Things is right up my alley. The multicolored yarn they used is a lot of fun, or stick with fall colors. Either way it’s a great fine motor skill activity!

Using leaf shapes to make other crafts is a great way to incorporate leaves into the classroom without having to use actual leaves. For little kids this sensory painting activity from Kids Craft Room would be a lot of fun (I think this would be fun for some older kids and adults, too, to be honest) and makes a fun and easy decoration.

Of course leaf activities don’t just have to be crafts. Check out this great leaf matching game from Made to be a Momma. These leaves are so cute and after you’ve prepped the game you can play it over and over with no prep. Use fewer sets for younger kids and the full set for older ones.

You can also use leaf shapes in all sorts of learning activities, like in this fall leaf number tower activity from Fun Learning for Kids. There are leaves with single numbers on them that kids can use to stack cubes on in one-to-one correspondence, as well as ones that show dots like dice so kids can add up the numbers to build their stacks.

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