Easy Ideas for Water Play with Kids

June 6, 2023 by Sarah White Leave a Comment

I never thought I would say this, but I kind of miss the days when my daughter was younger. Yes, it was a lot to keep her entertained through all those long summer days, but it was also fun coming up with things to do. (She’s 13 now and definitely does not want my help in deciding what to do with her time.)

One of my favorite challenges was coming up with activities we could do outside when it was hot. There was a lot of water play (and ice play!) happening, which is great because it’s easy, fun, not all that messy, and you can do it with things you already have in the house.

Sure you can build or buy a water table if you want — Blitzy has collected a bunch of DIY water tables if you want to build your own — but I always just used a plastic storage bin on the ground or on a low wall outside.

What different kinds of water play can you do? There are all sorts of easy water play activities to choose from!

You can paint with water, like in this tip from Teaching Littles. You can do this on paper as shown or you can “paint” with water outdoors on the sidewalk, on a chalkboard, or experiment with other surfaces. Or try freezing liquid watercolors and painting with the ice cubes.

One easy water play activity my daughter really liked was washing doll clothes. This requires two tubs, one for soapy water and one for clear, and ideally some clothesline and a place to set it up outdoors for clothes to dry, but it’s so easy and actually useful (because how often do you think to wash doll clothes anyway?).

Of course turning your water table/tub into a sensory bin is an easy upgrade, which can be as simple as grabbing some bath toys to the water. If you want to try something a little fancier, check out this list of more than 45 easy water sensory bin ideas collected by Happy Toddler Playtime. The car wash bin is another classic that might appeal to boys more than washing doll clothes.

Another fun and super simple addition to your water play is these sponge balls, which we made years ago from this idea at Natural Beach Living. You can buy sponges at the dollar store and have lots of fun for your water play without spending a lot of money. We used these in sensory bins and in the kiddie pool when we had one. And of course they’re great for water fights, too!

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Resources for Learning about Squirrels

Did you know that October is Squirrel Awareness Month? I didn’t know we needed more awareness of these little creatures, but let’s take it as a sign to learn more about squirrels!

Let’s start with some fun facts via Kids Konnect: did you know there are five subfamilies and more that 280 species of squirrels? The smallest are pygmy squirrels and the largest, the Bhutan giant flying squirrel, can be longer that 4 feet (1.2 meters).

Tree squirrels can climb down trees so fast because their ankles can rotate 180 degrees, allowing them to grab the tree bark as they go down. While most squirrels don’t survive their first year of life, they can live five to 10 years in the wild and squirrels have been known to live up to 20 years in captivity!

Rhythms of Play has more fun facts and tips for observing squirrels if you want to add some real life nature to your nature study.

We always like to start these collections with life cycle and parts of the animal printables, so let’s grab the squirrel life cycle an parts of a squirrel worksheets from Montessori Nature. (It doesn’t look like these are free any more but they have a whole unit study on squirrels you can buy that includes life cycle and parts activities, characteristics of different kinds of squirrels, a printable poster, information about predators and more.)

Grab the squirrel lapbook printable (free with email address) from Homeschool Share to learn the parts of a squirrel, where they live, what they eat, whether they hibernate and more. There’s also a nut taste test printable, a place for making observations about squirrels, life cycle of an oak tree, games and more.

Simple Everyday Mom has some cute squirrel themed worksheets including tracing the letter s, labeling the parts of a squirrel and a letter s maze. She also has more activity pages with a squirrel theme, including matching, a more traditional maze and a counting and graphing activity.

Work on letter recognition with this squirrel and acorn game printable from Teaching Mama. I love the idea of hiding the letters in a fall themed sensory bin for kids to find, identify and match to the letter on the worksheet.

For older kids you can do this “if I were a squirrel” writing prompt from Lesson Planet.

And throw in a little counting with these squirrel and acorn tens frame printables from JDaniel4’s Mom, which you can use to count real acorns or any other little fall themed thing you have handy.

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