The leprechauns and bunnies have being coexisting pretty peacefully in our house, but it’s time to switch into the full Easter swing of things.
I did a little refresh on our play kitchen with some Easter goodies. The kids love to play in their kitchen and having holiday themed food seems to enrich their play. They have been making Easter smoothies, delivering yummy Easter treats to their dad and I and baking bunny cinnamon roles in the oven. There is no lack of treats for them to enjoy this year.
Easter themed food
Large carrots (AliExpress)
Felt small carrots, pastel balls, bunny feet, fruit slices, boho Easter characters (Sewing Seeds Play – save with code: HOUSEOFPLAY10)
Ok, I half did this because I thought my kids would enjoy this little surprise scene when they got home and the other half was because sometimes I like to play with the toys too. lol
I had a lot of fun putting this together with toys we already had. Only the little Ambrosius felt clover doll is new.
It’s the week before St. Patrick’s Day, and we’re getting into the lucky spirit with a few themed activities. My kids love celebrating holidays and special activities add to the fun. Here are a few we tried that were hits with my 3 and 5 year old.
Magnetic Sensory Treasure Hunt
For this activity, I included some magnetic items (magnetic bingo chips, pipe cleaner shamrocks) and non-magnetic items (felt balls, tube ribbon pieces, acrylic gems) in a bin filled with shredded accordion paper. The kids used the magnetic wands to hunt around in the bin and find treasures. My 5 year old loved experimenting with magnetism and was very focused on what items were attracted to the magnetic wands.
This was our first time trying chick pea foam (Aquafaba) so it was new, exciting and tons of fun for the kids. I hid the gold coins and gems in the foam so the kids could hunt around for them with tweezers and fill their cauldrons.
Aquafaba is a fantastic sensory base. I was inspired by @lifewith3men on Instagram to try this and followed her instructions (whip together juice from 2 cans of chick peas + 1/4tsp cream of tartar). It was so easy and the kids loved it. I was also super surprised that it didn’t end up being messy at all.
The tweezers were great for their hand muscles and fine motor skills.
Another thing I loved about this activity is that it is very inexpensive. If you’re having chick peas in your dinner and save the juice, it’s practically free. All the other materials, including the trays, are from the dollar store (Dollarama), except the gems (AliExpress).
3. St. Patrick’s Day Rainbows & Rice Sensory Bin
The third activity was a sensory rice bin. I love a bin like this with lots of different things to discover because I will leave it out for at least a few days. That way, the kids can explore at their own pace. Over the past few days, they have been enjoying scooping rice and filling up little cauldrons with all kinds of treasures.
Materials
Rice with sequins
Rainbow wood insert & rainbow tray – Eye Spy Club
St. Paddy’s trinkets and loose parts – Eye Spy Club and Highway to Railway (Instagram)
Wood cauldron tray – AW and Collective
Felt balls – Sewing Seeds Play (save with code: HOUSEOFPLAY10)
Bauspiel lucent cubes – Scholars Choice
Resin containers – Playspiration (Instagram)
Wood rainbow – Tiny Fox Hole
Grimm’s Giant Gems – Sewing Seeds Play
Acrylic small gems – AliExpress
So there are 3 ideas for St. Patrick’s Day sensory and messy play. Would you try any of these activities? Let me know in the comments.
My daughter wanted to make an Easter craft, so we came up with these very cute Bunny Wands. This craft required my assistance, especially for the hot glue steps, but my 5.5 year old daughter was able to manage the rest. She especially loved choosing ribbons, bells and gems to personalize her bunny.
Materials
cardboard
egg carton
yarn (i used furry yarn and thick white yarn)
dowel
beads (1 pink for nose, 2 black for eyes)
tulle ribbon
ribbons
bells
optional: flower or gems for decoration
Steps
Cut out 2 bunny heads from cardboard. Hot glue a wood dowel to 1 bunny head. Scrunch and glue the tulle ribbon to the dowel at the bottom of the bunny’s head. Glue the other cardboard bunny head on top of the dowel, so the tulle is sandwiched in between.
Cut 2 pieces of yarn. Glue an end of each piece at the tip of each bunny ear, in between the pieces of cardboard. Wrap the yarn around the bunny head until the cardboard is covered.
Cut one egg compartment from the egg carton and trim until it is approx. 1.5″ tall. Make a hole through the end of the egg carton piece. Cut another piece of yarn and thread through a large needle. Make a knot at one end or glue the yarn to the inside of the egg carton piece. Sew through the hold and around the egg carton until the carton is covered with yarn. Thread a pink bead and pull until it rests over the egg carton hole. Sew around the carton 1 or 2 more times and tie off.
Hot glue the ‘nose’ (egg carton covered in yarn) onto the bunny face. Hot glue 2 black beads above the nose for eyes.
Tie 3-4 pieces of ribbon around the base of the bunny’s face. Thread bells onto one of the ribbons.
I like to save up small gifts for our egg hunt. My kids LOVE the egg hunt. It’s their favourite Easter tradition. I will hide a few chocolate eggs, but my kids go pretty wild after eating chocolate so I try to limit the amount.
Here are some non-chocolate items I put in the small and medium size eggs.
A note on buying these items – I tend to shop all year round for holidays. It helps me spread out spending, take advantage of sales and combine purchases at small shops to save on shipping. So, some of these items I bought months or even years ago. And some are small pieces that came with sets I’ve given to my kids in the past. I kept the small pieces out because I was worried they would put them in their mouth or lose them. Now, I think they’re ready to play with them. 2 gifts in 1.
I also save and reuse our plastic eggs every year. Every little bit helps.
I love hearing about other families’ traditions. Do you do an egg hunt? What do you put in the eggs?
Want to see what’s in my kids’ Easter baskets this year? My kids are 3 and 5 and this year I put things in their baskets that will compliment our spring play.
I love making holiday baskets. I like to shop small when possible, so I tend to shop very early – some of these items I bought last year (lol). I find that if I shop early and shop for future holidays, I’m able to combine orders and save on shipping. It also spreads out the spending and makes things a little more budget-friendly for me.
Both my kids LOVE the egg hunt, so I save most small-ish items to put in the eggs. I found that the smaller items got lost in the basket and my kids found them more exciting when they discovered the little gifts in eggs.
I love Peter Rabbit and Beatrix Potter’s world of adorable critters. I used to read the stories over and over again when I was a child. So, when I saw Tiny Fox Hole’s set of Peter Rabbit characters I had to get them. I wanted to give them a a world to live in where my kids could recreate parts of the books and their own imaginative stories. This play tray is what I came up with.
Supplies I used
Tuff Tray (mine is from Scholar’s Choice)
Cardboard tray insert (I made this using the box the tray came in)
Wooden characters (Tiny Fox Hole)
Grass Section
Artificial grass squares (Dollarama)
DIY Tree Burrow (see here for more info on how I made it)
Wood furniture – The Friendly Woodworker from Wonder + Kind
Miniature vegetables (Maileg)
Felt pond (Sewing Seeds Play*)
Glass beads
Grapat Mandala Coins
River rocks and artificial greenery
Grimm’s wood stacking bowls
Grapat Mandala Eggs
Resin eggs (The Creative Mix Shop)
Grapat Mandala Flowers
Woods Section
Sensory Mix (homemade)
Raduga Grez and Ostheimer wood trees
Wood mushrooms (Dollarama)
Stone and gem mushrooms (AliExpress)
Grapat Mandala Beehives
Grapat Mandala Mushrooms
Grapat Mandala Trees
Felt bee (Sewing Seeds Play*)
Mr. McGregor’s Garden
Dry black beans (Bulk Barn)
Goki My Little Garden Doll Accessories (Sewing Seeds Play*)
Felt worms, ladybug, bees, butterfly and dragonfly (Sewing Seeds Play*)
Finally, I set up our Yoto Mini with the Peter Rabbit card so the kids and I could listen to the stories we played. This tray is one of our favourites. What do you think?
Last year, I found a large cardboard tube in our recycling materials that I thought would make a great treehouse for the kids to play with. I cut a door in it and placed it in a small world scene. My daughter became so enamoured with the idea of it that she and my husband built some cardboard stairs inside leading to an upstairs bedroom with a shelf. I saved the cardboard tube and this year I wanted to give it some extra love to make it look more like a treehouse.
I hot glued two toilet paper rolls onto the sides of the tube for “branches” and then paper mâchéd the tree with scrap paper packaging. I used a 2:1 water and Elmer’s glue mixture to adhere the paper strips around the tube. I left lots of bunches in the paper mâché to give the effect of tree bark.
Then I painted the tree – starting with black in the crevices and working to a lighter colour brown on the tops of the ridges. A little green sponge painting around the base and where the branches meet the tree trunk gave the feel of some moss. Next year I may put a little actual moss on it. I am no artist, but it looked enough like a tree for my kids.
Once the tree was dry, we put it into our Peter Rabbit Sensory Play Tray. My daughter wanted to move some furniture in, so we put a lamp, small fireplace and couch downstairs and added a tv, pillow and blanket upstairs. Now it’s all ready for our wooden bunny friends.
My daughter and I thought our dollhouse walls were looking a little bare, so we decided to create some art and flower arrangements to freshen them up for spring.
Here’s how we made them.
Paintings
Materials
Mini Canvases (Walmart)
Washable acrylic paint
Maileg cardboard cutout and tag pictures
Fairy picture canvas (Dollarama)
Command Picture Hanging Strips
We tried a few different methods to make the paintings.
I sketched a few bunny portraits using a Maileg bunny tag for guidance and we free-hand painted a few of the canvases.
I am not much of an artist, unlike my daughter, so I cut out a small image from a leftover Maileg sticker. I taped the sticker to a canvas and dabbed a sponge brush around it to create a mouse silhouette and then repeated 2 more times. The sticker was too small for my daughter to manage this technique, so I went hunting for a larger image to use.
When I saw the cardboard mouse figure in my box of Maileg things, I thought it would be perfect for this project. I traced the cardboard mouse figure (it was packaging that came with a mouse outfit) onto some cardstock, taped the cardstock on the canvas and then my daughter painted around it. Once the background was finished, she removed the cardstock stencil and painted the mouse. This was the most successful and least frustrating method, for both myself and my daughter.
We also had a canvas (from Dollarama) with a fairy scene pre-drawn on it that we decided to add to the collection
Once the paintings were all finished and dry, we put Command Picture Hanging Strips on the back and adhered them to the dollhouse walls.
Picture Hanging Strips work like velcro – one side sticks to the canvas and the other side sticks to the wall. This way the picture can be moved around easily. I thought that it would be a fun feature for my daughter if she could rearrange the paintings. It also means we can easily create new paintings and switch them out in the future.
When I saw the little wood flower pots, I immediately thought of our dollhouse. They were very simple to decorate and put together. My daughter painted the pots with acrylic paint. Once dry, she put a little brown air dry clay in each pot and then stuck the mini flowers in each pot. We left the pots overnight to cure before putting them in the dollhouse the next morning.
My daughter and I had a lot of fun doing this project together. I think it’s very likely we will do it again.
If you saw my last post, then you know my 3 year old son loves his farm toys. He begged me to set up a farm activity for him. So, I used some sensory materials from my cupboard and from previous activities to make him a tray.
I used dry popcorn, green split peas for grass, and chocolate cereal for mud. I had a leftover mix from a previous activity of dry spaghetti, lentils and ground up cereal that covered the horse paddock.
Other materials
Felt pond (Sewing Seeds Play)
Wood fences (Ostheimer)
Animals (Schleich)
Chicken coop (Schleich)
Barn (Fisher-price)
My son was thrilled. I love a tray like this with dry goods because I will leave them out for a few days. Although the odd stray piece will make it out of the tray, it’s fairly easy to pick up. It’s an easy way to add a little special magic to his farm play.
