Shoe box Marble Run

Up next in my Fun Time for Baby and Me series is a simple marble run with a shoebox. Good thing shoes come in sturdy boxes that can be put to other uses!

A marble run is where you provide a path for marbles to roll from a starting point where you drop the marble and then let gravity do it's work. How fun you build a path is all up to you. The beauty of it is watching the marbles roll and along the way make those little jumps over gaps or mini-obstacles that you create.

It took me 20 minutes overall to make it and my little played with it. Lots of fun and peals of laughter for every run !  The game she made of it was to see how many times it didn't follow the expected path :)) Go figure!

Stuff you need :
Shoe box
Scissors
Knife
Glue
Marbles/Chinese Checker Balls

The shoe box will hold the structure of the "rails"/"path" for the marble run. I made the rails from the shoe box lid. Each piece of rail has 3 sides to it - the rail path and the 2 sides flanking left and right to keep the marble from flying off and of course to help glue it to the box.

I made 4 pieces of rail and arranged them alternately from right up - left down and then left up - right down.

Use a knife(or if you wish, the scissor) to make a hole at the right corner top from where you drop the marble.

Check the marble run and see if the angles need to be adjusted before the glue completely dries.

And voila, its marbles away !

Things to do for kids with stuff you can find at home

I think there's a basic need for novelty that we all have and more so with kids I feel! As wonderful as it would be to buy something new everyday, Yes yes, I know, that's as practical as it sounds ;-P !
But what about using something to help us see it in a new light.

So, here I have a few things that we've done at home(at least the few with photographs)

CLOTHESPINS/CLIPS

Buying new clothespins / clips turned into half an hour of fun play time for the little one! It really is true, we actually don't need to spend money on toys, when everything can be a plaything! It started with little one asking, what do we do with this? And I said we use it to pin the clothes to the wire so the clothes won't fly away if the wind is too strong. And she says how?
So, I put one on her shirt to give a practical explanation. And voila the Clips Game was born !!
I turned around to put away the other grocery items and I was back to see lines and lines of clips arranged on her shirt!

She used it to learn organisation, it was a repeat building block for learning basic color names and of course the dexterity required !

SKETCH PENS

Use Sketch Pens/Pens/Pencils to make car race tracks. The little one was fascinated that we could make the cars race inside tracks :)) After the newness wore off, she didn't want to be restricted by such small space, but hey, it was 40 mins of something new!

WRAPPING PAPER

Another fun find for me was a Gift Wrapping Paper with Alphabets on it. Got it for 10 or 20 Rs, put it up on the wall and voila!, the little one was figuring out what item was on each alphabet. It wasn't intended that she learn the alphabet through it, but I guess some stuff did trickle through. The vibrant colors and cartoon style images made a difference.

My next picture shows 2 activities combined together -
BALLOONS 
1) Balloons, some string(I used satin ribbon as that was closer by to me if I remember right :)) ) and a doorway ! I tied up the balloons with the ribbon and cello-taped it to the door frame. I told her to tap them and see how the bounce back and she came up with her own spin on it . She would come through the door moving the balloons as if it were a curtain, it was a brilliant idea ! And also, she had a ball trying to catch them every time they moved as the wind blew - that was a benefit of being the doorway.

STACKING RINGS
2) I had a set of Chennapatna stacking rings with me that she would use for well stacking up. But with a shoelace in hand with knots and twists and turns through the iron grill on our balcony, the little one learnt to move the loops along the wire, through the grill - following the path, over coming any obstacles in the way. I thought she would learn a little bit of problem solving this way, but we ended up with a mini-lesson on Gravity ! She would let a ring fall from the highest point and it would settle down in the middle of the "rope" instead of climbing back up to the next loop around the grill and she would wonder why? And I was actually not expecting the question. So, comical expression on my face followed by Ah! its time for Newton and the Apple story!

P.S. As you can see the picture captures her focused on a piece of paper at her feet ! So, do take heart in knowing that as fantastic as some things we do for kids may seem to us, they will have their attention on something new as soon as they find it!

BALLS

We have bunch of balloons and balls lying around home at any given point. And they make for endless number of games, here, me and the little one were working on the concept of sizes. Organising all the balls in ascending order and descending order. It was fun to explain to her logically how to arrange things that are the same size. She quite like the idea of "Put all the ones of same size in any order" :)) She wanted there to be a system to organise the same sized ones too !

NETTED FRUIT CONTAINERS

Have you bought Groundnuts or Regikayalu in those orange bags that look like nets? They are a fantastic compact way for the vendors to stock items - fixed weight and fixed price for us! Turns out they are amazing at helping the little ones build dexterity ! Not to mention, patience building.
And it is true, once you take it out, it seems wondrous how much fit into the bag and it is a tough ask to put everything back in. Here, the little one was picking up groundnuts one at a time and packing it back in ! She like doing it for a while, then she started scooping stuff in with a spoon at first and then with her hands.

Well, that's all for today folks ! See you next time with more of these! 

Fun Time for Baby and Me

Being a stay at home mom really motivates one to come up with fun ways to interact with the baby.
What better way to keep a baby engaged than showing them new things and playing new games that are fun for them and occasionally we can sneak in some learning too!

I've spent endless time on the net (Pinterest mostly, those guys absolutely rock!) finding things to do and then many a time trying to find alternatives to items mentioned, so I can source the activity materials locally. All the times I've not done things because I didn't have some basic building block. Sigh. Times have changed now, and its so easy to find things even at the corner kirana wallah. So yayy!

With every activity we do, other than getting brownie points from my little one for being so full of fun activities(shhh let me enjoy that before she truly understands the power of Pinterest :D) , I realise we more or less end up turning the wheel again. Many a thing were what my mom and grandma played with me when I was young. And so, the joy is two-fold - there's a sense of nostalgia and there's a feeling of doing something extremely this generation based.

So, here's kickstarting my Fun Time for Baby and Me Series with something from the past. My grandparents stayed in a small town by the Godavari and summer holidays meant frolicking in the waters, building smooth stone collections and using the riverside clay for building matchbox lorries! The wheels used to turn too!

What we used:
Soap Boxes
Play Doh / (alternate)Bubble Blower Lids
Sticks from Paraka / (alternate)mini barbeque sticks / (alternate) toothpicks
(Make sure you break off the pointy edges)
Glue

Here you can see my little one use it to transport vehicles. She turned it into pretend play beyond my limited "Lets make a lorry".
So, no real clay no worries, use play doh clay. Have only 3 boxes, its alright to have a futuristic car and no place for the driver's box :))
And once you are done, let your child's imagination take over - what can we move from one forest to another, how can an elephant outrun a tiger and a cheetah without getting tired and what not!