Month: April 2011

Fractiles Magnetic Tiles

Two posts about magnets in one week! Clearly this is one of our toddler’s current obsessions! (If you missed our post earlier in the week about making your own literary magnets, including the Kevin Henkes Lily magnet shown above, here’s the link.)

We bought these Fractiles for a trip back East earlier this year.

Not only were they fun on the plane and


enjoyed during our trip,

but they have continued to be played with regularly here at home.

She loves matching the pictures from the package (featuring dozens of designs) and making up her own designs.

The possibilities are endless!

The manufacturer packages several different sets of Fractiles magnets: the plain Fractiles Fridge Fractiles and the one that we have, Fractiles: Travel Version, which contains a steel board on which to place the magnets.

We highly recommend Factiles for hours of educational fun!

Morning Drawing Time

Inspired by early morning birding activities (there’s a bird that keeps trying to build a nest on the wind-chime on our porch!), we decided to do some bird drawings of our own.

We drew Sandhill Cranes,

Belted Kingfishers and

Great Horned Owls (clearly a joint effort).

An educational, fun, and creative Mama-Daughter activity.

OUR FAVORITE BIRDING RESOURCES:
– The book pictured above is The Backyard Birdsong Guide: Western North America, a fantastic resource for birders of all ages.
– For a similar online resource, visit The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s All About Birds website.
– For more of our favorite birding resources, including some great birding books, read our Early Morning Birding post.

Make Your Own Literary Magnets

Our three year old loves her Very Hungry Caterpillar magnets, a wonderful hand-me-down from friends. Unfortunately, these Eric Carle magnets appear to no longer be available for sale.

This got us searching for other magnets featuring beloved storybook characters. You know what we found? Nothing! There were plenty of magnets featuring television or movie characters, but none featuring our favorite storybook characters.

So, in true Spritzer Leyba fashion, we quickly set out to make our own.

We printed pictures from our favorite Kevin Henkes picture books onto plain white paper. Next time we may print the characters directly on magnetic photo paper (who knew such a thing existed?! Brilliant!).

We then laminated the paper (alternatively, instead of laminating sheets you could use packing tape).

After adhering the paper to magnetic sheets, we then cut out the characters.

A simple and quick project! Now we can use and love these literary magnets on our fridge or on the magnetic board that’s waiting to be hung in our daughter’s new room.



Curious about the characters?

From left to right: Jessica (from Jessica), Lilly (from Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse), and Chester, Victor, Wilson, and Lilly (from Chester’s Way). All family favorites! We almost always read each and every one of these books before bed each night. Check them out!

Craft Drawers

We’ve finally been making headway on our arts and craft supplies organization project.

This week we focused on decluttering and reorganizing these plastic drawers. To refresh your memory, here is what the drawers looked like before:

They were (inadvertently) fully accessible to our daughter (who discovered that she could reach the drawers by standing on a chair), yet full of all sorts of messy supplies that we didn’t particularly want her to use entirely by herself like finger-paints and mama’s hot glue gun:

Luckily she always asked before she delved in those drawers, so I don’t have any horror stories to share. Nevertheless I knew the day would come when she explored them entirely on her own, so we had to move the supplies around to get them out of her reach.

We essentially emptied these drawers, placing those supplies elsewhere (more on that soon!), and filled the drawers up with more age-appropriate supplies.

We also moved the drawers to a more easily accessible location so she can help herself to…


stickers,


activity books,


pads and pens (pencils are always accessible, placed out on the table),


crayons,


and miscellaneous supplies.

We’re very pleased with the results. We have one more drawer to fill and I have yet to tackle the clutter on top of the shelves, but it’s better and supplies that had been forgotten are being used. Success!

Stencil Exercises

In the past I’ve written about activities such as using scissors and winding bobbins that help build hand strength and dexterity in young children, an essential first step towards learning to write. Playing with stencils is another such activity, one that our three year old adores.

We picked this set of kid stencils up from our local resale shop — thrift store score!

Simple good fun with an educational purpose, an everyday learning activity!