Friday, June 14, 2013

It's Time To Get Busy

I'm happy to say that my kids do a darn good job of entertaining themselves. With that said, I definitely need to help feed their creativity some times. I broke down and finally got my act together and made some Busy Bags. The main reason I thought to make them now was because we recently purchased an RV (more on that later) and I wanted to have some things for the kids to do while we are traveling instead of just wanting to watch DVD's.
So I took some inspritation from Pinterest and made some Busy Bags and put together a few other activities. All of these ideas can be found on my Pinterest board "Activities With The Kids" so you can hop over there if you want to learn more, or to find some other ideas of your own.

First off, I found a plastic storage bin that most of these bags will fit in so it should be great for traveling. Just grab the box and go!


The first bad is really simple. Large colored paperclips. Threading them together helps with motor skills and you can do activities like matching colors, putting together patterns, etc. I found a box of 80 at the Dollar Tree and there are probably 25 in the bag (5 of each color).


The next set were actually a gift Nora received a couple years ago. She didn't play with them very well then so they ended up stashed away. I was happy to find them and I think they are perfect for her now. "Carrie" is one of 3 little magnetic dress up dolls and the kids should have fun playing with those.


I received the clothespin letters as a part of an activity exchange I did with a couple other gals last year. The strips of paper are lamenated so, with dry erase markers, the kids can practice their writing and they can also use the clothespins to match the letters and spell out the words.


Bead stringing is just basic motor skills. I had some pony beads with my craft stuff so I grabbed a couple handfuls along with some different colored pipe cleaners and they can have fun mixing and matching those together.

 
 
The animal stringing came about when I found these plastic animal beads stashed away. I put them away so I wouldn't have to worry about my (now) 10 month old getting a hold of them. But I went ahead and grabbed them back out and the kids can just play with the animals or string them onto some embrodery floss I found.


My oldest daughter has been asking if she could make some bracelets with beads so I grabbed the rest of my pony beads and some odd embrodery floss I had stuffed away and she can have at it.

 
I found these two card sets at the Dollar Tree so I stuck them in the box.

 
The next playset was from Pinterest...using toy cars and a print out of a city picture so the child can just drive the car around. Cars were, again, from Dollar Tree (the set of 3) and I just did a Google image search, found a picture I liked, lamenated it and voila!
 
 
These next 3 sets came from that same inspiration. I found these little plastic animals stashed away (are you noticing a theme...I have a lot of stashes thanks to hand me downs, thrift stores and garage sales), I seperated them by type of animal, did the Google image search, lamenated and fun was made! My kids found these 3 sets before I could get them put away and they have played with them multiple times over the last couple days.
 



This last one I just made yesterday. It was my most time consuming but worth it. The kids saw it while I was cutting out the pieces and they loved it! I mean, seriously, who doesn't love to build your own cupcake?? The website I found had all the templates you need and I had different colors of felt in my craft room so I used what I had and Build a Cupcake was born!
 
 
I mean, really? Look at those smiling faces!


 
 
I had one more thing I made up for the kids for our trip(s) and I show you that in another post. :)
 
I have had a lot of fun putting these together and I already have plans for more, when I have a little more time. I'm not in a rush though. I think it would be better to introduce some of these gradually instead of all at once. 
 
I hope you have been inspired to put together some activity bags for your kids. As you can see, some of mine were SUPER simple to throw together. So get your brain a working and see what you can have fun with!
 
Love and busy bodies,
 
Stephanie
 

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