Skip to main content

Bean Bags


After seeing a few bean-bag activity ideas on various blogs, I decided we needed some.  Have you looked into buying bean bags?  They seemed awfully expensive to me, even on Amazon, given the simplicity of the object.  So, I called my local sew-er (that is, my mother-in-law) and respectfully made my request.  A week later, she stopped by with six denim bean bags, complete with personalized stitching thanks to her fancy machine!  (Don't tell her she left "t" out of the alphabet on two of them.)

Levi and I have used them for two activities so far.  The first is the one that got me wanting bean bags in the first place, but I've looked everywhere and can't find the original blog post.  (If this activity was your idea, please let me know!)  I simply used masking tape to outline some shapes on the floor and had him throw the bag to the shape I called.  He knows his shapes just fine; I was hoping for a gross motor activity, but he'd just walk up to the shape and drop the bean bag.  Oh well.

(Don't mind the mess behind him. Owen is REALLY into dumping puzzles right now.)

We've also thrown the bean bags to various letters on our letter rug, specifically working on identifying vowels.  (Yes, I realize that Levi doesn't need to know about vowels yet.  But at the time, one of the bean bags was missing, and I thought, "5 bean bags, 5 vowels . . . why not?")  He's a little more willing to throw from a distance when aiming for a letter or number.  Still, gross motor skills continue to be my "we need to do more of this" area!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Vanilla and Snowflakes

You may remember from my Goin' Crunchy 2011 post that I started a batch of homemade vanilla back in May. It's all ready for use now, just in time for Christmas gifts!  I bought these little bottles  and a pack of winter-themed address labels on clearance at Target, dug through my craft boxes to find some old ribbon, and ended up with this: (You can't see it, but there is coordinating ribbon around the sugar jar, too.) As you can see, after I was done using my vanilla beans for extract, I cut them up into 2-inch pieces and covered them with white sugar in baby food jars: after about a week, the sugar is delightfully vanilla-flavored!  I haven't used it yet, but hear it's great for sprinkling on baked goods or oatmeal, or stirring into coffee or tea.  Packaged together in a little gift bag, they're making a nice small (and frugal!) gift for . . . those people who need nice, small, frugal gifts.  :)   In other news, I picked up a $1 sheet of snowfla...

More Pom-pom activities

That dollar or so I spent on a bag of fuzzy pom-poms might have been the most useful dollar ever. Both boys continue to be entertained by pushing them through the lid of an old peanut container , an activity I pull out whenever there is an emotional crisis mounting. I've been collecting toilet paper rolls in hopes of doing this stick-counting activity , but I have yet to gather enough suitable twigs.  So I created my own conglomeration of several activities I've seen: Levi used small tongs to put the pom-poms in the tubes, counting to match the number on the tube.  He recognizes the number words one, two, three, and six, so I opted to leave the numbers off and let him figure out which tube "said" which number. Like my lazy masking-tape construction? :) I belatedly remembered that we've done a similar activity before to practice colors: I've got a set of toilet paper tubes with colored paper around them!  Not surprisingly -- that was six months ago -- ...

Bravery

If you've known me for any length of time, you've probably heard me (lovingly, semi-jokingly) refer to my children as "wimpy." If you picture my household of boys as the stereotypical group of climbing, rough-housing, dare-devil male monkeys, well . . . you're wrong. While Calvin is out to prove every word of this paragraph incorrect, my first four boys are, by and large, sitters: they love to draw, read, play board games and card games, build things out of LEGO and magnatiles, etc. With the exception of Levi's newfound interest in soccer last year, they are, for the most part, artists and intellectuals, and I've never felt the need to push them too hard in other areas. Until this summer, that is. We simply couldn't ignore their need to know how to swim any longer. (Actually, I personally don't care much, as I don't find swimming all that enjoyable. Give me a novel and a lounge chair in the shade, hands down, every time. But my husband and mo...