Lacing Cards for Toddlers

Lacing for Toddlers

This was a great idea for us! Lacing helps to develop fine motor skills, color recognition, attention and following simple directions, new vocabulary, creativity, sense of accomplishment because the final result is nice; and Camilla was engaged in meaningful activities for a long time (short periods over several days). I love it!

Painting and making a card, 22 months old

I printed out coloring pages for painting. First we used finger paints for a couple of them. I put a little of each color, one color at a time, onto the different areas of the picture, and she had to spread it out. This experience changed for her: she doesn't like that her fingers are "dirty" and that destructs her from the painting.

She looked so cute when she rubbed her little fingers with some paint on them - her way of telling me, "Mom, come on, I am ready for the painting tools. And that's when we started having real fun with painting. We tried out brushes of different sizes, sponges, cotton balls, and Q-tips. Well, it wasn't as much for painting as just for introducing to different painting technics. I love having new experiences with her. It feels refreshing and exciting. Thank you, Camilla.

I guess, she likes the sponges so far. They are also the fastest to cover large areas of paper with color. For the dolphin, we tried to dab the sponge to make spots, waited for a minute for the paint to dry, and then painted over with the next color. That made an interesting effect that is easily accomplished by the little hands.

Laminating at home

was awesome! I used my brand new, beloved laminator for the first time.

Yes, I've just splurged to buy a laminator. I thought it can be used in so many ways with our activities and crafts: preserving the crafts, making easy props for the learning activities (we are into learning to match and 2-piece puzzles now), DIY dry-erase boards, and who know what else :)

Yes, I fell in love with it. It was very affordable. It is very easy to use. The cards looked great. Just in time for a grandparents' day.

Of course, Camilla painted all over the paper. The paint was everywhere over the edges of the picture. After the paint dried, I cut out the actual picture and laminated it. Then I cut out the picture again leaving the margins of clear plastic.

Making lacing cards

The only thing left to do is to cut wholes with the puncher. I bought 1/8 in ribbon (depending on the size of the wholes, the ribbon can be wider). The "needle" is made from the short piece of chenille stem.  I rapped the ribbon around the end of the stem, and bend the stem to hold my ribbon in place. Then I tied the other side of the ribbon to the whole in the card. Ready for fun!

I liked our awesome new lacing cards so much that I made a party for our toddler friends out of this idea. It was a huge success, yay! I might write about it next time.

I am posting the links for the laminator and laminating pouches I bought just in case somebody would be interested. If you'd decide to buy them, I would greatly appreciate you using my links to buy them. This way I'd actually receive a little chunk of money from Amazon (which we'd love to use to organize our next play date, He-he!)