Colored Sand. Letter H Activities for Toddlers.

Salt shaker for the colored sand

Here is our new favorite activity. It meant to be a craft for the Chinese New Year. We'll continue with our awesome colored sand for Valentine's crafts!
For the year of the horse, Camilla painted a horse (printed from ActivityVillage.co.uk). I cut out the horse, and she glued it onto the red construction paper.

We applied the glue onto the paper. Then I showed her how to use a salt shaker to sprinkle the yellow sand over the glue. Squeezing the glue from the bottle is great for her little hands. Working with the colored sand - she loved it so much!

We had to get all the different coloring pages for her gluing-shaking obsession. Who would imaging it can get to be that much fun?

The picture is held inside the box so that the loose sand is collected back into the shaker and reused.  I let Camilla get some sand back into the bottle by hand for the fine motor exercise.

Letter H activities

This page is a great free printable from 3Dinosaurs.com. Camilla colored it with crayons while we discussed the letter H.

Of course, she had to shake some sand over this page too. This time we used the glue stick which is easier to use. The sand is held by the glue stick just fine.

Vocabulary exercise: where do they live?

We discussed the different places to live for different animals, then tried to describe the pictures. Counted the bees and eggs. Letter H activity: H is for home, hive, hole, and house.
Finger play:
Here is a home for a robin (cup hands to make nest).
Here is a hive for a bee (clasp hands together).
Here is a hole for a bunny (make a hole with hands).
Here is a house for me (arms above head to make a triangle).

Matching game for CNY animals

I printed out 2 copies of a page from ActivityVillage.co.uk. One page is cut into separate cards to match the pictures on the main page. For Camilla's age (27 months), it's easy enough to increase her confidence in matching.

This post is a follow up on our CNY and year of the horse activities that can be found here:
Sensory Bin and Story Time
Green Horse 2014