Clothes Pin Cards for Busy Bags

Busy Bags are a great way to keep your kids busy for a few minutes with some quality quiet play time. However, MAKING those Busy Bags with your kids in the first place is another great activity for them to do! I feel weird having all the fun creating these Busy Bags for my kids, so I wanted to make one that they could get involved in too.

When I first came across these different clothes pin cards, I thought they were a great idea! This blog has two different ones: Second Story Window. The ones we made are basically the same, except we used one of my favorite craft supplies: paper plates! When making these Busy Bags, you'll also need plenty of clothes pins.  I found mine at the Dollar Tree: a pack of 36 for a dollar!

Now, start by dividing your plates into "pie slices".  I chose nine colors for the first one, so I used a straight edge to create nine sections, just by eye-balling it. Draw a blob of color in each section, to look like a paint palette. Now color the tip of nine clothes pins in those same colors.

Ben (2) will use the colored side to make his matches. Molly (5), will match hers using the other side, where I wrote the words out for each color. For now I wrote them in their corresponding color, but down the road you can write them all in black so your child truly has to read the word.

The second plate needed 10 slices, for the numbers 1 through 10. I also wrote the numbers 1 through 10 on the tip of clothes pins, and added that amount of dots on the other side of each clothes pin. To fill in the sections of our plate, I had Molly count out stickers to place in each one. After she got tired of that tedious task, I took over and had fun building shapes with them. :O)

Finally we made a plate with 26 slices for the alphabet. If you're using a ribbed paper plate like I did, each slice should be allotted about 2.5 ribs each. You can still use a straight edge, though. All along the edge, I wrote capital letters of the alphabet. I also rewrote them closer to the middle so they would still show up with a clothes pin hooked on. The clothes pins, on the other hand, had a lower case letter on each one. The object is to match the big letter with it's small one!

To store all these pieces in a Busy Bag, I kept each set of clothes pins separate in their own sandwich size bag. Now let's hope my kids stick to the Busy Bag rule: only one bag open at a time, and everything goes back in before you open the next one!