Busy Bag Idea: Felt Robots!

I haven't made a new busy bag for a long time, but Molly is always pulling them out to play with. Click HERE to read about busy bags and a few other ideas for them! I made a new one that was a big hit with both my kids, ages 3 and 6: Felt Robots!

Cut out several shapes from colored felt. You can buy single sheets of felt at Walmart for maybe $0.29 each so you can get a good variety of colors.  Make some normal shapes like rectangles, squares, circles, and triangles. Naming these shapes is great practice for my three year old.  Include plenty of smaller circles and squares to be the buttons! Also make some silly shapes like squiggly lines and crescents (for smiles) to complete your collection.  Molly (age 6) helped me cut some shapes this time and got very creative!

Have your child build a robot out of the felt shapes! This is a fun, quiet project your child can do with or without you. My favorite part was so unexpected - Molly and Ben focused on what each robot would be used for and named what each button would do! What wonderful imaginations!

Halloween and Fall Busy Bag Ideas

I decided to update a few items in my Busy Bag collection and wanted to add some seasonal activities for my kids! Now I have my bags separated in sets of five to be rotated out every couple weeks so there's always something new for them to play with. Here's what I've come up with so far for their Halloween and Fall Busy Bags!

Lately I've seen some really cute number games on Pinterest with a gingerbread man or a Santa theme. I decided to make a version for a Halloween/Fall Busy Bag! I used paper plates and drew a pumpkin on one and an apple on the other just to make it easy and sturdy. Then I filled the apple with smaller numbers, from 1 through 6: the numbers on one die. I filled the pumpkin with numbers you can get from rolling two dice: 2 through 12.

The object of the game is to cover all the numbers by rolling the dice and placing an object on the number as it is rolled. Use one die for the apple, and two for the pumpkin. You can cover the numbers with anything you want. I put a sandwich bag of craft pom poms in mine, but later thought some cut out shapes of pumpkin and apples SEEDS would be cute!  You can play by yourself for quiet time or as a game with two or more. Molly (5) and I played by taking turns. I love that she gets practice reading the numbers while we're having fun!

Another Halloween idea I came up with for our Busy Bag collection is a set of Felt Jack-O-Lanterns! I simply cut out a pumpkin shape and several face shapes (triangles, almonds, crescents, etc) that my kids can stick on and make different expressions with.  My personal favorite is the pirate eye patch! hehe I also cut out a few different shapes for stems and leaves. This is a great activity for my son, Ben (2), because he has been talking about emotions lately! "Ben is happy!" .. and at bedtime "Ben is sad."  Now we can practice making a happy face, mad face, scared face, and more.

Finally, I put together a counting activity with Halloween "candy!" I cut out several pieces of candy from colorful card stock in six different colors. As usual, I used my Cricut electronic cutting machine. You could totally use real pieces of candy though, like individually wrapped hard candies or candy corn for this project! I made several cards to go along with this project, including ones with a number on them to count out the shapes and many different pattern cards. I also included a few simple math equations (1+2=3) and a couple charts for counting out the totals. I allowed for charting by color and shape and also a separate sheet for charting both (not pictured... it's on the back of one of those bottom cards).

Easy Ideas for Busy Bags

Many Busy Bag activities are homemade, but they don't have to be! It is OK to take the easy route and bag up some store bought activities for your kids. The activity will be new and appealing to your child and these silly foam locking shapes are a perfect example! We've had these forever but my kids have neglected them for a long time. Ever since I stuck them in a Busy Bag, Molly (5) can't get enough of them! I'm so impressed that she uses them to make roads, practice counting, and create really great 3-dimensional shapes! You can find them in sets of 9 at a dollar store and they come in several character designs.

Lacing cards are a great addition to your Busy Bag collection! I've seen several sets on Pinterest that are homemade from card stock and hole punches... but believe it or not I don't own a plain hole punch! Yes, I have little heart shaped ones and a big circle one, and ones shaped like cats and leaves and spiders... but no regular one! So instead I found this CUTE set for a buck at a dollar store and that's good enough for me!

 

Here are two examples of homemade activities I've included in our Busy Bag collection. These items have previously been featured on my blog so I won't go into detail with them but I will include a link to those posts! The first is a set of roads made out of old denim and a few toy cars. You can read more about it here. 

This last one is a homemade Tic Tac Toe game. My daughter and I enjoy playing this one together, of course, and my son (2) just gets a kick out of sticking on the pieces! You can read about how to make it here. 

Busy Bag Ideas - Counting, Habitats, and Colors

Busy Bags are still going strong in my house!! Molly (5) loves to pick one out to play with during quiet time, or as a part of when we play school. Ben (2) enjoys most of them and at his age, just taking all the pieces out of the bag is fun too!

Here is a popular bag I came up with using some small plastic animals we already had and some strips of card stock. Make squares to place the animals on, labeled with numbers to practice counting. Ben is really getting into counting right now (he can count to 11 already!!) so this is a great activity for him. Meanwhile, Molly needs to work on writing and recognizing her numbers so it's important for her to practice while looking at them written down. I also included some easy math problems, which can be added to and upgraded as my kids get older.

 

I also included three pieces of card stock with habitats on them so my kids can sort the animals by where they live. This is Molly's favorite part. I only used animals we already had, so that limited my habitats, but if I bought more animals we could also use a Farm or Pet Store for example. Once your child gets older, you could use this idea with more specific habitats (fresh water stream, lake, desert, rainforest, savannah, etc).

 Another really popular activity I found on Pinterest that my kids love is a simple color-sorting activity. I found some great plastic gems at a dollar store in four different colors - a buck per package. Then I cut out four rectangles of felt in matching colors. Ben does a really good job sorting these gems - it is such good practice for him! Any craft gem or stone or small toy will work... you just need several of each color!

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!

I've Discovered Busy Bags!

My newest obsession is Busy Bags!! I came across them on Pinterest the other day and I just can't stop making them!! The idea is to have several gallon-sized Ziploc baggies, each filled with a different activity for your child. Many of the activities are homemade and many of them are educational. All of them are fun and great to hand your child when you need a few minutes to get something done. Having all the pieces in a baggie makes it easy to clean up, easy to grab on the go, and easy to keep everything together!

Right now I have 15 Busy Bags in my collection.  I plan to cycle through them on maybe a monthly basis as I add more and more, keeping no more than 20 available to my kids at any one time. Here are three blog pages I referenced when getting my own ideas: Small Potatoes, Second Story Window, Second Story Window. There are so many possibilities and variations, especially with the two different age groups I have to work with!

One of our busy bags is a "Build Your Own Cupcake" activity. I came across this online and had the supplies on hand so it became one of the first ones I tried. This is simply a collection of felt shapes that can be pieced together to create cupcakes. Some online posts included tiny scraps of felt as sprinkles but I decided to skip that part and save myself some cleaning up! I made enough felt pieces to create three separate cupcakes. I like this activity because both my kids - a toddler and a kindergartner - can do it. 

Even though I had a blast creating this for my kids, I felt kinda weird doing all the (fun) work by myself. I think in the future I'll draw some cupcake templates on regular construction paper for Molly (5) to cut out by herself. I just wouldn't be comfortable with her cutting felt yet!

A second busy bag I found online and re-created is some "Spelling Cards". This busy bag is perfect for my little kindergartner who is learning her letters and beginning to spell and read this year! I used some small foam letters, meant for bath time play, that we had laying around. I actually had used them to decorate our holiday tree for the beginning of school the past couple years! The word cards are made out of card stock.   I included a variety of words, utilizing every possible letter, and ranging from two letters up to five letter words.  Each card has the word in all capital letters on the front, then the same word all in lower case letters on the back. This is a great way for Molly (5) to review her letters and sight words she's learning at school now!

... Stay tuned for more Busy Bag activities, I'm sure!!