Theme: Beach Vacation
Honey Pot is 2 years and 4 months old
We are going on vacation next week! I avoided a beach theme
all summer so that we could use it as a way to psych up for our trip. I think
it was a huge success! I tried to keep to a “beach” theme and not an “ocean”
theme, because then we could have gone on forever. We’ll save that one for
another time! Take a look at what we did!
Books
We checked out almost a dozen beach-related books from the
library this week. Some of our favorites include Just Grandma and Me, by
Mercer Mayer; Curious George Goes to the Beach, by Margret & H.A.
Rey; Stella: Star of the Sea, by Marie-Louise Gay and Clifford The
Big Red Dog: The Missing Beach Ball, by Sonali Fry. They were great fun to
read, and helped reintroduce Honey Pot to the beach, as she was only seventeen
months old when we last went!
Beach Countdown
I wanted Honey Pot to get some counting practice this week,
and what better way than a daily ritual that gets us looking ahead to our trip!
This is her first chain craft at all, and as you’ll see, it involves so many
different fine motor skills from taping to gluing to using scissors. First I
cut strips of construction paper, and had her help me tape them together to
form a chain.
Then I used a craft punch to make circles, and Honey Pot
helped me glue the smaller ones to the bigger ones.
I added numbers to each one. We identified each of the
numbers and counted them up. Then she helped me glue one to each chain. The
chain by itself was quite plain still, so I printed out a beach-themed coloring
page to add to the top.
She, her Daddy and I took turns coloring in parts of the
page.
Here it is!
And each day before breakfast, in the week leading up to our
vacation, Honey Pot grabbed her scissors and snipped off the bottom chain. We
counted the remaining links, looked at the number and that was how many days we
had left till departure. What fun!
Painting Seashells
I had purchased a set of seashells from the Dollar Tree. Not
the prettiest of shells, but we actually got a lot of use out of them! First
up, we gathered our paints in some pretty, beachy colors, and painted them.
And, for the first time, we used GLITTER! Honey Pot was very
excited to spoon it out herself. She did a great job at sprinkling it over each
of the still-wet shells.
Here is our finished work. The photos really do not do them
justice – they really sparkle! I just love how they came out! They are on
display (in their original basket from the Dollar Tree!) on our kitchen table.
Sensory Bag
I wanted Little M&M to enjoy some seashells too! So I
filled a freezer bag with water, tinted it blue with food coloring, and added a
handful of seashells. Then I sealed it and put that bag into another bag for
durability! I set him up on a beach towel and gave it to him. He had so much fun squishing the bag. I tried to take it away for a
moment for a picture before he ruined it, but he got so upset! That’s how much
he was enjoying it, lol! So, sorry…no picture. But here he is playing with it!
Even Honey Pot wanted to play with it!
And she’s so silly…
Beach Scrapbooks
This will be our fourth annual trip to the beach, Honey
Pot’s third. So I pulled out our scrapbooks from the ones she has attended and let
her peruse them. She loved looking at the pictures of a younger her, and all
the fun she had had at the beach during vacations past.
Crab Hand-print Craft
I found this idea on Pinterest. There were so many versions
but I particularly loved the one originating from the blog called Daily Dose of Sugar Mama. So we used that as inspiration! First I tore a piece of beige paper
for Honey Pot to glue onto a blue piece, resembling sand.
Then I painted her hands red, and pressed them down onto the
page in the shape of a crab. Honey Pot glued on some small seashells…
And some googly eyes.
Then some cotton ball clouds in the sky.
It came out so cute! And I love how tactile this craft is –
cotton, shells and googly eyes. Adorable. We may just bring this on vacation
with us and post it on the fridge, lol!
Beach Small World
This is our second small world sensory bin. (Check out the
first froggy one we did here!) I decided to use Cheerios as sand, so I enlisted
in Honey Pot’s help smashing them up. We used her mini rolling pin and toy
hammer.
It took quite some effort with her small tools, so we didn't wait for it to be a fine powder. We were in a hurry to create the rest of the
beach and play! So I grabbed a spare piece of Tupperware for our beach. Then we
added some shells (still leftover from that one batch from the Dollar Tree),
two cocktail umbrellas, a blue piece of paper (laminated) and small pieces of
felt as beach towels.
Then it was time to play! She grabbed her Minnie and Mickey
right away! They lied on their beach towels, splashed in the ocean, built sand
castles, buried their feet in sand, sat in the shade of their umbrellas, dried
off with their towels, looked at seashells…all kinds of things we’re going to
be doing next week. It was a great preview! And Honey Pot just loves this type
of pretend play!
Letter Recognition and Matching
I wanted to add a little bit of alphabet review to this
theme as well, so I created a simple worksheet in Photoshop Elements. On it
were three common words: beach, sun and shell. I made them into sunshine
shapes, and used my circle punch for the corresponding letters. She did awesome
matching them up! When she picked up a letter, if she didn't say what it was, I
asked her. She knew just about all of these, and matched them up without
difficulty. A quick add-on activity, and a wonderful letter review!
