We started our fun with a simple little activity I found here. Santino loves hammers and hammering, he'll pretend to hammer all day using anything he has in his hand as a hammer. So this activity was perfect for him! I finally got to use the toy golf pins I found inside a Christmas cracker. The recipe for success was simple: 4 pins, a wooden hammer from our Melissa & Doug Hammer Set, and a little Styrofoam board. I showed Santino how to hold the pins to hammer them in the the styrofoam, but he didn't want to hold them, asking me to do it.
Then he figured, that he could just use the same holes over and over, and my assistance wasn't needed anymore.
This was a good 10 minutes fun.
I've seen so many reports on how much fun the cloud dough is for kids, that I can't even remember where I saw it first. So I decided to test it out too. I used 4 cups of flour and 1/2 cup of vegetable oil. I think I could add a little more oil for better consistency, but for our purpose it worked just fine. Santino is not ready to mold shapes with his hands yet, but we are working on this.
I gave him a few cars to move the flour around and a few scoops, and he loved it. He put the flour in the wagon, tossed it around, pushed it around, poured it with the measuring scoops. I thought he would last for 10-15 minutes, but he was occupied for over an hour! That's a great progress for us, such an improvement on concentration.
He was pretty good keeping the flour in the bucket I gave him, but nevertheless I had to sweep around a few times. He even tried putting his head in the bucket.
After about half an hour I changed the bucket for a larger one, and gave him more toys. Santino was delighted!
Next time we will try little cake molds of various shapes. I will also add more oil.
I think this would be a great activity for a playdate with one two more kids.
