Egg carton treasure hunt

We are always looking for ways to use up our egg cartons! Seems we have collected more since having chickens of our own as everyone passes them on for us to use so while the chickens are having a break from laying during the winter we decided to use our cartons for a treasure hunt!
I googled some images of things i knew we had around our yard that Tara could collect. Glued the 12 pictures onto the egg carton and presented it to Tara
She loved it, and set about on her journey to search for her 12 items. This could also be done for a younger child with just a half dozen egg carton as i does take a while to collect all 12 items and all the hard concentrating to work out where they would be.

Grass was the easiest to check off the list first

But eventually she found them all, a shell, feather, stick, bottlebrush, wattle, snail, leaf, spring onion, rock, rose petal, and mint. Talking about where a snail may be hiding or where she has seen wattle growing made for some great memory and problem solving skills.

Geo Matching slab

I had always wanted to make our own Geo board and to make it one of those activities that can be used in different ways to get its use from it so this is what we came up with-our Geo matching slab!

As we had no spare wood around the house i used some leftover air drying clay that of course got warmed up by Tara and her tools!
After she had finished i just moulded a rectangle slab of clay with some nails pressed into it evenly and let it dry overnight.

When it was dry i added some small markers down the side which i wrote on with whiteboard marker to create a matching game. Tara was working on matching her big and small letters here...

Matching colours here...

You can see how her little hand is using all its muscles to maneuver the elastics around the nails. Fantastic for fine motor and pre writing skills

It can still be used as a classic Geo board with a triangle, square or rectangle shape made...

But whatever the activity is, it always comes back to animals when Tara is involved! hehe now we have a farm with fences.....

Easter-Cutter match

We have an Easter box of craft put away for each year and when i got it down last week i found these cookie cutters. While it isn't close enough yet to get busy baking ,i traced them with thick bold pen onto paper and Tara matched them to the outline You could even fill in the outline to match the "shadow"

National Geographic matching

I bought these gorgeous Austrailian marsupials and birds from the National Geographic shop

http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/shop/aussie-birds-figurines-set.htm

They are beautifully handcrafted and very realistic. To make a matching game i googled images of the animal in its habitat and wrote its proper name underneath.



Tara matches them to the correct card

At the age of 30 months she is now really enjoying pretend play and making up little voices for all her animals which is really lovely