Activities with kids - bottle top shakers

Well so much for catching up on all those blog posts I'm wanting to write, I only wrote twice last week. Life just seems to be so busy at the moment, I suppose it's understandable with that big room out there that needs finishing! Not that I've actually been doing much myself on it, I'm not so good with dropsaws and figuring things out, I'm better with a paintbrush, and all the rain we have been having of late has put a stop to any paintbrush activity.



I've been doing quite a bit of work on the garden, building new garden beds (with lots of help from my dad, thanks Dada), and yesterday we went for a long drive into the countryside and bought fruit trees. I suddenly realised that spring is nearly here so I had better get a move on and plant some of those trees that I've been planning on planting for about a year now!



Anyway, to the point, the heading of this post. While we were all sick we spent a lot of time at home and indoors and did lots of quiet indoor activities. I'm always looking for simple ideas of things to do with the kids, so I thought I would start sharing some ideas here, perhaps it can be a weekly thing, if I'm organised enough ;)



So first up - bottle top shakers. We all had lots of fun doing this, sitting in the morning sunshine in our pjs. A friend of mine gave me a whole bag of bottle tops that she had been collecting, she makes play things for the kids out of them - she's very industrious :) - but she and the family are moving to Perth in a few weeks, so we inherited the bag of bottle tops :)



The idea behind this is to make as many different sounding shakers as you can, using grains etc from the kitchen. It helps the kids to think about sounds, and concentrate on listening, you can make pairs of matching shakers and play a game to find the matching sounds, listen to the loud sounds, the quiet sounds, notice how the small grains like say couscous or quinoa make a higher pitch sound than say larger things like beans or chickpeas. Or how the sound changes when you have the bottle tops very full of grain, compared to when there are only a few grains in them. And of course they're good to just make music with too :)



They also enjoyed just playing with the grains, and choosing which ones they wanted to use, and concentrating on putting them carefully into the little bottle tops. I had the job of taping the tops securely together (I used a big wide packaging tape).