Weekly Challenge Theme: BALLS - Part 1

I found this site with a weekly challenge theme. This week's theme is balls. I thought this would be great for us to participate in because Arin's favorite toy is a ball.

This morning, we started the challenge with ball sorting. I set up four baskets. I labeled the baskets: red, yellow, green, blue. Arin recognizes all of her letters, so we are trying to get her used to seeing common words too. I wrote the words in the corresponding color. I didn't even have to tell her how to play this game. She just started putting the right colored balls in the right basket. This task was too easy for her, because she got bored very quickly. Soon, she started purposely putting the balls in the wrong baskets. She thought this was hysterical. It was pretty funny to watch her cracking herself up.

The next activity we did was tossing the balls into a laundry basket. This game was a huge hit. She had so much fun and we played this for a long time. Sometimes, I would try to just sit back and watch her play, but she would quickly bring me some balls and say "Play, Mama!" Arin is also quite a cheerleader. If I wouldn't make a basket, she would say "Almost!" and go pick up the ball and bring it back to me so I could try again. We played several variations of this game. First, we just tossed the balls into the basket. Next, we called out the color as we tossed the ball into the basket. Arin can count to 20 on her own, so the final variation of the game was for us to take turns tossing a ball and counting. When we got to 20, we started back over at one. When the laundry basket was full of balls, Arin would pour them back into the first basket and we'd start all over again.
I have never introduced Arin to the concept of large and small, so I thought this was a good time to start that. I showed Arin how to line a few balls up from largest to smallest. Either she didn't understand what I wanted, or she had no interest. She tried it once, but didn't get it at all. So that is something we'll work on again another time.

I decided it was time for a break from our activities, but soon Arin was asking me if she could color. So I went on this site and printed out a few ball pictures. Then I went on Microsoft Word and typed BALL. I gave her these to color. She loves to color!

For lunch, I wanted to carry on the ball theme, so along with her pasta, I gave her watermelon balls and grapes (because they are round like balls!).

After dinner, we continued our activities. We did some water bowling. I got the idea from this site. First, we mixed the food coloring with the bottles of water. Arin loved this. She did get a little "squeeze happy" with the colors, but she had a great time. Then we bowled. This was another favorite activity for the day. We played this for a long time too. I am sure that we'll be playing this again tomorrow too.

Next, we tried making soap crayons, which I was going to shape into balls, but I didn't get it to work out right. I think I needed less water or more soap. We'll have to try it again sometime. Arin tried to help me grate the soap. She did like pouring the ingredients into the bowl and stirring them.

Next, we went outside and Arin did some golf ball painting. We saw this idea here. We didn't have a marble, which is why we used the golf ball. She did like this activity. It was the first time that we did this kind of painting.

The last activity for the day was to make sponge balls, which she called Stars. I did the cutting and tying, but Arin picked out the color of sponges that she wanted. She had fun playing with these in the bathtub.


I have several more ball activities that I want to do with Arin, so it looks like we'll be carrying this theme over to tomorrow too.