Beach Crafts & Games

We spent the weekend at the beach because one of Andy's brothers had his wedding there. It was fun, despite the on and off rain! On Sunday, we were actually able to take Arin to play on the beach. While Arin played in the sand with daddy, I collected shells for her. Then, Andy collected a bag of sand for us.

Today, we put our "treasures" to use. First, Arin and I washed, rinsed and dried the shells. We used several of the shells to make a matching game. I found that idea here. I had problems getting the stickers to adhere to the shells, so I had to glue them on.

This morning, I had dyed a lot of the sand, so our next project was to make colored, layered sand in a jar. I have to admit that I am not a big fan of this type of craft, but I thought it would be a good scooping and pouring activity for Arin and it did turn out prettier than I had expected. Arin had fun scooping the sand for a little while and then she got bored with that, so we poured the sand into cups and she poured those into the jar. This went quicker and she seemed happier with the results.

Next, we took some cardstock and made a random glue pattern on it. Then, I had Arin use her spoon to sprinkle colored sand on top of the glue. She once again got bored quickly with the spooning of the sand, so she just dumped it all on the paper. I really like this picture, so when it dries, I will frame it and add it to our gallery wall. On our art gallery wall, I have Arin's first crayon drawing, her first painting, her first dot marker picture and soon to be her first sand art picture.

When we were at the beach, Papa was talking to Arin about her numbers. She has been able to count to 20 for a while now, but I realized this weekend that she isn't so good at sight recognition of numbers. Papa was showing her playing cards and asked her what number was on them. At best, she only got them right about 50% of the time. So our focus for the next few weeks (or until she gets it) will be sight recognition of numbers. So for our final beach "game" today, I wrote numbers on the top corner of index cards. Then, I had Arin tell me what number was written on there - most of the time I had to help her. Then, she'd take the appropriate number of shells out of the bowl and place them on the index card. We had exactly enough shells to play 1-9 all at once. By the time we got to this activity, she had almost no attention span left, so I helped her quite a bit with this. It is fun to play together, but I want to see if this is something she can do on her own, so we'll play it again later or maybe tomorrow.