Recycled city

Anyone looking for a rainy day activity? It's been stormy for nearly a week, so we've spent many hours indoors. One of my kids' favorite activities so far was building a city from recyclables.

Cardboard tubes, yogurt containers, parmesan shaker, coffee tin, egg carton... we just grabbed everything from our recycling bin and started creating buildings.

We covered the containers in construction paper. The children were the architects, stacking bottles and boxes and then I taped them all together.

"What kinds of buildings does a city need?" I asked my daughter. She decided we needed a library, a school and a grocery store.

She drew lines on the streets and designed where the street would go, taping it to the table. She reserved much of the road for a parking lot in front of the library.

A rubber duck from the bath tub gets relocated to our Duck Lake.

As soon as we added play cars to the cityscape, little brother became very interested.

Our egg carton converts into a car ramp.

A toilet paper tube and some green construction paper make a simple tree.

It took us longer to build it than actually play with it, but it was a fun morning nonetheless!

Rainbow Art Collage

Looking for a rainy day activity with quick set-up and toddler/preschooler appeal?

I recently did an impromptu art project with my toddler using magazine clippings in all the colors of the rainbow. I drew the outline of the rainbow with the color names on the left and set out a pile of magazine clippings. My toddler sorted the clippings by color and used a glue stick to arrange them on the arc that matched the color.

Although she ran out of clippings to complete the rainbow, we hung it up anyway and have been working on it in stages as I have time to clip more magazines. By the way, the colors we used were: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple (a simplified version of Roy G. Biv).