Carrie Spritzer – Page 7 – The Creative Salad

Pretend Sticker Postage Stamps

Our daughter desperately wants to place real postage stamps on her letters.

I understand that she wants her stamps to look exactly like mine, but at 44 cents a stamp, letting her play with them just isn’t financially feasible. Besides, Mama has important letters to mail too!

Instead we photo copied stamp booklets onto plain white paper.

My daughter then cut them out and we fed them through her sticker making machine.

Now she has postage stamps of her very own that look like mine!

The postmaster wouldn’t be fooled, but my three year old is tickled pick by her realistic play stamps.

The Problem Solver

Want to play outside but your neighbor is using his noisy weed wacker?

There’s no need to fret.

Just break out your kid-sized noise reduction headphones.

They’re perfect for playing with the band at concerts and scooping dirt in the yard.

Fractiles Magnetic Tiles

$Making a menorah with fractiles$

Two posts about magnets in one week! Clearly this is one of our toddler’s current obsessions! (If you missed our post earlier in the week about making your own literary magnets, including the Kevin Henkes Lily magnet shown above, here’s the link.)

We bought these Fractiles for a trip back East earlier this year.

Not only were they fun on the plane and

enjoyed during our trip,

but they have continued to be played with regularly here at home.

She loves matching the pictures from the package (featuring dozens of designs) and making up her own designs.

The possibilities are endless!

The manufacturer packages several different sets of Fractiles magnets: the plain Fractiles Fridge Fractiles and the one that we have, Fractiles: Travel Version, which contains a steel board on which to place the magnets.

We highly recommend Factiles for hours of educational fun!

Morning Drawing Time

Inspired by early morning birding activities (there’s a bird that keeps trying to build a nest on the wind-chime on our porch!), we decided to do some bird drawings of our own.

We drew Sandhill Cranes,

Belted Kingfishers and

Great Horned Owls (clearly a joint effort).

An educational, fun, and creative Mama-Daughter activity.

OUR FAVORITE BIRDING RESOURCES:
– The book pictured above is The Backyard Birdsong Guide: Western North America, a fantastic resource for birders of all ages.
– For a similar online resource, visit The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s All About Birds website.
– For more of our favorite birding resources, including some great birding books, read our Early Morning Birding post.

Make Your Own Literary Magnets

Our three year old loves her Very Hungry Caterpillar magnets, a wonderful hand-me-down from friends. Unfortunately, these Eric Carle magnets appear to no longer be available for sale.

This got us searching for other magnets featuring beloved storybook characters. You know what we found? Nothing! There were plenty of magnets featuring television or movie characters, but none featuring our favorite storybook characters.

So, in true Spritzer Leyba fashion, we quickly set out to make our own.

We printed pictures from our favorite Kevin Henkes picture books onto plain white paper. Next time we may print the characters directly on magnetic photo paper (who knew such a thing existed?! Brilliant!).

We then laminated the paper (alternatively, instead of laminating sheets you could use packing tape).

After adhering the paper to magnetic sheets, we then cut out the characters.

A simple and quick project! Now we can use and love these literary magnets on our fridge or on the magnetic board that’s waiting to be hung in our daughter’s new room.

Curious about the characters?

From left to right: Jessica (from Jessica), Lilly (from Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse), and Chester, Victor, Wilson, and Lilly (from Chester’s Way). All family favorites! We almost always read each and every one of these books before bed each night. Check them out!