A Home Made Water and Sand Table
I am SO excited to share this idea!
I don't know if anyone here is aware of this, but water and sand tables for toddlers and children are VERY VERY expensive.
I was racking my brain, trying to think of how I could re-create one at home for cheap...when it hit me!
CHANNY'S HOME MADE WATER TABLE!!!
Take a medium to large sized rubber maid or plastic tub. Find a small plastic bin, and trace it's shape on the top of your lid. Using heavy duty scissors or a "Sawsall", cut the hole out of the lid and place the bin snugly inside. Fill with water or sand and replace lid on bin.
Now you have an activity table that doubles as a storage bin for the water/sand toys!!!!! Wahoo!!!!
To make it an even more stable structure that kids will have a hard time
tipping or dumping, put a bag or two of sand in the bottom. Then it becomes nice and sturdy.
Ofcourse never leave your child unattended with one of these.
Here it is!!!!!!:
PAPER PLATE FISH MOBILE
All you really need to get started is paper plates (I used small ones but it doesn't matter), scissors, glue, paint and glitter, some string, and something to hang with. In the past I've used dowels and sticks shaped in a cross formation to hang mobiles, but I kept this project super simple by just attaching it instead to a child's coat hanger.
Start by keeping 2-3 plates whole (how ever many fish you want to hang) and then cutting tails by simply cutting paper plates in half. I tape the plates down to Emmett's highchair so he can fingerpaint them more easily. Also, I wanted my fishies to have open mouths, so I cute triangles out where their mouths would be as well.
Today, I mixed my tempera paint with glue for two reasons: 1) I wanted it to dry more shiny 2) I wanted to shake on glitter after Emmett had painted them. Also, it made it easier to clean off the highchair when we were done!
Once we were done painting the plates, I shook glitter on them, hole punched the top of the body so I could run string through them, and glued on button eyes. You could use googly eyes, or just draw them on, or you could skip the eyes alltogether and it would still look great! Because I have used buttons for the eyes on the fish I will make sure to keep a close eye on them, and keep them out of Em's reach, in case they should fall off and be a choking hazard!
So, once they were dry and I had glued the tails and eyes on, I just strung them up with sewing thread and tied them on to a child's coat hanger! Voila! The glitter catches in the sun and it looks so darling. Emmett is really mesmerized by it!
