Another play mat

MATERIALS:

• Large sheet of paper
• Desktop protector
• Markers or crayons

We hadn’t made a play mat in a while, so it was the perfect activity for our first day home without relatives to help entertain yesterday. Johnny got this car/boat/plane set from a friend as a big brother gift, so we made a town to go with it. I accidentally cut the paper a little bigger than the mat. We’ll either cut it down for future play or let this one wear out and make the next one fit.

The kids pulled out the peg dolls Emma decorated to use as townspeople.

I was pleasantly surprised at how smoothly the day went caring for three children on my own. The kids are maybe starting to feel better, and I think that helped. They both ate properly for the first time since Lily was born, and that went a long way towards the day going well.

See other play mats we’ve made here.

Play food to last (for a while, at least)

You may recognize this food from my restaurant play post a couple months ago. The food was printed from Filth Wizardry. My kids used our first set until it literally fell to shreds, so we made a second set this week, laminating it this time. I don’t have a laminator, but I bought a roll of laminate that works well for small projects like this. I’ve seen other bloggers use clear packing tape to produce a similar effect.

Both kids love their new laminated food. The food is pretty small, so we store it in an old yogurt container. Emma uses it with her play kitchen as well as with the restaurant play mat!

House Plan Play Mat

We made a new Play Mat! This one is a house plan (for a very small one-bedroom house).

As usual, we made this using butcher paper and our trusty IKEA desk protector alongside my miserable art skills and some scribbled help from the kids…

I planned for them to use this mat with Play-Doh (I was planning to make furniture), but Emma wanted to use her little doll instead, so Johnny used Play-Doh and Emma used her doll. This arrangement worked surprisingly well!

The most popular play mat so far is this one. Emma asks to play with it at least every other day. The paper food has held up surprisingly well, although I plan to make a second set with the kids sometime this week and shroud it in contact paper for even better durability.

Restaurant play

I mentioned in my Play-doh play mat post that I thought it would be fun to make a restaurant play mat. I’m staying away from Play-Doh this week because, after a brief respite, Johnny is back to stuffing it into his mouth at an alarming rate. Then I saw these great colour and cut out food sheets from Filth Wizardry, and I knew I wanted to make a restaurant play mat to go with them.

I used the usual butcher paper, traced a couple plates and one cup, and then painted around the edges (very fancy for me, but Emma was playing with bubbles in the sink, I had leftover tempera paint from her earlier painting activity, and Johnny was napping).

I printed out the food templates. They are well-drawn, easily recognized, and they have nice thick lines for young children to color within/cut out along.

Both Emma and Johnny had a blast coloring. Emma had a go at cutting out the food, but she’s just learning about scissors and got frustrated, so I finished up.

Once again, Johnny surprised me by playing with this mat for a good half hour. Either he has a particular affinity for mat activities, or he has suddenly developed an attention span. Either way, it’s great to see him having fun.

Emma played with the mat for quite a bit this afternoon, and then asked to get it out again in the evening.

Animal habitat playmat

MATERIALS:

• Butcher paper
• Crayons
• Clear plastic desk protector

Draw a grassy area, a path, and some water (the black things are my pathetic attempts at drawing rocks)

Add toy animals (we used Little People animals, because that’s what we have) and play away.

I was especially pleased to see that this activity kept Johnny happily occupied for a solid half hour – that’s a rare occurrence in our house!

You could make something similar using a large sheet of cardboard, but I like the sleekness of the desk protector, and the fact that butcher paper is so easy to color on.

Geometric shape play

My parents gave my kids pattern blocks for Christmas, and this week the blocks inspired us to make a couple of games using some butcher paper and the desk protector I wrote about in this post.

We started out with some very simple shape sorting:

I’m afraid my penmanship/drawing skills are pretty bad; thankfully two-year-olds are gentle critics.

Emma loved the sorting activity, so we made a shape matching board on the other side of the same sheet of paper:I roll up the “boards” we make and secure them with rubber bands. They are stored in a cereal box so that Emma can easily choose the one she wants to play with.

Play-doh play mat

Play-doh is one of the things we use nearly daily in our home. We recently purchased this clear plastic desk protector from IKEA for $5.99 to use as a play surface when our kids are playing with watercolors, finger paints, etc. This morning, I realized that, since it was clear, paper could be placed under it to create a play mat. I decided that we should create a base for a Play-doh town.

The kids helped draw streets and grass areas on butcher paper :

Then we placed our artwork under the desk protector and set up our town: I forgot about our resident King Kong (aka Johnny)

Who quickly reduced our town to rubble:

Next time I’ll put the mat on the table so that “King Kong” can only reach part of the town.

I really like the possibilities this creates of having many different play-doh play mats that we create. I think we’ll try a restaurant play mat with place settings and/or a stovetop, a train station, an airport… the possibilities are endless.