March Infant/Toddler Activities
Spring is coming. Bring a glimpse of spring into the class by purchasing three carnations. Place the three carnations in three vases, each with tinted water with different colors of food coloring. Check out the petals of the carnations day after day and watch!
March in the month of March by singing “The Ants Go Marching”. Your toddlers will love it!
March 17th is St. Patrick’s Day! There are lots of fun things to do with the children –you can make rainbow crayons from melting old crayons and pouring into muffin pans to make wonderful infant crayons. You can make rainbow streamers from paper plates and tissue streamers letting the children sing and dance with the streamers. It is also a good month to talk about the color green. You can introduce Spring green creatures like frogs and worms and other green items. Another fun thing to do on St. Patrick’s Day is to play an imagination activity with the children. You can use green tempera paint to leave some “leprechaun footprints” on a window. Just make a fist and paint the outside of your hand and pinky finger. Make little prints and then add dots for toes. They look very similar to footprints. Let the children discover the prints and then exclaim that a leprechaun must have visited. Have some treats ready that the leprechaun left behind. Suggestion for treats: Rice Krispie Treats-made with Green food coloring. And of course there are many fun ways to make Shamrocks like painting Shamrock patterns and tracing shamrocks and making Shamrock lacing activities.
Paper Plate umbrellas are a fun art and then movement activity.
Give the children a paper plate with a small hole poked in the middle. Let the children decorate with markers or crayons. Then let them stick their index finger up through the holes in their plates to make umbrellas. Then the children can walk around in a circle singing a rainy day song. A simple one is: It’s raining. It’s raining, Oh me, oh my! But our umbrellas will keep us dry!
Draw an outline of a worm or snake on a large piece of poster board. Let children color (mark off into sections). Then cut the sections apart and make a worm “puzzle”
Kites are fun to use and talk about in March. Simple Wal-mart bag kites can be made by simply tying yarn to handles of Wal-mart type plastic bags and let the children hold the yarn and run in the wind as the bags balloon out into a fun “kite”. Also a fun ‘Kite art activity is to cut diamond shapes or help children cut diamond shapes from posterboard and color or paint and glue on pasta to make a “kite collage. Add a streamer or yarn for the kite’s tail.
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Kay Carmack; Infant/Toddler Specialist
595-0255