Busy baskets: using common, every day items to create fun, educational and fine motor activities.

There are still two weeks left of summer break here, but I’m starting to get things ready for the Hooligans’ return. I made our story stones the other day, a really fun and easy project, and I know they’ll be popular.

I’ve also found some neat stuff at thrift shops and yard sales this summer. I sorted through, and organized them last night, and I’ve displayed them on a table just outside the toy-room door, where the Hooligans will see them in all their glory, as they’re going down the stairs. I thought for a minute about what I could call these collections of treasury-goodness, and came up with “busy-baskets”.

We won’t spend a great deal of time inside in the fall, so the baskets won’t likely get a lot of use until the weather gets colder, but until then, they’ll be great for rainy days and quiet time.

So, without further ado, here are the busy-baskets!

Glass beads with tongs and a small scoop. The silk bag that I added has a fairly small opening, providing a challenging but fun activity for little hands. It’s a great sensory activity too: the silky, slippery softness of the bag, and the smooth, cold, beads rattling around in the basket. Love it!

A couple of months ago, at an auction sale, my mom found a huge (about 10000) collection of vintage buttons. I felt like a kid in a candy store when I was sifting through them, and washing them up. One of my favourite childhood memories is playing with a basket of buttons at my Nana’s house. I love the way they feel when you slither your hand through a pile of them, and the soft clicking and clinking sounds they make. They’re a favourite of mine for crafting and for sensory activities. Anyway, my mom, knowing my love for buttons, picked the collection up for a steal. Aren’t they pretty?

We’ll use many of them for crafting, but I thought a busy-basket of buttons would be fun, and I added a scoop and a couple of small glass jars for filling.

Coloured glass beads are an all time favourite here. I’m not kidding, hundreds of hours have been spent, playing with these over the years. The hooligans’ favourite bead activity is filling muffin and tart tins, but we also use them in sensory bins and for decorating play-doh. I placed a bowl-full beside the buttons for scooping and filling the little jars.

Another second-hand find this summer, these little wicker vehicles can hold treasures too.

A basket of assorted hardware: chains, nuts, bolts, clips etc. I just rummaged through our tool boxes and came up with bits and pieces for little hands to sort and assemble.

A tray of paint chip samples and a pair of scissors develops fine-motor skills when you encourage little ones to cut along the lines. I have to pick up some brighter colours though; we used all of the brights and pastels when we were crafting for Easter.

Miniatures are always popular with little people, so when I saw this assortment of tiny copper vessels for A BUCK, I didn’t hesitate. Gotta love thrift shops!

And, of course, we have the story stones!

And there you go! Busy-Baskets: simple, inexpensive activities to keep little hands and minds busy!

Easy homemade story stones for story-telling & play:

I love finding new ways to turn every day items, found in nature, into cool things that we can play with, like our domino stones, letter stones and tic-tac-toe stones, so I was positively drooling when I saw some gorgeous story stones over at Pre-School Play the other day.

The Hooligans are off for summer break until September, and I thought about holding off, and making some for us when they return, but I started seeing these stones everywhere, and I couldn’t get them out of my mind.

At the beginning of summer, my boys and I went to the beach, and collected a bucket of smooth rocks. We brought them home, washed them up and stashed them away for a project just like this. Yesterday was gorgeous here, and I had nothing pressing to do, so I set myself up under the trees in the back yard, and got to work.

How I made them:

I started with some scraps of quilting fabric, and cut out some animal shapes, but I didn’t have as much as I’d hoped, so I turned to some magazines, and cut out a few more things. Then, I stumbled across a couple of craft books that I’d picked up at a thrift shop a while back. BINGO!!

The books were intended for a stained glass-painting type of craft, but the paints didn’t come with them. I’d just thought the pictures inside might come in handy one day. They were perfect for this project!!

To make your story stones, put a puddle of modge-podge on a stone, and then place the cut-out in the puddle, and use your fingers to smooth out any air bubbles. With a sponge brush, smooth and dab a little modge-podge over the cut-out, pressing around the edges with your fingers, to get a good seal between the paper and the stone.

The quilt fabric was the easiest to work with because the material was thin and flimsy, and molded to the rock easily. The magazine pictures worked well too, because of their thinness. The craft book cut-outs were quite a bit thicker (similar to glossy card-stock), and required more pressing and smoothing, but they turned out great!

I’m thinking an even easier way to make these, if you didn’t want to go to the trouble of modge-podging, would be to simply apply assorted stickers to your stones, and then give them a coat of varnish for protection.

Story stones provide a super opportunity for imaginative play, and there’s some great sensory stuff going on too: the colours are vibrant, they’re cool to the touch, and for me there’s something soothing about the sound of stones clacking together as you play with them.