Five Faves - Toddler Busy Boxes

Linking up with Jenna today!

Well, the 12 Days of Christmas are officially over, so that means school starts back up today.   Notebooks are restocked, pencils are sharpened, and worksheets have been printed.    I love the "first" day of school!  

Getting ready for school to start in a house where a toddler lives also means getting our "Busy Boxes" ready.  Theo has a box for each day of the week, and he only gets to play with the contents during official school time.    For the most part, these boxes buy us a little bit of non-interrupted school time where I can focus on the big kids and let Theo work on his own activities, either at the table next to us or on the floor in the schoolroom.  I thought I'd share five of my favourite busy box items.

I'm a cheapskate (and kind of a procrastinator), so I try to keep these boxes full of things that I can just find around the house.    I mean, it's kind of required when you realize at 9 pm the night before school starts that you've haven't prepped the busy boxes yet, but we can claim that it's actually planned and I'm just an awesome creative, thrifty Catholic homeschooling mom.   Yep.  That's it.  It's not laziness at all.....

1.

Pipe cleaners.   Yep.  Pipe cleaners.   They go into a busy box, along with a colander, and anything else I can find that he can thread on them.   Tube pasta.   Beads.   Lacing cards.   Fabric (felt squares work great) with little notches cut into it.  Anything that he can practice lacing or threading with.   For a little guy like Theo, string or yarn is just too flexible.  He gets frustrated easily, and whatever he's trying to thread falls off of the other end super quickly.   Pipe cleaners, though, provide just enough stability to give his little fingers time to thread it through the holes, and they are thick enough to provide just the right amount of friction to keep things in place as he's trying to thread multiple objects at a time.   And they're super crazy cheap.   Perfect busy box item!

2.

Play-doh.   This is one constant - I rotate through items in every other busy box, but there is always one with Play-doh in it.  One of these days, I'll get ahead of the game and it will be homemade play-doh, but for now, it's store bought.  It's not super pricey, and all of the stuff he uses to play with it comes right out of my kitchen, so it's still a quick and inexpensive busy box item.    The packs of play-doh are $5 or less, usually, as long as you stay away from the specialty toys.   I usually just give him two colours at a time, and we use them until they get dried out, so that $5 pack will last months.   Definitely a hit with Theo - he'll spend hours at the table playing with this stuff!

3.

Craft pom-poms and egg cartons.   This was from our first round of busy boxes, when I was trying to get him accustomed to the idea of independent activities while the big boys worked on their assignments, so it's the bare minimum.  Literally just 12 pom poms and an egg carton.  Once he understood what to do with them (fill each egg cup with a pom pom), I painted the bottom of each cup with a bit of washable paint.   Nothing perfect, just a dab of colour on the bottom of the cup.   Each pom pom matched up an egg cup, so we'd dump them out and he'd sort them by colour.  Eventually, we'll paint numbers and/or letters on the bottom of the egg cups and use ping pong balls instead of pom poms (that way, I can use sharpie to write matching letters/numbers on the ping pong balls).  He's not there yet, though, so it's pom poms for now.

4.

This one takes a little bit more supervision, but it's worth it for the end result.   It's a piece of construction paper, with a shape or letter cut out of the center (so the shape/letter is "framed" by the construction paper).   Tape a piece of wax paper to the back construction paper, making sure it's large enough to cover the cut out.   Now all you need is some glue (I pour it onto old sour cream or yogurt container lids and give them a q-tip to "paint" with) and little squares of tissue paper.   The child glues the tissue paper to the wax paper, and the finished products look something like this:

5.

Paper bags.  No joke.   Paper bags and crayons, a glue stick, and scraps of whatever you can find (paper, magazines, felt, ribbon, yarn).   All of my kids have LOVED making paper bag puppets, and Theo is no exception to that rule.   He loves to create them, and will happily spend a good chunk of the school day making the little puppets sing and dance and bounce all over the house.  As a bonus, it's super cute entertainment.  

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So, there you go.  My go-to, inexpensive toddler busy box goodies.   When we first started homeschooling, Nicholas was about 2 years old, and I tried the busy box method with him as well.  However, I made the common mistake of thinking that the contents of the boxes had to be flashy and "fun" and "cool."  Ummm, nope.  Those held his attention for hardly any time, whereas these hands-on, creative activities kept him occupied for almost all of the time that I needed to work with his brothers.   They're time-tested, fun, easy to throw together, and, best of all.....super cheap!

Hope that helps someone out there!  Happy Wednesday!