Rainy Day Painting!

I discovered this fun idea from Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/pin/216383957068769139/. 
It comes from the Little Page Turners blog.

I've been waiting for a rainy day to give the project a chance because it looks promising. Today, once the hail stopped, I jumped on the chance to get outside to "paint." It was going to be a toddler activity until the last minute when I realized Jo is too little to do drops of food coloring.

Oliver was very excited to do the drops. I have all of our craft supplies packed up, so I improvised and used sandpaper instead of card stock. Oliver made a few drops of yellow and blue on the sandpaper.

He was a little reluctant to go outside, so he held his out to catch the rain drops. It wasn't really getting wet, so I coaxed him outside to lay it down on the porch (It's cluttered out there because we're cleaning out the storage shed! The worst of the mess isn't even in the photo...).

A few drops hit the paper, and then the rain stopped.

It was too slow of a transformation to keep Oliver interested. He definitely wanted to do more drops, though. He went outside and added a little red. We didn't get any more rain, but the colors slowly leaked from the paper getting a little damp.

I guess we had the opposite problem from Little Page Turners. She said their paintings only took 1-2 seconds to run together. She wished it had been longer! Here in the dry West, I guess it takes more like 20 minutes. Ha!

It didn't end up being the fun activity I'd hoped for, but I want to try it again one day. We usually get a week of good rain at the end of July, so we'll attempt this activity again then!

Jumping in Indoor Puddles

I was so excited for rain today! I had a rainy day activity planned for the kids. This morning, I checked online and confirmed the forecast: rain starting at 2pm and continuing all afternoon.

I put Oliver and Jo down for nap time/quiet time at 11am, and I gathered up supplies for my planned activity. Then, I poured myself a mug of coffee, sat down on the computer, and went back to weather.com to confirm the rain would still start on schedule.

Nope.

The updated forecast calls for an hour or two of rain starting at 6pm. Six! I am disappoint.

So, I changed our fun plan for the day. It's not exactly an activity for young toddlers, but it looked promising for Oliver and preschool-aged kids. I got the idea from a pin from Melissa & Doug on Pinterest. The pin, which you can view here, shows some little girls jumping on construction paper puddles indoors. There's no information about that activity that I can find, but it looked simple enough to figure out.

I taped some paper "puddles" to the floor and waited for Oliver and Jo to get up for the afternoon.

The puddles fascinated Oliver. I showed him how to jump from puddle to puddle. He started jumping and bouncing and counting puddles.

This is a solid rainy day activity for preschool kids, even though it wasn't exactly a rainy day. Keep this activity in mind the next time you're stuck inside all day. It's a good way to burn some energy indoors!