Weaving Loop Bracelets, Headbands and Pot Holders

Creative Wednesdays One of the easiest bracelets for kids to make only requires fabric loops and fingers — no special tools. Once kids feel confident weaving bracelets and headbands on their fingers they can move to a weaving loom to make pot holders and more. Here’s what to do: Will Need: Fabric Loops Weaving Loom […]

35 Quick Summer Activities

Keeping Kids Busy on Long, Hot Summer Days During the long, hot days of summer nannies don’t need to rely on electronics and video games to entertain the kids. Here are more than one month’s worth of easy activities to do with the kids. 1. Find an object in the house that begins with each letter […]

Creative Relay Races, Obstacle Courses and Sack Races

Summer Boredom Busters Most of us don’t have burlap sacks on hand to have traditional sack races so have the kids make up their own variations of group races in the grass. You can use the ideas below to plan the races for the kids, but let them come with ideas of their own too. […]

Healthy Taste Test

Creative Fun for Kids The kids I care for love having taste tests. All you need are two or three similar food items that are just different colors. Cover the child’s eyes with a blind fold or just ask them to close their eyes. Then, put a piece of food in their mouth and let them guess […]

Pumpkin Pie Play Dough

Nothing is better than the smell of pumpkin in the Autumn. So, this week we made this easy homemade play dough recipe that is scented like pumpkin pie. While playing with play dough, children use the small muscles in their fingers and hands. They use hands, fingers, and tools to pound, push, poke, shape, flatten, roll, cut, […]

Paper Bag Puppets

Creative Projects to Do With Kids Every pre-school and early elementary school-aged child I have ever cared for loves puppets. Making simple paper bag puppets allows kids to practice coloring, cutting, and pasting. I like cutting out shapes from colored construction paper for young kids to make animals, princesses, and princes but it’s even easier […]

Sorting Games

Teaching Classifying, Comparing and Patterns Children benefit from having lots of experiences sorting, comparing, and classifying objects before participating in patterning activities. Provide opportunities for children to sort or group things by shape, number, color, or texture. As children play sorting games, vocabulary such as classifying, groups, sets, categories, same, different, fewer, longer, heavier, lighter […]

Puffy Paint

Getting Creative with Kids There is something magical about the three-dimensional appearance of Puffy Paint. Puffy paint is easy to make and you can simply find the ingredients already at home. Allow the kids to use the Puff Paint recipes as finger paint as well — although I don’t like adding color to the puffy […]

Art with Kids

Kandinsky Tree I love the subject of Art History and hope to inspire my Nanny Kids to appreciate art as well. I introduced my three-year-old charge to abstract art by showing her Kandinsky Trees. Wassily Kandisnsky was a famous Russian artist who had a gift called synaesthesia cognate which gives him the ability to hear […]

Colored Rice

Rainy Day Sensory Play By Whitney Tang The wind is growling, the rain is cascading, the children are whining. What is a nanny to do after puddle jumping, spontaneous dancing, and storytelling have all been exhausted? Brighten up your stormy afternoon by making colored rice. It’s fun to make and will give grubby little fingers […]