When we went to Tennessee last summer, I did not want to drag a lot of toys to the little cabin that we rented. And I needed Buggy to be entertained in the car for 6 hours. So I decided to piggyback off of the Busy Bag concept that so many others have done (and I used to use for quiet time when I taught special education). Simply, they are bags that have an activity in them (usually a quiet one, or uses unconventional items rather than toys). I wanted to share the ones I made with you! Feel free to copy the ideas or Pin these….just please link back to this post!
The first activity I made was a bag of blocks, a cookie sheet (for stability) and a stack of idea photos.
I included only the blocks that were required to complete the structures in the photos…which helped to figure out if we were missing one or two. Jayna played this mostly when we were settled into the house, but did do a couple of the pattern photos in the car too. She did use the blocks to make up her own little structures, but the photos helped inspire her creativity!
I put all of these activities in large freezer ziploc bags, and then I would rotate them into the three cloth Busy Bags. At the time, three activity choices were plenty for Jayna’s quiet time! Here are some of the other activity choices that I would put in the bags:
Scratch Stencils
Magic Coloring Books
Dry Erase Board
Sorting Cups
(due to the size of the erasers, I would not recommend this for children under 3!)
Putting Erasers on the Ends of Pencils
(due to the size of the erasers, I would not recommend this for children under 3!)
Decorating Foam Butterflies
(Stay tuned for a future post with pictures and ideas for the inside!)
I found that as long as I switched up the contents of the three busy bags on a regular basis, Buggy was happy as a clam finding out what was inside (it was like Christmas each time!). And for the more abstract activities (like the blocks), pictures with suggestions or instructions on them seemed to really help.
Have you ever made a busy bag? Leave me a comment with some of your ideas. Got a blog? Leave a link to your page!
Linkin’ up here this week!
[...] did not bring the busy bags that I had created for our trip to Tennessee, but I did use the actual, physical bag from one of [...]