Quiet Games

Several weeks (months?) ago I pinned this pin. I thought it would be perfect for car rides and other times when the kids needed to have a quiet activity. When my niece's birthday rolled around a few weeks back, I thought of this as a gift, since she was having a baby sister soon (who was born last week! Yay for being an aunt again!), and would need something quiet to do while mommy fed the baby and rested.

I bought a bunch of wool felt from Madtosh, (which is so nice - I now will only use crappy felt for things that may be torn up - ie: costumes and such), and planned out which activities I wanted to do.





I've heard that the ice cream one is her favorite!



For the tree I made several different colors of leaves, so the tree can have seasons as she gets older and understands that.



I think the rainbow is my favorite!





I really like the flowers and butterflies as well.

I didn't use a pattern for any of these - for the ones I was worried about coming out the right size to fit on the half sheets of felt (I cut all the backgrounds into half sheets), I made a paper template first (butterfly, tree trunk). I added embellishments I thought a two-year old could handle. And if tiny pieces get lost, they are easily replaced!

I packaged each set of pieces into snack size ziploc bags (the butterflies did have to use a sandwich isze bag - their wings were too big for the smaller bag), labeled with what pieces belonged in them. Then I put all of the backgrounds and small bags into a gallon sized bag. This way she can have out one activity at a time. And some of the backgrounds have things glued down - the tree, the butterfly body, the sand, the ice cream cone, while the others have mostly moving parts. I tried to glue something on each background so they could tell which activity it was.

Samantha has already requested a set for our house - guess I need to buy more wool felt!