How To Make Cheap DIY Fake Snow - Winter Sensory Activity For Kids (VLOG)

Make your own quick & cheap DIY fake snow at home using just two ingredients & gift your child hours of free play & pretend play fun. Watch the video below to see how to make your own DIY fake snow for kids.

We did this activity as a part of our winter theme unit. My almost 3 year old son enjoyed it to the core playing with the fake snow & building snowman out of it. I also included polar animals figurines to his free play / pretend play. You can find more of our Winter Themed activities HERE in this YouTube playlist.

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Hope to see you around. Happy Parenting!

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Solar System - Sun, Planets & Orbits - Hands-On Activity For Kids (VLOG)

Watch this simple setup & a hands-on activity on solar system & see how I gave a simple lesson on planets, their sizes, positions & orbits to my almost 3 year old son.

We talked about the sizes of the planets, arranged them according to their sizes & then made orbits using colored wooden blocks, one orbit of one color, then arranged the planets according to their positions round the sun, we also learnt why mercury is the hottest & Neptune is the coldest of all the planets because of their relative positions from the sun.

Watch this video below to know about our impromptu setup.

Book that my son loves & that is mentioned in the video about solar system is - The Party In The Sky.

Source of the wooden cutouts of the solar system - Mumma Diaries.

What activities have you done to introduce solar system to your kids?

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Do not forget to follow "The K Junction" on Facebook page & closed Facebook group, Twitter and Instagram for day to day updates that might not always find a place on this blog. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to know more about our early learning journey, DIY & Montessori & Waldorf inspired activities for kids, kids books & toys reviews and much more!

Hope to see you around. Happy Parenting!

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Montessori Inspired Busy Bag Ideas For Toddlers (VLOG)

Diwali vacation is approaching, lots of travel planned & fearing how to keep your toddler engaged during the travel?

Here are some Montessori inspired busy bag ideas that I compiled for my then 17 months old son. We took this busy bag to our vacation & we never had a difficult moment during air & road travel & in the hotel room! 

Watch the video to get some ideas for your busy bag!

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5 Reasons Why You Must Stock 3D Miniature Toys at Home

My love for miniatures and figurines is immense. It has become more so after I’ve seen how effectively they’ve worked in improving my child’s ability to learn as compared to learning from a 2D point of view in books or flashcards. 

So, I keep my eyes wide open and whenever I find interesting little miniature toys, I grab them. Now, I proudly own a huge collection and they range from vehicles to animals and birds; fruits to vegetables and equipment to even utensils.

Here are 5 reasons why I feel 3D miniatures and figurines are an awesome addition to your child's toy collection.

My article has been featured on BabyChakra. Click HERE to read. 

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The Ostrich Who Came For Tea - Pretend Play

The other day, I posted on my facebook page about how & why I love figurines & miniatures. And how open ended they are for a child to enjoy & play with.

Today, my 19 months old was enjoying in the swing leisurely when he suddenly wanted to get down. I helped him get down & he ran to another room & grabbed the ostrich from the animal figurines basket. He kept on playing with the ostrich for some time & then grabbed his tea set. Little did I know he had actually invited the ostrich for tea & snacks!

As you can see in the pic, from left to right, top to bottom, he first laid out the saucers, put cups over them, prepared tea & mixed sugar with the spoon, tasted the tea himself, invited the ostrich for tea, offered him tea & snacks by spoon himself, and then drank his tea himself!

I love how free play/pretend play brings forth the creativity in a child. All these were his own ideas :) Oh yes, he offered me some tea as well at the end!

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What Can Vehicle Miniatures Teach A Child?

What a child can learn from free play is immense. Even more interesting is the way you can tap into the cues & interests of your child & drive learning through these interests. The child will be interested & enthusiastic in such learning activities. Read on how & what my son learnt, and is still learning following his love for vehicles!

My son who is 18 months old right now, is super duper fond of vehicles of any kind. When I realized this craze months back, I started hunting for miniatures of various vehicles. I did not want to stick to the routine cars, moreover wanted to encash this craze & encourage some learning. 

I finally bought a lot of vehicle miniatures like truck, bus, tempo, auto, bike, scooter, train, engine, fire engine, ambulance, boat, aeroplane, helicopter, tractor and some construction vehicles like dumper truck, digger, mobile crane, cement mixer truck, bulldozer, road roller and what not. This was not a one day purchase obviously. Whenever I found a deal somewhere, online or local market, I hoarded this stuff. Also, I did not give him all the vehicles in one go. It is overwhelming for the child. I looked for his cues, for example, there were days he got super excited seeing an auto. So I gave him the auto miniature & he would play with it endlessly, even sleep holding it. It was so amazing to see him so engaged with that little auto. Same happened for tempo (goods carrier in India), bus, truck etc.

There is a construction going on just in front of our place, so he used to stand at the balcony & watch those construction vehicles work with great interest. That was the time I pulled out his construction toy vehicles from the almirah & gave him to play! He would hold the cement mixer in one hand & watch the real cement mixer work on the construction site for long.

"Play is child's work." ~ Maria Montessori

I did not know how enriching it is to play with these miniatures before I actually saw my son playing with them! I am sharing how his love for vehicles facilitated in so much learning for him, I am sure I have missed a lot more points to enumerate but nevertheless!

• Gross Motor Skills - See his large muscles at work while making a vehicle move. By the way, I made this maroon & yellow parking lot with a ramp for him from an old Flipkart box. All his vehicles were being dumped in a box, they certainly needed a better home ;) 

• Fine Motor Skills while holding & manipulating the vehicles

• Vocabulary Building - Learning about names of vehicles & parts of the vehicles in a hands-on way like wheels, headlights, tail & wings of an aeroplane, blades of a helicopter etc. In the picture below, I was having my lunch & he wanted my attention. So I asked him to get me one vehicle at a time from another room. I asked him, "please get me the dumper truck", and he would get me the dumper truck. So this huge collection you see below, he brought to me rightly according to the vehicle's name. This was at around 15 months if I remember correctly. In another picture below, he is trying to tell me where are the wings, jet engine & tail of an aeroplane

• Counting the wheels in a 2 wheeler, 3 wheeler & 4 wheeler. 
• Learning Shapes - wheel is a circle, window is a rectangle, so on & so forth
• Enhancing Imagination & Making Connections - My son would play for 15 minutes at a stretch with his vehicles (which is a LOT of time considering the super short attention span of babies & toddlers). I am sure in his mind he is doing some kind of imagination & role play. Once he starts talking more, I may get to know what went in his mind while playing with his vehicles all this while. Moreover, seeing a real world vehicle & a toy vehicle side by side helps a child to make connections in his brain, helps to make one to one correspondence, which is a pre-math skill.

• Related Book Reading - I invested in books that were based on vehicles, picture books, story books, sound books, lift the flap books & books of all kinds. He already loves reading books. And books with his favourite vehicles, all the more interested! He matches his toy vehicles with the pictures in the books every now & then. By reading books, he also gets to know more details about how these vehicles work. He LOVES these vehicle-based books! Sharing just a few of them that I already had pics of (along with other non-vehicle titles too). There are a whole bunch of more of such books inside!

• Visual Discrimination - Based on his interest, I made some DIY activities for him to take his interest on a different level & he LOVED them too! These are some color, shape & vehicle matching activities that he started doing successfully from 15 months onwards.

Printable courtesy - Welcome To Mommyhood

• Peeling Off Stickers - I got him puffy foam stickers of cars to peel off. Using stickers is a very good fine motor skill. He loved playing with them too! This sticker sheet had logos of some car brands & he would ask again & again what they are. I told him these are logos & he could remember the names & pointed to the right logo when I asked! This further gave way to learning of logos. We used to go to our society garden every evening & he would point each & every car & ask for the logo name. Now he recognizes some 7-8 logos on paper & on the vehicles on the road too. While in the car, he starts shouting Tata Tata after seeing a Tata bus on the road!

• Perceiving Finer Sounds - My son now knows what sounds some vehicles like aeroplane, fighter plane, train, tempo, truck, car reverse horn etc make. In the middle of anything, when he is playing or reading or roaming around, whenever he hears these sounds (amidst all the noise, believe me!), he stops for a moment, points his fingers to the direction of the sound, says car or whatever is the name, if he can utter that word, smiles, does an eye to eye contact with me or his father, and goes back to his work again! Many times, we do not manage to hear the sound until he tells us to listen & acknowledge! 

• Hands-On Learning & 3D to 2D Matching - Once a 3D object picture is stored successfully in children's brain, it is very easy for them to relate to their 2D counterparts. If we teach vehicles just from the books, they would see a 2D view of it, and would not know how it looks from other angles. They will tend to store a limited view of that vehicle in their brain. We also did shadow matching activity of vehicles & to my surprise, he could do it very easily! Also, anything that anyone can actually experience (hands-on), rather than just read, goes into the long term memory. 

I will link up all the books, toys & puzzles we have related to vehicles in a separate post! For now, you can search them on Amazon & Flipkart.

I also wanted to share a beautiful vehicle set that I got as a gratitude gift from Creative Express because I reviewed their awesome concept calenders. These vehicles are sturdy enough & lovely to play with :)

Next, we plan to do 2 part, 3 part & eventually jigsaw puzzles based on vehicles! We will also do some vehicle painting and sorting of vehicles based on where they go - land, air & water. Later on we will attempt pre-writing work with small vehicles, like tracing the shapes or different kinds of lines using vehicles.

Do you have more suggestions as to how one can use vehicles? I would love to hear. I would also love to know what all activities you did with your child using vehicles :) Do share in comments!

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