It's Raining, it's Pouring...

It was such a beautiful day the other day, we decided to take our play learning outside. Come on, could you resist this? We love the way our "front yard" looks this time of year. The best part of it is that we don't have to worry about the maintenance. 

While it looks gorgeous, it was still quite warm outside so I thought playing in water might be just the thing. I stripped Erik down to his diaper (because I'm lazy and didn't want any extra laundry), then we took a large pitcher of water outside, along with lots of bowls and cups and other fun things that would work to play with water. The idea was to just let Erik play around with the water, see if he would pour it out of the containers, etc. He mostly just wanted to splash. He hasn't really grasped the concept that the water reacts to his actions yet. Thus this activity! In hind sight, I should have started more simply with one big bowl of water and one cup or bowl for him to play with. I showed him how to scoop up the water and pour it back out, but he was too excited by all the fun stuff to really care about what I was doing. This is definitely one we will be revisiting, probably often, at least until the weather gets too cool. 

This activity is a great one for several reasons. It helps with hand-eye coordination, as well as understanding spacial relations. It's a great sensory activity to feel the wet and cold water and builds vocabulary when you talk about what it feels like and what the water's doing when he's splashing and pouring. And it gets you out of the house!
The idea for this activity came from here, where you'll find many more fun things like this.

Maybe the biggest problem with this activity was that Erik was way too excited about being outside to want to sit still. He was way more interested in dragging his little naked knees across the rough sidewalk to go exploring. I guess we need to make a point of getting outside more often.