Making Soup...and More Pretending

When my daughter was younger, I remember really looking forward to the day where she could pretend with me.  When I was working as a teacher, I was the teacher who would pass out strips of paper and say, "Let's figure out what it could be, what we could do with it!".  Sure, I got a lot of eye rolls, but I also got a lot of creative thinkers.  The art of pretending is really a skill that comes with age, and I would say that age for Olive was about 17 months.  Around that time was when she really started playing "pretend":  pouring tea for her dollies, eating imaginary food with a fork, driving a cardboard car, and more.

I love, love, love pretending with Olive for a lot of reasons, but 2 main reasons really:  1) When you pretend, you can go anywhere, be anyone, and do anything and 2) it doesn't cost anything.  Let's face it, if necessity is the mother of invention, than an empty wallet is the mother of pretend play.

One of Olive's favorite pretend things to do (and by favorite, I mean that it's an activity that she can focus on for more than 15 minutes) is "making soup".

Sprinkling some "spice" into her soup bowl.

Opening a pill box to retrieve some "ingredients" to add to the soup.

Of course, every good cook always tastes their food.

Making soup isn't the only way we pretend around our house.  Here are some other things we have that we pretend with:

• Old corded telephone
• Calculator
• Table setting (place mat, plate, utensils, napkin, cup)
• Dolls
• Toy cars
• Random plastic pieces
• Scarves & hats
• Teapot & teacups

Here's a short article I came across on the importance of play that I thought you might enjoy reading.

Olive and I hope you have a fun weekend filled with dancing like a bear, baking cookies in a shoebox, and having a phone conversation with a stuffed animal. :)

Animal Diorama

I found these cute little plastic animals at The Dollar Store recently.  I've been wanting to get Olive some play animals like this and at $1 a piece, these sturdy, realistic animals were just the ticket!

Aren't they cute?  You may find the giraffe familiar - it was same one I used for the animal bookends I made in my last post.  I bought two of them.

The only problem is that they looked a little lonely.  I thought that they could use a habitat to live in, but being short on funds I needed to make one using things around the house.  Here's what I came up with:

I used a diaper box and cut off the top and one of the sides.  You can't see it, but I covered the outside with construction paper.  This isn't necessary, but Olive is obsessed with pointing at the baby pictures on the box and I didn't want that to overtake this activity.  For the floor, I used a piece of green felt and made little hills by stuffing some batting underneath.  The sky and clouds are painted with tempera paint.  I made 2 moveable trees out of toilet paper rolls and felt pieces.  I also made a little cave/hollowed out log out of 2 toilet paper rolls cut and glued together.  The whole thing took about 20 minutes to make and I had everything already on hand.

Yes, I know that it looks like a 4th grader made it for a school project, but my daughter loves it.  If she were older, I may have spent more time on it and made it "better looking".  Or maybe not, I don't know.  All I know is that it engages my daughter and it was $6 (the cost of the animals) well spent.  I have plans to make other habitats for the animals using more diaper boxes.  I'm hoping that we won't have too many diaper boxes before too long because we're trying to potty train my daughter.  So I better start holding on to them!