The other day, on my favorite offbeatmama.com, there was a featured article about creating treasure baskets for infants. The ideas were AWESOME! While at my mother-in-law’s house, we scoured around to find a bunch of sensory items for Potamus to play with and put them in an old Zappos box that was heading to the great recycle bin in the sky.
Take a minute and think about the toys that we provide for our infants, they are mostly plastic and feel/taste the same. Boring! The Treasure basket allows you to create a base basket full of 20-30 multi-textured, multifaceted, objects for your baby to explore daily for about half an hour to an hour. Eventually the basket can contain up to 60-80 objects as you slowly build more items to keep the baby interested.
Things that I included in Potamus’ treasure box are:
- rubber spatula,
- one of those cloth geckos filled with sand
- a clear plastic cup
- an altoid-type tin
- orange juicer
- lots of different color ribbons tied to an old Fisher Price drum-stick
- 2 large squares of felt (different colors)
- bow from a Christmas package
- I also add into the mix a few of the toys we’ve brought with him that day, like his Sophie Teething toy, or his lovey
Oh my how he enjoys it. He’s been dumping the box out, putting stuff back in, waving the wand to and fro, banging the juicer on the tin, etc. This has been a welcome relief for me, since he has been SOOOPER fussy in the past week. This treasure box has entertained him for some good chunks of time.
To check out the full article: http://offbeatmama.com/2012/08/heuristic-play
boof & monk-monk 