Following on from our blog ‘Tuff trays; the wonder resource’ and the positive responses we have been receiving over on instagram for the trays we have done so far, we have made the decision to start a ‘monthly’ (given the time and opportunity by the children’s needs) blog to showcase what trays we have done each month and what has and hasn’t worked for us. If this is something that you would find useful please comment below.
*As mentioned in the previous tuff tray blog these trays may not seem age appropriate for my children (8 and 11 years) however firstly we do not agree with age restrictions except for safety reasons and secondly my children’s chronological age does not match their mental and emotional ages, we therefore provide activities that they will enjoy not what is dictated by their age and society, one of the many bonuses of home educating them.
Making staffs
Making staffs – selection of paints, gems, beads, jewellery beads which had previously been broken down from some ugly jewellery we had, glitter, twine and an explanation of staffs in terms of the pagan faith because Samantha has shown an interest in this, with several pagan rituals to bless the staffs when they are complete.
The children learnt alot from this as well as having a lot of fun. We worked together as a family (minus Lela who was away for the weekend with a friend) on our individual staff and I believe this really helped engage the children. They learnt skills in RE, woodwork, respecting nature, design, bonding (both family and with their staff and nature), and storytelling, as they came up with names, personalities and backstories for their staff.
Our staffs are quite large as both myself and Riley also use them as mobility aids (walking sticks) however this activity would also work for wand making thus making them much easier to store.
Corn dolls
Corn dolls – corn husks (taken from corn we ate the night before that had soaked in water for an hour), yarn because I didn’t have any twine and an explanation of the history of corn dolls and instructions on how to make them taken from google and wiki.
The children loved this activity and begged for more corn the next night just so they could make more dolls. I was worried about this as I thought it may be a little difficult and past their patience and tolerance levels but they surprised me and after a strop each, they succeeded in making two dolls each. We followed the instructions (readily available on google) and with a little bit of patience they are very easy to do. The children needed some help tying the knots but other than that were capable of doing it by themselves. Now this one does not strictly need to be done in a tuff spot but I find first off it’s a lovely way of presenting an activity to the children and secondly it generally contains all the mess.
The children learnt crafting, perseverance, use of a whole of something (no waste), history, geography, value of possession (owning something they made) and storytelling as unprompted the children then made up backstories and personalities for their corn dolls.
Construction tray
Construction tray – Oats, cereal hoops, pasta, flour, fake snow, building blocks and construction vehicles.
Samantha went straight to this one. Both children enjoyed finding the hidden monkeys in the snow. They both enjoyed rearranging the blocks, transferring the ‘materials’ and drawing in the flour/oats/snow. This was a good activity for my two but somewhat short lived as I chose to partner it with a massively sensory based activity which for my two will always be the clear winner (gloop).
Gloop tray
Gloop tray – cornflour 2 boxes, water, glitter, toys, spoons, pouring jugs, anything else you can think of that’s washable.
Big winner. The children had fun mixing it all together after playing with the cornflour dry first. The kids spent several hours pouring, dribbling, running their hands through it. After they had spent a little time playing with it au naturale, out came the glitter because “everything’s better with sparkles”. After the children had finished playing with it (it needed to be cleared away for dinner having been played with all day) they wanted to keep it to see what happened to it, they predicted it would go hard. They found initially the water separated from the mix. After a few days it went off, smelling bad so we spoke about how bacteria from our hands transferred to the ‘dough’ and allowed it to ferment and threw it out.
Treasure/gold dig tray
Treasure/gold dig tray – Sand, gold (fake) nuggets, gems.
The children love this activity and it’s one I have to set up reasonably regularly and long before we had the tuff trays. It will keep them both occupied for about an hour but they will both return to it repeatedly throughout the day.
They love sieving the sand, finding the treasure and the sensory feedback from the sand. I believe this is a calming activity for them.
Pirate desert island
Pirate desert island – Two trays used with a piece of open drain pipe creating a slide between them. Lego people, a crocodile, a box of lego, twigs and fronds from our palm tree, tin foil, jugs of water, laces.
The children were asked to create something to safely move the stranded lego people from the island to the next tray via the pipe slide to safety (this is where we had to introduce the crocodile as Riley said he could just make them all swim to the slide!). The children liked using the lego most to create modes of transport and spent a good while making various lego boats to transport the lego people to safety including a coffin as “you use what you’ve got”. The crocodile then became lonely (Riley is a huge animal lover and is usually on the animals side rather than the humans) so swam to join the people as he was friendly and didn’t want to eat them. Samantha then decided to build a bridge using the rope as supports, lego as the main bridge and nature as aesthetics whilst Riley worked on redesigning some of the boats that hadn’t worked.
The kids then realised that by constantly adding the extra jugs of water the bottom tray was going to overflow so began to take water from there instead. Riley, our little animal warrior, then decided the crocodile was at risk of injury so put in a barrier to protect him from the boats. It took about half an hour of this play for the children to redesign the course/game to a theme park ride (their true passion). Samantha abandoning the bridge idea and making a spear shot pulley system to pull the riders back up to the top of the ride.
Frozen gelli baff gem tray
Frozen gelli baff gem tray – 2 cereal containers full of gelli baff, array of gems, 3 frozen bowls with gems, wooden hammers and chisels.
This was a really simple tray but the kids loved it and really got involved. They adored the fact the bowls weren’t completely frozen in the middle (to be honest this was not done on purpose we were having issues with our chest freezer), so looked for weaknesses to drill into to release the water. As the gelli baff melted it was sludgy (as it is) and the kids had great sensory fun. It took ages to melt even in 31oc heat in fact four hours later it still had a small ice lump left. The kids then started incorporating the gems into the treasure island rescue tray. They adored this ice gem tray and returned to it several times throughout the day, which strangely because of the gelli baff they could.
Oyster pirate tray
Oyster pirate tray – oysters with pearls, seaweed, sand, lego people, boats, moldable soap, kale and seashells.
This was a great one for the kids and it allowed dadda to get involved as well. The children got straight into this one, bouncing their hands on the top of the soap. They were a little wary at first, unsure what they were meant to do but quickly just got involved in the play after a little encouragement from the adults to just explore it. We directed them (they didn’t know what the knife was for) in saying “Maybe turn over a shell, oh dear no food for the pirate in that limpet” We then talked about the other food sources found in shells.
The children used the pirates to explore the island. Samantha found an oyster while playing the pirate and was very excited about finding food. We spoke about what else pirates might be excited about finding in oysters. “Pearls”.
Dadda opened them and the children pried them open. They had great fun with several storms (extra moldable soap sprayed). The children got lots of enjoyment out of setting up homes, beds, baths etc for the pirates out of soap and seaweed. There was lots of imaginative play happening and it had the bonus of being super sensory.
Our follow ons from this were, the children then chose pearl jewellery cages to put their pearls in.
Then with Dadda’s help they used the microscope to investigate the oyster meat and shell.
*Our oysters came from alliexpress prepackaged (vacuum sealed) . When we opened them we found they had been cooked to preserve them. We did not allow the children to play with live animals/creatures to facilitate their learning.
Clean the hands
Clean the hands – 4x laminated hands, paint, cloths, bowls of water, soap.
Put paint on one hand, then let the kids high five all the other hands watching the germs spread. We then spoke about how we could watch the germs spread from person to person and how easy it is to do. The children then first used just a cloth and water to try and wash off the germs. Next they used the soap and water on a cloth, seeing how much better it works. Samantha learnt how important it is to wash the back of your hands as well when she lifted the hands to find all of the germs (the paint) had run to the back where she hadn’t washed.
The children loved the hand washing activity. After high fiving and washing lots, the children then changed the game (unprompted). They became the virus ‘sneezing’ from the flannels over the hands creating more germs, the giggling was amazing.
They then unprompted took this further outside in their play. Samantha put chalk on the play equipment outside and got Riley to follow her around touching the equipment, then got him to check his hands to show the spread of germs, Riley then continued to ‘spread’ them around the garden.
We followed this tray up with the pepper in water experiment to show we need soap when washing our hands due to our natural oils and the germs clinging to them.
We also did the germs on our hands rubbed on bread (shows up as mould) experiment. The children also willingly wrote up this experiment, which if you know anything about how much my children despise English, is a testament to how much they enjoyed this day and the experiments we ran.
Playdough soap
Playdough soap – ½ cup cornflour, ¼ cup liquid soap, 1 tsp coconut oil (these measurements are a little give and take, we had to play around with them a bit as Riley’s worked perfectly and Samantha’s took some fiddling).
Mix soap and oil together then mix in the cornflour, knead until it all comes together like playdough. The advantages to doing this one in the tray was all of the mess was contained in the tray and it was super sensory so a winner for my two. We were really surprised by how well this one actually worked as we did not have high hopes at all. We talked again about why washing hands especially after being outside playing and after the toilet is important and the reality has been this went down so well and has encouraged the children to wash their hands so well the two batches we made (one for the upstairs bathroom and one for the downstairs bathroom) have both been used within a week and we already need to make some more when usually the soap upstairs (primarily the children’s bathroom) lasts for more months than I care to count.
Ice hands with gems and germs
Ice hands with gems and germs – ice hands made from water in medical gloves, ‘cute’ pictures of germs laminated (I was impressed with how well this worked as water only penetrated one resulting in it’s loss), and gemstones, tweezers.
The kids loved this but they became very dysregulated this time. It worked well as an indoor activity as the weather was awful outside, not the beautiful day we had last time we played with ice. The children enjoyed using the tweezers to remove the germs from the ice; they then used the wooden hammers to break up the remaining ice. Great activity for them but I believe for my two this is an activity best done outside and I will need to be aware in future that it can cause dysregulation with them so we may need a calming activity afterwards.
Teeth cleaning tray
Teeth cleaning tray – bottoms of water bottles painted, toothbrushes, toothpaste, whiteboard markers (for drawing germs and plaque), clips for holding the teeth together, playdough, toy dentist equipment, hot glue gun.
The children got straight onto this one gloved and masked up (this lasted all of two seconds), they then cleaned all the plaque (playdough) and germs (whiteboard markers) off the teeth using toothpaste, reminding me that they needed a bowl of water to wash their brushes. Once they had cleaned the teeth they noticed that several of their teeth had holes, we spoke about enamel and how it protects your teeth and the nerves underneath from damage. To show this we syringed coffee onto the tooth (these teeth were filled with white kitchen roll so it absorbed the coffee and shrank away from the tooth), the children were fascinated and intrigued as to how the teeth would be repaired to prevent this damage. I explained how it is done at the dentist and then produced the glue gun so (under supervision) they could fill the cavities themselves. Overall the children were really engaged with this tray and were enthralled when they saw me packing it up rather than recycling it knowing it would come out another day and as hoped it gave us a great opportunity to talk about dental hygiene an area where the children due to their many sensory issues and demand avoidant behaviours have great problems with. The children have since played dentist a few times with a few of the tools (mirror and tooth scraper) Dadda made them with his 3D printer and resources we printed from Twinkl just reinforcing the fact this was one they really enjoyed.
Feed the monster water beads
Feed the monster water beads – Water beads, snack monster (something from when the kids were toddlers I found in the great garage clearout but you could easily use a face cut out from cardboard here), kitchen utensils (spoons, cups, etc), sieves, jars.
The children, especially Riley loved this, although in complete honesty he loves anything to do with water beads and will spend hours playing with them. The children didn’t even wait until they had breakfast before getting involved with this one as they were worried that the munchie monster was hungry and it wasn’t fair they were eating and he wasn’t, so they made sure he had a mouthful of water beads to keep him going. The children played with this set up for a good few hours incorporating bits from their kitchen and the scales from the autumn weight tray set up next to them. Riley particularly (as predicted) enjoyed this table spending ages sorting the beads into separate pots by colour.
Autumn weigh tray
Autumn weigh tray – lots of autumnal supplies, weighing scales.
The children enjoyed exploring these but in all honesty it was short lived. They enjoyed the weighing scale but I think again I paired it wrong, I did this tray the same day as the water beads and these are always going to win out. I may have to try gloop and water beads on the same day and see if it blows the kids minds…
They did however enjoy incorporating both trays and feeding the monster autumn stuff and weighing the beads. So the following day when I was trying to pack for our holiday and needing a little peace I put the water beads back out with the monster and the scales and this really was the clear winner of them all. Lots of jars and spoons, the scales, munchie monster and water beads and the packing for the first time in a very long time was done in no time.
So there you are, our September tuff trays and yes I know there are a lot. It seems to be our go to, the trays light up the children’s faces, they are always desperate to get involved whereas if the activity is set up on the table they can take it or leave it. Also mess containment, win, win.
