A couple of years ago I found this great website called Lakeshore Learning. I was looking for high quality craft resources for Eve and to use together. I was pretty much over Walmart's selection of Crayola. Believe me - I love Crayola but was needing something more. I ended up buying a bunch of great craft items!
Pompoms:
Brushes:
Wiggly eyes - because no crafting is complete without wiggly eyes!!
Really awesome paint:
This fun painting set:
Feathers:
Flowers:
I also bought huge white cardboard cutouts of the alphabet along with a bunch more collage type items. And paper. Loved their paper! For the paint I bought inexpensive trays, these were a wonderful thing to have considering Eve was two at the time. The trays helped keep everything nice and neat. They were so easy to clean also.
Last year I bought this fantastic playdough toy set:
My kids have had hours and hours of fun using these toys.
Now I have my eye on two new items.
This bookshelf:
And this water and sand activity table.
But I can guarantee you I won't be putting sand in the containers! Oh, how I HATE sand in my house.
I felt remiss in not sharing this great resource with you. The quality is awesome and this company has so many fun things for kids! The target audience is teachers and schools, but mothers can enjoy all that this company has to offer also.
18 Comments:
Glad to hear about the sand omission! One thing that would be a blast in the tubs is the cornstarch and water. It's rock hard if you hit it but if you pick it up slowly, you can have all kinds of fun. Sam LOVED it!
Mom
I love all of that! I will definately be checking them out! We have been cleaning out our craft supplies in the past couple of weeks and need to re-stock!
Ok I'm your lurker via Rachel's site,(mostly because I saw your homebirthing thing--that's my goal next time and I'll probably try to hit you up for some info soon...) Anyways. That book shelf is great for hardcover books. When I worked at a daycare that's all they had. However! If you plan on putting any paperback/soft books in there they will just bend over in half, falling forward all the time. Which is kind of annoying. Just fyi. =)
Oo, I'm definitely going to check this site out! Wyatt is getting into crafts and hands on stuff, so I'm always looking for fun projects. My biggest problem, though, is that most of my artsy abilities lie in writing, not creating, so I have a rough time coming up with ideas for him to make.
Thanks for sharing! We LOVE crafts around here... can never have enough!
brittany
Thanks for the tip! When J grows, I will definitely be in the market for fun art stuff!
This is great! thanks so much for sharing! We get bored of the "same old stuff" all the time too. I just might have to pay this site a visit!
Oh I LOVE Lakeshore! We actually have a LAKESHORE STORE here! I LOVE LOVE LOVE IT! They have an awesome chore chart for kids too!
Oh Andie - I need you to help me get going on crafts with Juli. She loves it whenever I do something, but I feel very uncreative lately!
How do you work your craft time? Do you just pull out a couple things and say "go at it"? Do you have some kind of end result that they're aiming for? Please give me some help here :)
My little guy is a little too young for craft time- but I can't wait until we can do that- I LOVE it!! I've had friends that just use rubbermaid containers for sand/water tables- then they have nice lids & can be stored easily. We get the One Step ahead magazine that has this canvas book shelf in it that solves the soft book problem. (http://www.onestepahead.com/catalog/product.jsp?productId=534230).
Thanks for sharing, I'll have to check them out. I'm so over wal-mart selections as well, but that's pretty much all we have around here!!
I used to work at a preschool, and instead of using sand in the sandbox, we used oat meal. We filled it up with one container at the beginning of the year, and it lasted the whole time! The kids absolutely loved it, and the cleanup was minimal... just had to sweep when they were done... but it's so much easier than sand... oh, i can't even imagine the places you'd find sand!
Lakeshore rocks! Thanks for reminding me about it. When we moved here, I got rid of all my catalogs. I had completely forgotten about Lakeshore.
We have done colored rice (food coloring on some of it in a plastic bag) and right now we have a mix of dried beans in the sand table.
We don't have lakeshore.........but AC MOORE is great for all that stuff.
You really seem to enjoy spending time with your kids and finding creative things to do. I read where you are looking for a school to put Eve in, but have you thought about home schooling? I think that you would really do well at it as well as enjoying the time together. We were going to put our son in school and just a few weeks before he was to start, we decided to put him in a private Christian school. A few years later with the Lord's prompting, we started home schooling and we really had a good time.
thanks for the link..I always love new craft stuff!
I have quite a few of their products - I love them too! Glad the little one is OK, RSV can be a scary thing! Love the pants photo - my kids have the same problem - they really only want to wear pants with elastic waists - even at 13 and 11!
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