I Spy

I cannot even begin to explain how simple and fun this activity was. During this activity, I felt like a real life version of the hands in the air / happy dance emoji come to life. It was just that good. Plus, there are like 7,000 extensions to this activity so we could literally play it for daaaaays (yes, all those a’s are super necessary).

I filled a tray with random items I pulled out of the “What does this toy go with?” and “How did we even end up with this” toy box. I know you have a bin like that or at least I’m hoping you do so I can feel better about myself and our toy situation. I was a tad strategic with the items I pulled from the bin: first, I made sure Sam has a word for each item / knew what each item was. He doesn’t know what an octopus is yet so this wasn’t the time to use the octopus finger puppet. I also made sure the colors of the items were varied so it was easy to distinguish one item from the next. That seemed to work well and kept him successful.

We sat together and played good ol’ fashioned “I Spy”. As in ” I spy with my little eye….” and it was glorious. Sometimes, I asked for exactly what I could see “I spy a horse” and he’d identify the horse. Other times, I asked for something blue and waited to see what he’d come up with. The extensions for this activity are limitless: position words (I spy something next to the spoon), use numbers or letters, make this into an activity on color.

This activity has it all and with the little amount of time this takes to set up and the zero mess it leaves behind, we definitely got our money’s worth playing this over and over again while baby sister napped. It was such a perfect way to spend 1:1 time with Sam.