Fine Motor Counting Activity

This easy activity is perfect for practicing early math while developing fine motor skills.

Before I was a mom, I was a developmental psychology major. In my studies, I was intrigued by sensory and fine motor development then. Now that I am a mom, I love setting up activities for my own kids that give them hands on fun and learning opportunities without spending a ton of money to do it.

This fine motor counting activity is perfect for preschoolers.They can work on their fine motor skills while practicing counting. You might have all the materials at home to do this, making it fuss free and frugal. If not, I have included some affiliate links you can use to get your supplies.

Supplies:
Rainbow Bands
Large Craft Sticks
Sharpies

Directions:
Write numbers on large craft sticks with sharpies.
Use the largest craft sticks you can find to make the activity challenging.
Offer your child small rubber bands, like the rainbow loom style of bands and encourage your child to count the number of bands that need to go on each craft stick and slide that number of bands on to each craft stick.

If you are looking for more fine motor activities for kids, check out these posts:
Unicorn Fine Motor Bin
Play Doh Pre Writing

Cat in the Hat Pattern Making Sensory Bin

This year in honor of Dr.  Seuss's birthday we made this easy and fun Cat in the Hat Pattern Making sensory bin. This is a fun way to put your puffle to good use and work on pattern making skills which later help kids grasp math concepts.

This post contains affiliate links. 

We love sensory bins, bags and play! Both of my kids still get excited when they see I have a new bin ready to explore. This one was a huge hit because they had been itching to get their hands into pluffle. This is such a fun squishy foam! It is a must have for sensory play!

Supplies:

Pluffel

Assorted red and white items.We used cotton balls, feathers, legos, mini clothespins and glittery Christmas scatter

Measuring spoons, tongs and other fun items to pick up the items in the bin with.

A large tray or a plastic storage bin.

Directions:

Pour pluffle on to a tray or into a storage bin.

Make sure you take a moment to squeeze, form and otherwise take in the pluffle; it is a great sensory play option and adults will enjoy the texture too.

Next, offer your child an assortment of red and white items.

We used tiny clothespins, legos in red and white, feathers, cotton balls, and Christmas scatter that was glittery and red.

Encourage your child to recreate the stripes of the Cat in the Hat's hat.

This is a great opportunity to use fine motor skills with the spoons and tongs. Encourage your child to try placing the items with those tools as well as their fingers.

When play time is over, you can snap a lid on the bin, or put it all back in the pluffle container for future play sessions. Pluffle never dries out!

You can find all of my sensory ideas here.

Favorites include:
Rainbow Rice BinVeggie Garden Sensory Bin

4 Ways To Get Your Crafting Business Taken Seriously

Crafting is more than just a fun, therapeutic and rewarding pastime. It can also be a highly

lucrative business that can either become a profitable side hustle or even liberate you from your day job. Selling your own handmade crafts harkens back to a

simpler time when people made an honest living from their hands. And in this increasingly

tech-savvy and fast paced world, there’s a great deal of appeal in that both for skilled

crafters and the people who buy their wares. 

Image by Pixabay via Pexels

But building a business of your own from scratch can be extremely challenging… especially if you’re
running it in your free time out of your spare room / studio. It’s very common to suffer from impostor
syndrome and feel that everything you do marks you out as an amateur. You know that you need to
adopt the mindset of a business person… but you’re not quite sure how. 

Get to know your audience

Before you know how to sell in the kinds of volumes that are meaningful to you, you need to get to know
your audience. What do they want? What do they expect? How do they want to feel? And how can your
products fill that gap for them? Are they looking for something beautiful to display in their home?
Something practical that will stand the test of time? Or something cute, fun and novel? 

The great thing about crafts is the sense of community it provides. So the best place to start marketing
is in your own online community where people know you, respect your talent and see the value in your
work. From your interactions online can help you get a fairly strong idea of what kind of people buy the

things you make. 

Start building a brand

Building a brand is a bigger challenge than you may think. It’s not simply a case of finding a graphic
designer and creating a logo. It’s about establishing a set of standards and qualities that you want your
branding to stand for, and that your customers can rely on. And that takes time and thought. As Amazon
founder Jeff Bezos once said “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room”. 

Invest in a business presence

Whatever your branding, you likely want to be perceived as the kind of small, independent homespun business that cares about its customers. But that said, you also want to be taken seriously as a professional. And that means establishing a professional presence. To achieve this, purchasing a domain name from a provider like NameSilo can be beneficial. Plus, they accept a variety of payment methods, such as Amex, to ensure a seamless transaction process. A unique and memorable web domain enhances your professional image. Establishing yourself online is the newest and most effective way to ensure your business comes across as professional and capable of providing a good service to its customers. When starting out as a small business it can be expensive however to hire someone to build a site for you, utilizing great free online tools such as Wordpress can be the perfect alternative to get a webpage up to discuss your business and engage customers. There are lots of great free resources out there to get started on doing this yourself, one notable example being the createwpsite YouTube channel, which can assist in putting your site together.

Establish yourself online with content marketing

Finally, content marketing is a great way to establish the quality of your products as well as the
experience and insights of the person who makes them. When people invest in their products, they
invest in you, as well. Creating blog posts, vlogs, “how to” tutorials and other forms of content online
not only helps to establish you as an expert, they also increase customer’s personal investment in you. 

8 Charming Champagne Cocktails

Valentine's Day is near, and if that isn't an occasion for celebrating with a little bubbly, then I don't know what is!

This post contains partner content or affiliate links.


This year, I have 8 charming champagne cocktails to consider creating for my sweetie on Valentine's Day, but I have a feeling that any time we have cause for celebration I will reference this list!

Strawberry Champagne Margarita
Champagne Smash
Champagne Jello Shots
Strawberry Champagne Cocktail
Raspberry Champagne Cocktails
Mock Champagne Punch
Fizzy Julep
Champagne Floats


If Champagne isn't your favorite, you might like my Goodnight Kiss Cocktail recipe.

Which of these champagne cocktails sounds the best to you? Tell me who you would sip these with!?

Fun Tech DIY To Do With Kids

Children have a thirst for knowledge and love to experiment. Sometimes it can be challenging to find
projects that you can do from home that can help encourage this. DIY technology projects can be so
much fun, and usually, you can find the items in the house, or source them pretty quickly online. So
here are a few fun DIY projects that you can do with the kids. 

Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

Earmuffs

You might have seen these in a store already, but you can create your own music earmuffs at home.
The critical thing to remember is that you won’t be able to put your earbuds in your ear. Instead, they’ll sit
behind a layer of fabric. Kind of like can headphones - but warmer. Simply cut a small space in the
center of ear earmuff, slide the earbud inside and stitch it back up again.

 If you are feeling extra adventurous, you can use larger headphones, and replace the fabric entierly. If
you don’t love the idea of musical earmuffs, try putting on-ear headphones Into a woolly hat instead. 

Echo

You can create your own Amazon Acho by using a Raspberry Pi. Amazon has a range of walk throughs
and coding sources to help you manage it. And once you have tackled that, you can move on to turning
it into a Twitter Bot, a Minecraft Game server, or even just private storage. 

FireStick

If you have a firestick or Apple Tv, you might be surprised to know just how much you can do with
them - aside from watching TV. TroyPoint has a few really fun DIY projects that are really simple to
tackle. 

USB Drive

Sure we mostly use cloud storage or HDD now, but the simple USB drive has a lot going for it. Even
more, when you take the time to create your own case. You can opt to do something with dried flowers
and epoxy or perhaps building something with LEGO. You can get super adventurous and use an oven
bake clay to create a dinosaur or a happy potter wand. Bake for a few minutes in the oven and voila!

Jewelry

Geek-chic and ‘nerd’ jewelry is a big deal. Even more to the people who are genuinely in that culture.
You can create some incredibly unique pieces of jewelry like earrings or necklaces with old
motherboards. Of course, other circuit boards will do the trick, but motherboards are more prominent,
and you’ll be spoiled for choice on the textures. 

You’ll need to saw the board into the shapes that you want, and it is recommended that you wear
gloves and eye protection while doing this. Smoothing down the edges doesn’t take long with some
epoxy. 

You can pick up old defunct computers at car boots and online, rather than consider sacrificing old
motherboards that you have in the home (that can be used to build your own computers)

Simple and fun ideas to help encourage your children to get creative with technology and DIY.