Dumpster dive challenge

I want to share a great game for kids and you don't have to buy anything at all for it. 

Check out your recyclable busket because you want to upsycle it :) This can be old newspapers and magazines and little cardboard boxes, or lots of plastic bags (which I am sure are in profusion in everyone's house nowadays), or this can be a box of the clothes that you were going to donate or to hand down to someone. 

This is a sensory game, and you can choose one material to fill the sensory box with or to use two or three sorts of stuff all together. It can be pieces of paper or cardboard or plastic bags, or cloth. And you know it feels different and it sounds different to crumple them. We had only paper.

This is a dumpster dive challenge, so your sensory box has to be large enough for a kid to dive in or at least to dip arms into it. It can be a cardboard box or a plastic container or a basin. We had two cardboard boxes of a bucket size (not large enough to dive in). And I wanted to fill them with wads of paper.

What I liked most about this idea is that my daughter had series of activities  without knowing that it was a preparation for the dumpster dive challenge. 

• Firstly, she liked to crumple the paper, make a really tight wad to throw it into my face. Yes, we had a snowball game at home!

• Secondly, when there were too many wads all around the floor (enough to fill the boxes up), I did not ask my daughter to clean the mess - we went on a new game: shooting the baskets. And as we had two baskets we could count how many balls each of us scored. In the picture you may see that the table behind the boxes is turned over to screen the balls. It made it easier to hit the box. You can put your baskets just next to the wall, that should work in the same way.

• Thirdly, we got little toys ready to be hidden in the dumpster. And because I wanted to make sure we knew how many there were, and there wouldn’t be any lost I asked my daughter to count them. It is always good to practice counting with a prescooler. But we went further, we made the list of the toys. Tasia knows ABC but can not read any words yet. So we put the initials only. This was how I made it an ABC revising game :)

So there were letters: f - for fairy, s - for Sleeping Beauty, a - for Ariel, j - for Jasmine, c - for Cinderella, m - for Masha and b - for Belle.

I asked my daughter to give me some time to hide the toys in one box. I did not want all the little toys to sink to the bottom of the box, so I wadded them up. Which challenged my daughter even more, because she had to take a better look, to feel each wad and unwrap it to find out if it had a toy or not. And I left the other box empty, for my daughter to throw the wads that she had already searched into it. The found toy had to take its place on the page with the list next to its initials.

• Fourthly, we had to draw the outlines of the toys before we hid them in the box. Because she loved the game so much that she asked to have one more round with a set of her favorite ponies. This time a list would not be enough. We went on and traced each figurine and put the initials inside the outlines. My daughter knew all the names in her collection, so they were not just "P" for ponies but "R" for Rose, "F" for Fluttershine and so on... And later she had to place the found pony properly to fit in the outlines on the paper.

Tasia is 4 years 8 months old.