Foam Collage

Quite a while ago, I made these foam shapes for my kids and let them stick the shapes to the window with water. Big success! At the time, my youngest daughter Ava was only six months old, and therefore had no interest in participating. Since then, she has showed great interest in sucking the water out of the brushes but not so much in the foam shapes. So, I thought of another way of using the same shapes that might entice her into playing with them. Make collages!

To do this with your kids, put a sheet of clear contact paper onto a table/window sticky side facing up, and use masking tape to border the edges so little eyes can clearly see where the contact ends. Provide foam shapes for them to stick as they wish, and that's about it! Of course, you can use anything you want for a collage, but I found foam to work really well because Ava could reposition it time and again without it ripping (like paper). 

Tipping shapes onto the floor and picking them up again is
pretty fun too!

Big sis jumped in and gave it a go.

Ava (15 months) was a busy little bubba for at least 40 minutes. That's pretty incredible in my book, not just because of her age, but because ... it's Ava! She's the type of child who sees a toy she wants but gets distracted by something else en route to the first toy, changes directions, plays with Toy #2 for 10 seconds and then gets distracted by something else. I think part of what maintained her interest was the ability to change the picture, plus the tactile element of the activity: the feel of the foam combined with the stickiness of the contact paper. My baby girl LOVES sticky things!
We'll definitely do this one again. Maybe it's time to make some new shapes...
Thanks for reading! ~ L.