Project “I Spy”

One rainy morning earlier this week we needed to do something different.  Nathan was in the kitchen getting the orange juice out of the fridge himself, taking pictures with the camera in the bedroom and pulling flashlights out of the drawer and throwing them in the Living room simultaneously it seemed.  As I was cleaning things up I found he’d dragged a chair to the phone and was having an imaginary in depth conversation with Porter, his cousin, AGAIN.  I didn’t know whether to laugh or scream.  How much trouble can a two year old get into inside of 60 seconds flat?  Plenty!  Something different was in order so I headed down to the basement with the boy in my arms and brought up some supplies I’d been saving for just the right occasion.  On line I’ve seen stores selling some rather expensive “I Spy” bags which are clever and fun.  I’ve seen friends of mine sew their own renditions for a quiet time toy.  But I wanted something my children could participate in more, though this project is not  as portable as the sewn bags that I’ve seen. 

I had saved up some clear V-8 juice bottles and cleaned them out well.  Then we began using a funnel and filled each bottle part way with rice.  (Clear beads are a common content of eye spy bags but rice works for this as well and is much cheaper to come by).  Letting the kids scoop and pour the rice in themselves is very good practice with motor skills for young children but you will have to clean up a little afterwards.  The four year old had no trouble with this.  The two year old needed close attention from me but did remarkably well after I worked with him for a little bit.  Then I got out my “junk” bin.  Yes, it’s actually labeled “junk” (it’s not very big) because it’s good fun stuff for when your child, say, needs to build a Leprechaun Trap for a school project.  So this stuff is fun and quite useable but incredibly miscellaneous.  My kids had a good time digging out different beads, balls, shells, buttons, plastic jewelry, empty spools, pebbles, and whatnot to add to their bottle.  If you wanted you could do bottles with themed objects too.  Choosing and adding objects to the bottle was as exciting as sorting allowance money and sticking pennies in the piggy bank. 

Then we filled the bottles up with the rice to the bottleneck so there is still movement for the contents.

Nathan can pick his up despite its weight but I suggested sitting down with the bottles.  You  can lay them in your lap to search or roll them on the floor and have a peek at what emerges.  We had races to see who could find the baby first, or the ring first, or the safety pin.  It was quite interesting to see who could get the object to surface first and they had a good time with it.  Then we set them aside for me to finish them and I marked their initials on the lid of each bottle.

I made an alphabetical list of the specific objects in each child’s bottle, covered the cut out list with packaging tape (laminating would be nicer but…) and then I used the glue gun to fix the list to the bottle.

Then for safety purposes as well as the obvious cleanliness issue I put glue around the edge of the lid and fastened the lids onto each bottle.  I don’t want that much rice poured out of the bottle by my two year old and of course I don’t want anything to get swallowed from the bottle either.

Let the bottles stand up to dry and cool so the rice doesn’t get glued to the lid and in just a few minutes you have a fun game that the kids can play.  It’s not the most quiet game but they do have to sit down to do it and hopefully it holds their interest for a few minutes.  The children seemed to enjoy the time they spent helping to put these together.  And the project really helped to channel my two year olds energies.  Hooray for surviving a rainy morning at home!