Fruit and vegetables
Gather a range of fruit or vegetables and place them in baskets or bowls, covering with tissue paper or napkins. For example:
* Place a tomato, plum tomato, a few cherry tomatoes, and tomatoes on the vine in a bowl, all individually wrapped.
* Encourage babies and toddlers to explore the objects and enjoy their sensory findings.
Or focus on citrus fruit:
* Gather two oranges, limes, lemons and grapefruit. Slice one of each in half, and one half into portions.
* Place the whole fruit and one half of each in a large dish.
* Offer a slice of fruit to the toddlers and challenge them to find the matching half and whole fruit in the dish.
During both activities, name the fruit or vegetables as the toddlers explore them and describe textures, tastes and scents.
Crepe paper dying
* Suggest that you have lots of crepe paper in a 'rainbow' of colours and ask the toddlers to help you rip it into small pieces.
* Sit together on the floor and chat about the colours and how helpful the children are being while they rip the paper up.
* When you have lots of pieces of paper invite them to watch you do some 'magic'.
* Ask them to choose a few bits each for you and place them on to a piece of white paper.
* Take a water spray bottle and gently soak the crepe pieces on the white paper.
* Suggest you sing a song such as 'Sing a rainbow' while you wait for the 'magic' to work.
* At the end lift one or two pieces of the crepe off the white paper and draw their attention to the marks left behind.
* You could spray a little more water and sing again, or let the children remove the rest of the crepe.
* Invite toddlers to do their own if they would like to.
* Let it dry and laminate.
Food frieze
* Cut a variety of food pictures from magazines
* Alternatively, let the children take photos of their snacks and lunches over a few weeks and use prints of these.
* Give each child a large piece of sticky-back plastic placed on a cardboard frame. Put this on a table, sticky side up.
* Let toddlers choose some of the photos to place into their frame until they feel they have created a 'food feast'.
* Cover with another sheet of sticky plastic and hang around the snack area, or cut off the frame and use as snack mats.
Alice Sharp is director of the training company Experiential Play, Glasgow