Sooner than I want, Princess will be a toddler. A friend in one of my mom's groups is coordinating a toddler busy bag exchange. I participated in a busy bag exchange for 4 and 5 year olds last year and it turned out great. Even though Princess is still a baby, I thought I would go ahead and participate in this exchange. It's always good to be prepared with fun activities for kids. If you don't know what a busy bag is, it's basically a quiet activity that fits in a bag that you can take with you for your child to enjoy.
For this exchange, I made an Animal Memory Game. This activity literally came to me in my sleep. I put 4 different animals on each 4x6 picture. Then I glued the pictures to the back of construction paper, laminated it, and then cut them out. There are 12 cards, six animals: pairs of birds, dogs, cats, horses, ducks, and rabbits. The child will try and match like animals. They will match a baby animal with its parent.
I made 23 busy bags and will get 23 different busy bags at the exchange next week. I love these exchanges because you get so many neat activities by just coming up with and making one. The budget for our exchange is no more than $2 per bag. For this project I spent less than $20, which is great! It took more time than money to prepare. Finding and printing the pictures, then assembling them took about 2 hours, which isn't bad. This doesn't include the time it took to pick up the pictures or take them to laminate them. I printed 75 pictures because I went ahead and made 25 busy bags. I love how they turned out and I really hope the kids like them. Each set fit on one piece of construction paper so this made them easy to cut and bag.
You can really personalize this game with different themes. I think I'm going to make a family memory game for Princess for Christmas basically doing this same thing.
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| Pictures in stacks to glue on the construction paper |
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| Laminating the pictures for durability |
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| Ready to cut them |
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| Putting the game in the bags |
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| What the game will look like when played |
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