Infant Water Play

I have seen a number of posts about infant water play floating around so I decided to give it a try with my 7 month old son, Aedan. Today was in the 80s so it was a perfect day for this! It's super simple, very cheap and he had a blast!

I used a bunch of stuff I already had laying around the house and was able to set up our station on my incredibly tiny front entry way porch. You don't need a lot of room; I had just barely enough space to spread out two bath towels for us to sit on. Here's the set-up:

 

Bowl, bags of colored water, clear plastic cups, a sponge, the lid to a storage container, some dried pasta and rice and a few towels.

 Pretty simple, right? This is also great if you are entertaining company that happens to have small children. Not a single one of these items is 'baby' related and was still child safe, with supervision. (My son did try to eat an elbow noodle or two, but with some distraction and redirection, we avoided some major temper tantrums.)

Aedan started out pretty simple by exploring a clear plastic cup. It was great to reinforce manipulation of objects and he even got to explore a bit of pouring and dumping, which is great!

Next I introduced the sponge. At first he was leery of the new texture but eventually he got into it, splashing the water with the sponge.

He enjoyed making sounds by first hitting a cup against the side of the glass bowl, and then striking the cups against one another. Another great reinforcement of object manipulation!

Next I introduced a bag of colored water. Simply some food coloring and water in a ziplock bag reinforced with some duct tape. This is where he really started to let loose! Once he got a good grasp on the bag, he really enjoyed the sensation of smacking the bag against things. He started off splashing the water with the bag. Here, he discovered the tray of pasta and rice and used his bag to splash and then swipe across the tray, moving all the pasta and rice to one side.

He got to explore the stick used to blow bubbles for a little while. Eventually it ended up in his mouth, so we moved on to something else pretty quick.

He showed quite an affinity for the bags of water, especially the dark blue one.

We revisited the sponge, along with some big splashing!!

Fast forward a bit; he eventually got bored with the bags, so first we poured the blue bag into the bowl of water and let the bag of yellow water float intact. We practiced stirring the water and watched as the bag circled around and around. Shortly after that, we broke the yellow bag and slowly poured it into the blue water, to make green! Then we got out the fountain from our bath time toys and played in the sprays of green water.

Inevitably, he wanted to explore on his belly, so I let him roll over and I set the tray down in front of him with some water on it. He eventually crawled onto it, laid in the water and played with his cups until he grew tired. Then, it was time for a nap.

Overall, the experience was a really great enrichment activity that kept him actively engaged for almost 45 minutes, which is really awesome for a 7 month old. We were able to explore a LOT of different things: sitting, reaching, grabbing, object manipulation, filling and pouring, textures, water splashing, early color recognition and color mixing. Plus we kept cool on a hot summer day!!

XOXO
Jenny