Basket case – making a treasure basket for a baby

Bubby D has reached that age where grabbing at anything and everything in sight is the favourite activity of the day. (Time to tie my hair back and hold on to my glasses!).

With this in mind, and remembering the Wee Man going through a similar phase, I decided its time to whip out the treasure basket.

As the name suggests, it is a basket filled with ‘treasure’. However the treasure in question is not money, or chocolate coins (the Wee Man was more than a little disappointed about that). It is in fact ‘found objects’ from everyday life.

The idea is simple. Introduce babies to a whole range of interesting textures, colours and shapes by providing them with different objects from around the home – a whole big learning opportunity without the need for expensive plastic toys that claim to do the same job. (I realise at this point, the whole concept seems to be going somewhat against my self-confessed gadget geek persona, but hey, sometimes the simplest and cheapest things are better than the bests ‘gadgets’!).

As you can see, Bubby D was very interested to dig in and begin a whole new sensory experience.

So…what’s in the basket?

Some of the items in ours include:

• empty cardboard eggbox
• scouring cloth
• scrubbing brush
• wooden spoon
• dolly peg
• cheerleading pompom
• foil cases from apple pies
• a cd
• an empty bottle filled with water, food colouring and glitter (with the top superglued on)
• a small plastic food tub filled with rice and the lid superglued on
• the polystyrene disk from under a pizza
• a pastry brush
• an old set of keys
• some crinkly plastic
• a lemon
• a travelcard wallet
• a bath puff
• some bubble wrap
• a sponge cloth

As you can see, its a bit of a random list, but it provides hours of fun. Best of all, you can keep on adding things as and when you find them, so the basket never gets boring!

What would you put in yours?