With snow in the forecast for Sunday night, my kids were hoping for a snow day on Monday… and I was already making a mental list of a few special activities they could enjoy on their day off. But the snow didn’t start falling until we were eating breakfast on Monday, and so they headed off to a full day of school as usual.

One of my ideas was this masking tape maze that I made for them that evening after dinner. Since our carpet is light in color, I actually used blue painters tape to create a maze on the floor of our living room. I started with the rectangular outline and then just kept making lines inside until I had a complete maze. It wasn’t a very complicated maze, and it didn’t have any dead ends or decision points, so it only took me a few minutes to lay it out.

Younger children might enjoy kicking a ball through the maze or using it for trucks and cars, but my two older kids are in elementary school, so I told them that their goal was to move a ping-pong ball through the maze by blowing it with a straw. Of course, the ball rolled out of bounds many, many times, but they weren’t aiming for perfection, so they just put the ball back in and kept going.

I thought Hayden might want to use a stopwatch each time he did the maze to see if he could improve his time, but after he maneuvered the ball through the maze once, he didn’t want to do the same thing again. So he adjusted some of the tape to make different pathways of varying widths and angles, as well as some dead ends, and later added other little toys as obstacles.

And then before bedtime, we pulled up all the tape and threw it away. If we want to do it again, we can make a brand new maze another day!

What ideas do you have for using a masking tape maze? Perhaps younger children could hop through the maze on one foot, or older children could drive a remote control car through the maze. I’d love to hear your ideas.

Here in the woods, the woodpeckers apparently think our house is a tree. One afternoon I actually went to the front door because Magen and I both thought that someone had knocked on the door. Although I love how woodpeckers look, and I’m all in favor of them pecking on trees, they’ve turned into an annoyance because they’re loud and they’re destroying our wood siding.

Schools are closed today for Election Day, so both kids are home with me today. Yesterday I was looking for some creative project ideas that we could work on today, and when I found this paper woodpecker toy, I thought it would be fun to create some woodpeckers that make us happy. (Made By Joel is an amazing blog I discovered recently, written by a father/artist who makes simple, homemade, creative toys and crafts for his four-year-old twins.)

Last night after supper I showed the kids the video of the woodpecker toy we were planning to make today, and Hayden watched it over and over and over.

So this morning I printed out two woodpecker templates from the downloadable image and we got to work. I love that all of the supplies were things we had on hand — photo paper, a drinking straw, rubber bands, and tape. Oh, and a few little plastic beads. After the woodpeckers were complete, I took Joel’s advice and tied beads to each end of the rubber bands so they wouldn’t slip out of the straw.

Magen named her woodpecker “Peckanona.” When she told me the name, I asked her how it was spelled, and she spelled it out for me. (The ‘o’ is a short ‘o.’) Then she explained that it’s just a made-up word, so she can spell it however she wants. “I mean, it’s not a real word like a, an, the, meteorologist, Constantinople…” I love how her mind works!