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I am having trouble finding activities that my entire group can do together. My daughter is only 7 months and still sleeps a lot so she doesn't get to participate in some of the activities. I have a one year old, an 18 month old and my 3 year old son. Does anyone have any ideas of some activities I could do with all of them (minus my daughter) at the same time? I do painting, play dough, play, dance, song, books, outdoors but I'm looking for more art/craft related things.
I find this hard too, I have 3 one year olds and 2 toddlers, I usually do the bigger crafts with the toddlers while the babies have their morning nap or while they have free play. I do a lot of hand print/ foot print crafts for the babies and two simple spring crafts I did last week were cutting out flowers and letting the kids finger paint them and same with rain clouds. I give the babies sponges to paint with sometimes too. But something like rock painting I leave the babies out of it. I have started only doing one bigger craft a week and then have colouring and stamps available daily...I was trying to do a creative craft every day and found it to to be a lot of work, expensive, and no one really seemed to care...once a week it is more exciting!
It is my struggle for sure too! My age range is similar to yours; the youngest (not as young as yours) just turned a year...oldest is 3. One thing they all can do is paint with food...I make up some pudding (vanilla ) & add food coloring. They all also like to do the shaker painting...you put rocks (anything that will make a rattle; I just find rocks are an easy wash after)...anyway, rocks, paint & paper in a Tupperware container (I tape the paper in the bottom) & they shake it to their hearts content...voila masterpiece;). Also, they all love to stick stickers on pages (of course, the older ones can tear the backings off themselves, younger need some assistance). I really believe (& tell parents all the time in interview, it's all about the process for them). We do a craft once a week (like you they draw/color/stamp almost daily). The end results are not wow fantastic but they have a blast. I have a set of craft scissors that cut in patterns and often I will cut around their artwork to make it cute or add a magnet to the back.
It is ok to plan some of your activities around the toys that you have. Everyone could build towers with blocks and see how high they can build, talk about the colours they are using etc. with you giving more assistance (holding the tower so it doesn't fall over) for the youngest or give the baby a bucket with a few blocks in it and then do towers with the two older ones.
Set out cars and line them up in a row, count them, name the colours, discuss what job they do - ie dump truck or front end loader.
Sometimes the best activities are those using toys where we get the kids started and then we retreat or concentrate on playing with the baby and leave the older ones to carry on.