Simple I Spy Activities for Kids

Today, we are focusing on visual sensory play. Kind of self-explanatory, but it’s things that you see.

My three year old has a very hard time focusing her eyes on objects, so I thought it would be fun to do some I Spy projects with her.

I know there are a million and one different I Spy activities on the internet, but like I said yesterday, sometimes an activity doesn’t need to be new and fancy. Sometimes you need something simple and familiar.

We’ve made I Spy bottles before with a plain water bottle, some water, glitter and some trinkets. We’ve also done the rice bottles.

But I wanted Shiloh to have time to focus her eyes on things rather than shaking a bottle and having it all drop immediately to the bottom or float to the top.

I also wanted objects that we could “talk” about, so I used toys and objects that she was familiar with. (After the bottle has served its purpose you can always retrieve the toys from the bottle.)

And finally, I only put a few items on/in each I Spy activity. For three reasons:

#1 To make them easier to find
#2 To allow for us to repeat words over and over as we found the objects.
#3 To keep it from being overwhelming

These are what we came up with:

The I Spy mini-book:

What makes it different? There are only a few pictures on each page, so we could easily spot them and repeat the words as we found them. I also added a counting element to it even though Shiloh doesn’t understand counting yet. She does like to say the numbers sometimes, so it’s good exposure.

The sparsely populated I Spy Page:

What makes it different? A traditional I Spy page is incredibly cluttered. That is very difficult for a child who has a hard time with visual concentration. So I made some that had some space in between the pictures. These are intended for “conversation”. You can have your child find the different animals. And if they are more advanced in their language skills you can use them to teach prepositions (above, below, beside, etc.)

We also had some farm stickers on hand and Shiloh decided it would be fun to match the pictures on the stickers to the pictures on the page. She totally surprised me on that one! The only one she couldn’t figure out was the duck because the duck on the sticker was yellow and on the page it was white (and the chicks were yellow.)

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And the always fun, I Spy squishy bag:

We simply filled a quart-size bag very full of water and just a few objects. Then we placed it inside another quart bag for safe-keeping and put duct tape on the seal. She liked finding and grabbing the different objects in the bag.