Treasure hunt

When I was a little girl we liked to play "treasure" and "secrets" games which included finding pieces of coloured broken glass on the street, dig them in the sand and then look for them later. It was one of the most popular activity in the sandpit. Thankfully now there are much safer options rather than playng with broken glass!. It is also winter here in Melbourne and playing treasure hunt game on the beach is not an option for us. So, here is what we did.

I picked up a few fake gemstones  and shapes, glass decoration figures and wooden numbers  from hot dollar shop, put a few of each kind on the baking tray and covered with sugar. When Alicia came home from preschool I told her there is some treasure hidden in the baking tray under the "snow" and she can to dig it out if she wanted. I showed her that she needs to use the paint brush to discover treasures in the tray.  She was into nothing like this before, so she started digging with rather curious face expression.

Then she started discovering things and her face lit up with smile.

Then she used the brush to clean little treasures from the sugar - totally her idea!

Then she wanted to do it again!

Next day we played this game with rice - this time also she decided she didn't want to use the brush and little glass teddies needed to jump on the "snow" before they get out :)
I also replaced wooden numbers with Russian plastic letters.

Then she wanted to hide the treasures in beans mix from her playkitchen:

And black beans:

Then we played sorting/ pre-reading game with matching object with words (in Russian):

After all these activities our "treasures" needed a wash. So next day we hid them in a soapy water:

Doing this in play area was a mistake so we moved to the laundry:

Alicia was happy discovering treasures and placing them in the clean water (which soon became soapy too).

Cleaning up is a must!

Here are the "treasures" we were playing with: