Homemade Light Boxes

One of the things that is often incorporated into the activities featured on Play At Home Mom is a light table. I decided to make homemade light boxes for the kids (with my husband's help). They aren't quite finished, but they are functional.

First we bought two fairly small clear bins. We wanted them to each be able to play on their own and we liked the idea that they could even pull them into their laps if they wanted. We bought white spray paint (the kind designed to adhere to plastic) and spray painted the inside of the bin and some of the lid. We also bought battery powered florescent lights to put inside. I used some pattern paper I had gotten a while back from a fabric store and we use that to diffuse the light. Hopefully the pictures will make all of this clear.

So far, we have just played with translucent items on top of the box. Once they get bored with that, I'll start to introduce different art and sensory activities using the light box. So far we've used glass gems, mosaic shape tiles, translucent letters, and some translucent duplos on the box. The gems we sorted by color. The shapes can be sorted by color and shape. You can also use the shapes to make pictures. Two triangles make a diamond. Two squares make a rectangle. You can make a house or flower or anything else you can imagine. The translucent letters can just be sorted by color or letter or used to spell simple words. We didn't have enough translucent duplos to do much with, but they thought they looked really cool on the light box.

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