Tiny Explorers, Big Adventures: Fabled Friends Recap 

On Saturday, February 22, The Dot Experience Team, along with APH staff and volunteers, joined the fun at the Fabled Friends Preschool Party at the Southwest Regional Branch of the Louisville Free Public Library (LFPL). Through interactive activities, little adventurers explored the many ways everyone can play, learn, and discover – whether through movement, touch, or problem-solving. 

Event Highlights  

With nearly 300 preschool-aged attendees, Fabled Friends was full of magic, excitement, and fun! APH staff and volunteers geared up with little learners, who embarked on a daring quest to rescue the Monarch butterflies. With courage and curiosity, our young explorers took on each challenge, using hands-on engagement to achieve victory over the evil toad. They played with the Code & Go Mouse, an APH-adapted tool featuring tactile graphics of the mazes, allowing them to program Colby to find the cheese – an interactive early coding activity that the kids loved! 

The gemstone dig had the children eagerly delving through the sand, searching for lost magical rocks and sorting their findings by color and size – a fun way to develop early math skills, classification abilities, and fine motor coordination. It was also a wonderful opportunity for young children to come together, share tools like tongs and scoops, and collaborate in their treasure hunt, fostering social skills and cooperative play along the way. Another featured station was Ribbons and Rhythm. With our Bluetooth speaker, attendees danced and played to upbeat music, twirling ribbons of different shapes, sizes, and colors! This lively activity encouraged self-expression, coordination, and spatial awareness as children grooved to the beat.  

The most popular attraction was the sensory bag station. Children and their families created mesmerizing sensory bags designed to engage sight and touch. Using vegetable glycerin as a smooth, slow-moving base, they added a few drops of green food coloring to create a vibrant, swirling swamp. A sprinkle of glitter gave the bags a magical, sparkling effect, while tiny resin frogs floated and tumbled inside, adding a playful tactile element. Once sealed, the bags were illuminated on an APH Light Box, enhancing the colors and movement, making it an exciting way for children to explore visual tracking, focus, and sensory engagement in a hands-on, calming activity.  

Attendee Feedback  

Families and volunteers had a fantastic time at the Fabled Friends Preschool Party, sharing enthusiastic feedback about the event! Mike Stewart, a volunteer with The Dot Experience, stated, “It was great seeing how engaged the kids were with Code & Go Mouse, which is the station that I worked. Any child could use it, so it’s incredible to see how accessible the game was, easy to learn, and educational!”  

We would like to thank LFPL for allowing us to participate in Fabled Friends as well as the APH staff and volunteers who worked to make this event a success! To learn more about The Dot Experience and future programs, follow us on Facebook.