Frog Hand Puppet

I found a hand puppet making craft kit for my 3 year old to do. 

Here are all the parts.

Now she has glued them all onto the puppet and is ready to put on a puppet show for me.

Watermelon 'Sorbet'

I bought a whole watermelon a while ago and we were unable to finish it so I froze it rather than waste the delicious fruit. I had the vague idea I could use it to make watermelon slushies. When we were ready to make the slushies, I started blending...

When it started looking like this I thought it would be a shame to waste this on a slushie when it looked just like sorbet. So I put it in a glass instead and ate it.

Instructions:

To make Watermelon 'sorbet' freeze cubes of watermelon. Once they are frozen blend the cubes until it is a sorbet consistency and serve in a glass or ice-cream cone. I added maple syrup to this to make it extra sweet. Mmmm, delicious.

Autumn Trees

Footprints - a matching game

One of my children has started noticing footprints and wanting to know what made them. It has now become a daily form of entertainment for me when we are out walking and I have started to build up a collection of photos of these prints. We printed out the photos and printed out a photo of the owner to play a matching game. Here are a few of our print photos (I won't bore you with the whole lot!)

Dog Paw Prints ( and its owner's shoe impression)

My shoe print on sand

An Elephant print on mud - I don't think this photo does justice to how BIG the footprint was.

Wet foot prints - I didn't feel like going out for a walk so the children enthusiastically decided to hunt around the garden for footprints. I decided to leave a few prints for them to find. 

Wet show prints

Shoe Box Car

One of the hardest things for me is when we are away from home. At home I find it easy to entertain my children. They know where all the toys are and I know that I have plenty of activities for when I need them. When we are away from home, there are often long periods in the car (think 8-10 hour drives), lots of outings that my children don't have any say in and only one or two toys that we have been able to fit in our bags. 

All of this means we need  to use our imagination to entertain ourselves...and any scraps around the place that could be used to play with. 

We were in luck this time, our lovely host had just purchased a new pair of shoes. How does this help? Well, it gave us a box. A box makes a very good car for a doll if we cut out 4 circles and glue them on.

The fun didn't stop there. Later the same day I found my toddler sitting in the shoe box and sliding herself across the floor. I love the way my children can use and reuse the same idea for a whole range of different games.

Fruit Flowers

Grass Creatures

After a hot summer my lawn was looking rather patchy and in need of some TLC. With this in mind, I purchased a big box of grass seed the last time I was in the garden shop and sprinkled the seeds onto the prepared patches of lawn. There was still quite a large amount of seed left over so we decided to grow some grass men. 

We took some disposable cups from the cupboard, poked a few holes in the bottom and filled it with dirt. The children drew faces on the cups and then we sprinkled the seed on top.

For some reason, I don't have any photos of the cups before the grass started growing, so you will have to imagine peculiar white cups with faces and nothing else. I gave the children a spray bottle and explained that they would need to keep the seeds damp so that they could sprout. 

This is two days after we started growing the grass hair.

The hair has grown some more thanks to the diligent watering the children have been doing.

This little man is ready for a hair cut after 1 week. I wish my hair grew that quickly. 

It seems we picked a good week to try growing grass at home, since it turns out that the preschool started growing grass creatures at the same time!

Here we have our grass caterpillar. We used an old stocking, filled it with a seed/dirt mix and tied the end in a knot. Once it was secure, we used pipecleaners to twist around the stocking to create legs and segments of the caterpillar. We glued googly eyes on and then kept watering it until the grass grew. The grass here took much longer to grow - this is 1.5 weeks old.