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.

Play Dough Recipe

Does anyone else have children that start playing with play dough and end up putting it in their mouth? Occasionally mine do, so I like making my own play dough just in case it gets eaten. The only down side is that it doesn't quite last as long as the store bought one.

I collected my few ingredients - flour, cream of tartar, salt, water and oil. Then we measured it all into a saucepan according to the recipe:

1 1/4 cups of Flour

1 cup of Water

1/2 cup of salt (to prevent the play dough going off)

2 Tablespoons of Cream of Tartar

1.5 Tablespoon of Oil

We cooked the play dough over a high heat for 5 minutes and stirred constantly until the dough came together into a sticky lump. It does look wet and very much like goo until the last minute when it all comes together.

Now we have fresh play dough all ready to use. My favourite time to use it is when I have just tipped it out of the pot and it is warm.

Rainbow Cake

My son wanted my to make him a rainbow cake for his birthday. To start with I thought he wanted a swirly marble cake (I'm not sure why since he didn't ask for a marble cake). After a few hiccups we discovered that he really wanted a cake similar to one my fabulous cousin made last year when we were visiting her. That made it easier. All I had to do was get the recipe from her and make it.

The hardest part of this cake is sorting all the m&ms. Good thing I have lots of willing helpers and don't mind the helpers taking payment via the occasional m&m that disappeared into their mouths and not the bowls.

After the m&ms are sorted, the cake baked and cut into shape, the only part left to do is ice the cake and stick all the m&ms on in rows.

Painting with Little Children

One of my biggest problems when painting with my children is the paints either spilling or getting mixed up.

We recently started using egg cartons to divide the paints up and it has been quite effective. I put a squirt of each colour in to the bottom of the cups and then the kids can use the paints. I make sure that there is a container of water. So far we have avoided mixing the colours up, and this is after the children had been painting for almost 40 minutes uninterrupted.

Hand Print Art

Time to make another set of canvas art. This time, since I found 4 small canvases in my cupboard, it is going to be 4 hand prints. One for each child.

We painted the canvases in 4 different colours and then used hands to put a print in the middle of it. All that is left is to sign a name down the bottom of each canvas and put a date on it. Maybe one day my children will look back at these prints and be able to compare how much they have changed/grown.

Magnetic Peg Planes

In our house our fridge is our noticeboard. We stick notes, invitations and artwork up on the fridge because this is the central location here. We all congregate around the kitchen while I am cooking. We come and go through the kitchen multiple times a day, so it is really the ideal place to display information. I finally decided to re-make our tacky magnets from our local MP.

We made some peg planes to stick on magnets and use to hold our artwork up in style. I did discover that my boys don't know what bi-planes are. We did have to go and visit the War Memorial to confirm that there really are planes with two main wings, one on top of the other.

Gingerbread houses 2012

This year we decided to change the recipe we used to make our gingerbread houses and make the gingerbread houses much smaller. We found that the bigger ones look prettier and can fit more decorations on them, but that the children just east all the lollies instead of eating the gingerbread. This recipe is one that the children like eating, so I was hopeful it would be more successful.

Ingredients:
125g margarine
1/2 cup of Caster Sugar
1 egg yolk
2 cups of plain flour
3 teaspoons of ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon white pepper
1 teaspoon of bi-carb soda
1/4 cup of golden syrup warmed for 20 seconds in the microwave

-beat butter and sugar until creamy

-add egg yolk and mix thoroughly

- sift flour, ginger, pepper and bi-carb soda together and then add to the butter mixture along with the golden syrup. This should bring the dough together into a thick stick ball of dough

- knead dough on lightly floured surface and roll out to a 1/2cm thickness

-cut the house pattern out of the dough and bake in the oven for 10-15 minutes or until golden brown.

Makes 1 house and a few tiny biscuits to taste test.

I used the computer to make house shapes to print out so I could use them as templates for cutting out my gingerbread house pieces.

It is a good thing that royal icing can make up for our wonky house pieces!

The children had a lovely time decorating the houses and then eating them.

Biscuit Wreath

This year my oldest son wanted to take in a gift to share with all the teachers from his school and he wanted it to be something edible. While we were sitting in a waiting room at an appointment he found a picture of a biscuit wreath and decided that this was exactly what he wanted to make.

We made a butter biscuit recipe with white chocolate added to the mix for a richer biscuit. Once we cut out the biscuits we 'glued' them together into a wreath shape with melted chocolate. I thought this was easier than a royal icing alternative and the children could manage without my help.

White Chocolate Butter Biscuits

200 grams of butter

1 cup of caster sugar

1 egg

2 1/4 cups of plain flour

100 grams of grated white chocolate

Extra 150grams  white chocolate for joining the biscuits

Icing sugar for sifting over the finished wreath

Cream the butter and sugar then add the egg and mix well.

Slowly add the flour and grated chocolate to the mixture. 

Once the mixture comes together in a big lump put it in the fridge for half an hour.  

Roll the mixture out and cut out various sized stars, place on a baking tray and put in the oven at 180C conventional or 170C fan forced. Bake for 10-15 minutes or until they start to colour - these biscuits are not meant to be brown, so stay close to the oven when cooking as the chocolate in the mix ensures that they go from cooked to burnt in a few minutes!

Once the biscuits have cooled, melt the extra chocolate and use it to glue the stars in a wreath shape. Sift icing sugar over the top to finish.

Cold Banana Ice-Cream

I had a few bananas that were starting to get very ripe so I peeled them, broke them into pieces and froze them. All I had to do was wait for the perfect combination of a hot day, and a day when I remembered that I had these frozen gems all ready to make some mini 'ice-creams'. After the children had worn themselves out on the trampoline we enjoyed our home made ice-cream (I know it doesn't have any cream in it, but any other descriptive term doesn't encompass the creamy texture of the creation).

I put the frozen banana pieces into the blender and turned it on. I forgot to put my hand on the top and the lid came flying off. Our second attempt was more successful.

The bananas take around 5 minutes to blend properly in my blender. I had to stop blending a few times to scrape down the sides. Then we were able to see it happen...our banana lumpy mix turned from this mix here (see below)...

To this incredible looking soft serve banana ice-cream.

All there was left to do was put them into some tiny ice-cream cones.

This banana ice-cream mix does not refreeze very well without crystalising and becoming more like an ice-block rather than ice-cream, so I mostly just freeze 2 bananas at a time and that gives all of my children a lovely serve.

Stained Glass Window Paints

I have had a packet of window paints in the cupboard for a while. It seems like it is something that is too hard for the children to manage on their own without extensive assistance from me. I had a little more time than usual this week so thought I would give it a go. I traced the design from the book with the black paints and let it completely dry. Once it was dry then I let the children loose with the paints. My only stipulation was they could only use one paint at a time and needed to let it dry before moving on. Well, it is a good thing the paint dried very quickly or the first photo would have been as far as the picture developed.

Paper Hobby Horse

In the course of playing dress ups during the week we uncovered a major failing of the dress-up box - there are no horse costumes. Since it has been hot and humid this week, I didn't feel like bringing out the sewing machine to whip up an amazing horse costume (I'm not even sure I could make one without a pattern, anyway!). I remembered my fabulous friend Irene making these paper hobby horses a year or two ago, so I thought I would give it a go.

First I drew a horse head (not one of my better skills!).

Next James cut out two heads and started sticking clumps of wool to the inside for the mane.

Then he glued the two heads together. This was a slight problem because he glued ALL of the heads together. He went back and pulled apart the neck so we could slide the cardboard roll into the head.

Now we have a complete hobby horse to ride around the house and pretend we are galloping off to rescue distressed damsels and compete in horse races around the garden.

Pipe Cleaner Worms

Last week I took my children to a play group and we had a fabulous time. Here are two slithery worms that we made. I was rather taken with this activity. The children were given a pile of squares with a tiny hole in the middle that they had to thread a pipe cleaner through. The end of the pipe cleaner was bent to form a nose and the eyes were glued on. It was a simple activity that we all enjoyed, and it gave my children practice with threading - something they ordinarily won't do.

Pasta Angel

When I was younger ... a lot younger ... I made pasta angels to give my friends and family for Christmas. I always intended to make more each year and then wouldn't get around to it. Since I have a few extra sets of hands this year I am determined to make them again.

The first materials that we need are a few different types of pasta. Rigatoni pasta makes a good body, while the bowtie pasta forms the wings.

My boys glued the wings to the body with PVA glue and left them to dry overnight. 

Next we used macaroni pasta to form the arms. These were slightly trickier to glue on, but we found that if we rested the arms on the wings then it would stay long enough to dry. Again, we left the arms to dry overnight.

Being slightly forgetful, I didn't photograph the next few steps. We found a plastic bunch of grapes at Spotlight and pulled it apart. Each grape was the right size to form a head for our little angels. We glued the grapes on to the bodies. Then we dipped the angels into a tin of enamel paint and used the stems to hang them to dry on a coat hanger. I made sure that this was over a piece of plastic so that the drips wouldn't fall onto the concrete.

Once the heads were dry we glued tiny star pasta on to form the hair.

Once all the glue was dry then we painted the hair  and the tips of the wings gold and drew on two black eyes. 

And here is one of the finished angels.