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.

Autumn Trees

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.

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.

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.

Tube Man

James asked me to draw a shirt on his tube man. I like the personality of this little man - he now keeps me company in the kitchen while I am cooking

A Friendly Echidna

We collected some leaves while we were out today and decided to use them to make an echidna. First I drew an outline of the echidna.

Then I gave the children the leaves and some glue to finish making their little echidnas. I had thought that the gum leaves would create fantastic spines...and so they did, only the spines the children wanted to make were lying down because the echidna is our friend.

Stained Glass Houses

This is a really simple craft idea. First I printed out an outline of a house and then cut the house out, leaving the house shape. Bigger children can cut out their own shapes, but since I am planning on taking this one to my mothers group, I thought it was simpler if I prepared the outlines beforehand. 

Then I covered the sheet of paper with contact. I saved the paper  from the contact so I could stick it behind the paper to keep the contact sticky and dust free until we were ready to do the activity.

The next step was to set James up with a container and ask him to tear tissue paper into small pieces, along with a few pieces of cellophane. Here is one of the containers he prepared for me.

Then it is simply a case of peeling the backing off the contact again and letting the little artists decorate their houses. One they finished, I covered the back with contact and stuck them on our window for decoration.

They immediately wanted to make something else so we cut out rocket shapes and butterfly shapes to work on as well. A successful activity for us, I think!

Crayon Rubbings - Leaves

We were walking through the school grounds today when we noticed this clump of leaves. James, of course, had to stop and pick it up. He wanted to know what I thought we could make with it so I suggested we try crayon rubbings. These leaves are perfect for it since they have very pronounced veins and an interesting shape.

Here are our tools

James did one complete rubbing and then thought the paper around the edge was in need of decoration too, so we have a collection of partial rubbings.

The other children didn't want to be left out and tried different colour crayons. We found that the oil based pastels made the best rubbings for little fingers. The ordinary crayons needed a little extra force as well as a steady hand to stop the leaf slipping under the paper.

Finger Print Blossom Tree

This is a print out of a tree that was coloured in and decorated. Once all the colouring in was done, we used our fingers to dot white and pink flowers all over the branches ...and let ourselves get carried away by dotting flowers right down the trunk of the tree too. It is a unique tree that probably only exists in our imaginations. Once the paint was dry, the boys made a lot of little cuts in a strip of green paper and glued it on to look like grass.

Cotton Ball Sheep

My daughter loves to use glue, so I sat her down to happily stick the cotton balls all over this sheep shape I had sitting in my useful box. It kept her entertained for a good half hour while I was hanging the clothes on the line. 

Creepy Crawly Kit for something fast

The Ladybirds sparked an insect and creepy crawly hunt through our garden this afternoon. After making our own ladybirds, the children wanted to make other crawling insects. Since I was halfway through pruning one of the trees out the front of my house, I was keen to get back to work.  

I remembered that I had a tiny insect kit from Clever Patch and let the little ones loose with them. These are the four insects that were sitting on the bench for me when I came back inside:

Mr Blue Back Spider

Sparkly Miss Ladybird

Flower Fly

Miss Violet Ant

Gingerbread Christmas Trees

This is an easy recipe for gingerbread that can be transformed into a variety of gifts. James is very fond of making gingerbread Christmas trees. This consists of cutting out 2 stars in each size and sticking them together with melted chocolate. James then tipped the rest of the chocolate over the top as snow. I then package up in cellophane and ribbons for a present.

Ingredients:

125g margarine

1/2 cup of Caster Sugar

1 egg yolk

2 cups of plain flour

3 teaspoons of ground ginger

1 teaspoon of bi-carb soda

1/4 cup of golden syrup warmed for 20 seconds in the microwave

3 different sized star biscuit cutters

white chocolate melts

hundreds and thousands

-beat butter and sugar until creamy

-add egg yolk and mix thoroughly

- sift flour, ginger 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 sticky ball of dough - if it is too sticky then add a little extra flour

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

- cut out equal amounts of stars from each sized cutter

- bake for 15 minutes or until golden

- remove biscuits from the oven and cool on biscuit racks

- melt white chocolate and use to stick the star biscuits together. Each tree consists of 2 large, 2 medium and 2 small biscuits. Drizzle remaining chocolate on top of the biscuits and sprinkle hundreds and thousands on top.

Fruit Faces

We went to Floriade today and the children made fruit faces at the Yellow Van activity tent. The best part of it was eating the faces when we finished!

Tissue Paper Butterflies

While we were playing around with the tissue paper flowers James decided that he wanted to have a butterfly. Every time we go outside to look at our flowers there seem to be butterflies flitting  around, so I could see the connection.

I was rather dubious about whether we could make the same process work for a butterfly, but there would be no harm in trying. These butterflies look like a cross between a flower and a butterfly. They are wonderful for the kids to fly around the room and still look good after chunks of paper tear off. Next time I'll use a few less sheets of paper.

Tissue Paper Flowers

I am enjoying the spring flowers all around the garden. The children decided to make me some paper ones for inside the house. Here we have some A4 pieces of tissue paper layered on top of each other. The children made little cuts all along the edges.

Then we wrapped a pipe cleaner around the middle of the flower and twisted it tightly together.

The tricky part was trying to gently separate the layers of tissue paper to create the flower. We ended up with a few little rips, but it is hardly noticeable once we put it in a vase with a few other flowers.

This vase is going to brighten up my white kitchen.

Stick Christmas Tree Card

We're getting started on card making early. I think that now I have one child at school we need to have A LOT of cards. This one is very easy if you have paddle pop sticks. Simply paint some green and some brown and leave them to dry.

When the paddle pop sticks are dry we used one brown one and 3 green ones per tree.

Put 5 dots of glue on the brown stick and attach cut pieces of the green stick in order of size. The bottom green stick only has the ends trimmed. Once again we left it to dry before attaching it to a card. I like my trees plain, but the boys wanted to glue decorations on their ones.

Rainbows

Did anyone see the rainbow earlier in the week? Just before the thunder storm hit we saw a beautiful rainbow.

So when we came home, we painted our own rainbow with water colour paints.

I quite like our version of the rainbow. This is Imogen's one. We have a peculiar water colour set that we used big sponges with to create the rainbow in one big sweeping stroke, so it is especially good for small hands! Next time I will remember not to use shiny paper as it makes the colours slide a little on the paper.

This is the water colour set we have for the children to use. (I need to remember to hold my camera strap out of the way!!)