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.

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.

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. 

Paper Christmas Trees

We were playing with shapes today when Imogen decided that this one was a tree. This tree then needed to be decorated.

So I found some small tubes of puffy paint. It dries in a 3D blob, so would stand out from the card. I also found an odd assortment of sequins, beads and buttons to use.

Here is a little forest of trees

We decided to stick them to the cards with sticky dots (removable, reusable stickers) so that the tree can be detached from the card and placed on a mantle or shelf as a decoration.

Nativity Card

Here we have a fingerprint family (and since I am typing on the computer you can safely deduce that the fingers were not mine). The house is made of sticks and glue and hopefully it will hold together better than the little pig stick house did! I am unsure as to whether I should risk posting these ones due to the wonky nature of the sticks. 

Animal Shapes

Today we have a couple of animal shapes that Imogen decorated while I had a cup of tea. Now we have a sheep and a unicorn to begin a poster farm with. I wonder what other animals will join them over the weekend...

Christmas Cards with Clay Ornaments

Anyone with a child at school will understand the volume of cards required before Christmas. And when you have a child that wants to make every single card himself, then you will understand why we start making them early.

Here are our latest efforts using the clay ornaments we made earlier in the year.

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

Ladybirds to help in the garden

It is the time of year for me to get out into the garden and do some weeding and pruning. The children like to come out and explore the insects we can find. Today we were lucky enough to spot some orange and red ladybirds keeping our plants healthy by eating the aphids and scale - always a problem in our garden with all our roses and citrus trees. There seem to be more ladybirds this year, so perhaps there will be less scale for me to worry about...

Here are some of the ladybirds we made this afternoon.

First we found some red and black cardboard. Then we cut out two circles roughly the same size.

We cut the red circle in half and used a hole punch to put a few holes in the red cardboard and glued them onto the black circle leaving a space at the top for the head. Black marker works just as well to create the spots on the ladybird. We then glued some googly eyes onto the lady bird. 

Once we finished making our ladybird James decided he wanted to make it into a magnet. So we found a peg and an old magnet from the fridge to stick on the back (one of the advertising magnets that frequently turn up in our letterbox). Then it was simply a matter of glueing the ladybirds onto the peg. 

Once these are dry we will be able to use them to hold up the school notes on the fridge with style!

Brighton Beach Houses

The one thing I really miss is living near the beach. It is not just a place for swimming - I love walking along the beach in all seasons with all the sights, smells and sounds. I try to go and visit the beach at every opportunity, usually when I visit family in Melbourne, so that my children can experience a little of the beach life I took for granted growing up.

On a recent trip to Melbourne we went to look at the Brighton Beach houses. I quite like the colourful row of tiny little houses on the beach, especially on a wet and windy day like this one. We decided to see if we could make one of our own to go with the interesting collection of shells and rocks we found.

We folded 2 A4 pieces of cardboard in half (folding the short side in half). Then we glued paddle pop sticks on as the weather boards. Once the glue was dry we then used masking tape to stick the two pieces of cardboard together to form the 4 walls.

The roof is made from a long piece of corrugated cardboard and two triangles. Once all the building was complete the children were free to decorate their houses. James wanted lots of windows on his one.

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.

Under the Sea Painting

I have a drawer full of paintings like this. Today I decided that we needed to do something with them. When I asked the children what they thought we could make with the picture, they told me it looked like water. Further discussion concluded that there are fish, jellyfish, rocks and seaweed in the water.

I found some material for rocks, glitter for seaweed  and a bottle top for a jellyfish body. We printed out some pictures to colour in and stick on. Now we have refurbished the painting and have to find somewhere to hang it up.

Peg Ants

 We are back to insects again. This time using buttons and pegs. First we take a peg...

and paint it brown. Then we have to wait for it to dry.

The we find some black or brown buttons from my button collection and glue three of them on to the peg.

2 Googly eyes and 3 pipe cleaner legs later and we have our ant. Christopher wanted green legs and James liked the red fluffy ones. I think the fluffy ones look like they should belong to a nasty spider so I have to keep counting the legs to reassure myself!

Button Picture Frame

Imogen decided she wanted to make Dad a picture frame for Fathers Day. We raided my box of buttons for decorations after she coloured in the frame green. 

The Rainbow Fish

Christopher's lovely artwork from school. The background is a crayon drawing covered with a blue paint wash. The fish is a colouring in picture that he has cut out and glued colourful scales onto it.

The Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister is a classic story about sharing, and a favourite book in our house. I quite like the glittering scale down the bottom. 

I must try this with the younger children and see what they make with it.

Getting Ready for Spring

I can't wait until the warmer weather comes. With the coming of the warmer weather are the flowers. Just what I need after a long and bleak Canberra Winter.

Even though spring is still a few days away I thought we'd start to decorate the house with spring flowers. Cue the paint and art smocks.

Here we have the canvas on the kitchen bench with a child either side. I thought if I gave each one a colour then there would be no arguments over the paints. So out of necessity we have a sky and grass.

Where would spring be if we didn't have any flowers? James cut various sized circles out of material and we put them together in groups of 3. Then Imogen went through my button collection to find some pretty buttons to decorate the flowers with. Some glue to stick it all together and then we have our flowers made, ready to attach.

Here is the final painting. James dotted the stalks on in a slightly darker green, the clouds were also dotted on with sponges. The sun is glue and an entire packet of glitter. We probably didn't need quite so much glitter, but I wasn't watching when the children tipped it on to the glue! Pity my vacuum cleaner is being repaired as now we have to try and sweep the glitter up.

Rocket Picture

Remember the splatter paintings we did the other day? Well, after letting them dry we did go on to make rocket pictures.

James is very interested in rockets, space, aliens and astronauts at the moment. Possibly the result of following the Curiosity Rover a little bit too much over the last week. To ensure he had a proper rocket, we found a colouring in sheet for him to decorate, then we cut out the rocket and glued it on to the painting.

James had a look at the picture and said that the rocket was missing something. On closer enquiry he said it was missing the red hot fire that the rocket has to try and run away from. Glitter and glue provided the flames to propel the rocket into space (I admit that I told him that the flames usually came from the engines and were used to propel the rocket - Youtube provided some examples we watched). While looking for the glitter we came across a sheet of star stickers and an empty frame, so of course we had to use them both. The frame was perfect for the picture and adds a nice finishing touch.

James is just sticking the final star sticker on to the picture. I liked it so much that we have hung it on the wall in our hallway. It looks rather good under the red light there.

Paper Plate Ladybird

Say hello to our friend Mrs Ladybird. This is a new addition to our insect collection. I am quite fond of the lopsided nature of this happy bug.