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.

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.

A Bottled Boat

I am in awe of people who have the patience to make model boats in glass bottles. The skill, time and patience needed for such an undertaking is something beyond my ability. Can you imagine my horror when Christopher announced that he wanted to make a ship in a bottle? 

It turns out he had seen an episode of Mister Maker with a boat in a bottle project. It was simply a case of using food dye to colour some dry rice to make the water. The boat was made from plasticine and slipped into the bottle. The sails were cardboard triangles stuck onto sticks and then attached to the boat inside the bottle (the tricky part of the process)

Here is our finished project