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.