R is for Robots

E came home from her latest trip to Scitech carrying a box. Inside was a build-your-own spider robot kit that her dad had bought for her. It was labelled for 10yrs+, but it's what she really wanted. E and her dad built it that same day. She's actually getting pretty good at following instructions and identifying parts.

Now she has fun watching it scuttle around the house.

Obviously E is a big fan of robots, so it was a logical choice for some letter R activities.

Here's a picture we did together some time ago (I did the drawing and E did the painting):

And more recently we did this 'Rory the robot' picture:

Again, I drew the robot and this time E decorated it with pieces of aluminium foil. This is part of a series we're doing to help remember letter sounds and identify letters in a sentence.

-Polly

More Apples

Here are some more apple activities that we did recently.

A fun art activity was printing using cut apples and poster paint:

Having seen many "do-a-dot" pages online, and not having any daubers, we decided to try using one with a circular sponge dabber and paint. I found this page [here].

E seemed to like it. She likes any excuse to use paint. I imagine this method is a little messier than using bingo daubers.

I made up a game for E to play which was simply a picture of an apple tree and each apple had a number written on it. I supplied a pack of number flashcards (spectrum brand) and a pack of colour flashcards (home-made). She would randomly pick one of each and use crayons to colour the apples the corresponding colour. She loved this game, so I ended up drawing more worksheets with more numbers and one with lower-case vowels which we played the same way.

A couple of weeks later we headed to Donnybrook for the Apple Festival and a play at the Apple Fun-Park.

Apples are fun!

-Polly

Easter Chicks

Happy Easter to those who celebrate and a good long-weekend for the rest of you. :)

This time of year, whether you celebrate Easter or not, is full of eggs, bunnies and chicks. We couldn't resist trying this cute chick craft found at 'a little delightful'.

I drew the template myself, although Bianca offers one at 'a little delightful' if you'd like. We used foam shapes for the eyes and beaks and pipe-cleaners for the legs and feet.

These two chicks are currently displayed on our fridge.

-Polly

Hearts and Crafts

Did everyone have a good valentine's day? It's not something we celebrate around here, but I couldn't resist a few love-heart crafts.
First I collected up some craft supplies in shades of pink and red and set them out on E's table:

I included some papers, foam shapes, shredded crepe paper, cardboard hearts, pipe-cleaners, pom-poms, wrapping paper, tulle, felt, pencils and crayons. E was excited for all the pink. It's been a while since we've done a colour theme.

E used the wrapping paper to wrap and unwrap imaginary presents. She thought it was a fun game. The rest of the supplies were used for collages and ornaments.

E also did some painting and learned how to make pink by mixing red and white paint together. We painted her feet and made heart-shaped footprints:

When it was dry, I drew the heart around the footprints and cut it out for her. It was added to a painting/collage that included hand-prints, brush-painting, crayon drawing, the words "E Loves Daddy" and a photograph. E gave it to her Daddy as soon as he got home from work and she was very proud of it. She also spent all evening saying "I love you, Daddy," which was adorable.

I did set up one other 'heart' activity. E is currently learning to spell her name, so I cut out some more cardboard hearts and wrote one letter from her name on each heart. I then got a long strip of paper and traced around the right number of hearts as a template for where to place the letters. E had some fun with this. She loves finding the letter "E" everywhere.

-Polly

Australian Animals

As part of our "Australia" theme over the last week, we did a lot of animal themed activities. Australia does have a lot of unique animals.

E has a block-puzzle that has pictures of different Australian animals and we had fun putting the pictures together. E also likes to stack the blocks and find all the pieces with animal heads on them.

We did some arts and crafts, including a dot painting of a gecko:

and a paper-plate kangaroo with a joey:

I found some animal songs on youtube. This exercise song would have been better if the video showed children doing the actions instead of just pictures of the animals. Don Spencer sings many classic Australian animal songs. I used to listen to the "Feathers, Fur or Fins" album when I was young. The only ones I could find online were this video which includes "Please Don't Call Me a Koala Bear" and the Play School version of "Feathers, Fur or Fins".

E had plenty of fun pretending to be different animals. Her favourites were a bouncing kangaroo and a squawking, flying cockatoo.

We read some animal books, too. After reading "Koala Lou" by Mem Fox, E pretended to be a koala using a mask from Wildlife Fun 4 Kids:

Echidnas were made using play-dough and pop-sticks:

I knew that bag of pop-sticks would come in handy one day. :)
-Polly

Alternatives to a Paintbrush

This week, E had a lot of fun painting with some new techniques.
First, I gave her some empty toilet-paper rolls and some kitchen-sponge paint pallets (ideas both from Mummy Musings & Mayhem). The cardboard rolls make neat circle prints on the paper.

After a while, E decided to get her hands into the paint, too. She even picked up the sponges and did some painting using those.

Another technique that I introduced was this idea from Making Boys Men. It's simply using a balled up plastic bag instead of a paintbrush.

This could also be interesting if you covered the ball with something even more textured like bubble-wrap. I think that all of these paintings would work well as home-made wrapping paper (particularly if we used thinner paper), but really we just did it as a fun activity for E.

-Polly

Happy Halloween

So, yesterday was Halloween. We don't do trick-or-treating or anything like that, but we had our own little Halloween fun.

I sewed together some "bat wings" for E to wear around the house, following these instructions (found via Pinterest) and using an old t-shirt for the fabric. She certainly wore herself out 'flying' around like a bat. We read "Going Batty", by Charles Reasoner, which has been a favourite board book for quite some time. E loved to act like the bat in the book by saying "Boo!" too all her toys and going upside-down.

It was surprisingly difficult to find Halloween stickers in the stores this year. There were plenty of generic costumes and horrible-looking candies, though. So that E could do a Halloween collage, I printed off a page of cute Halloween drawings (and drew a few of my own) and cut them out. Then E, armed with a glue-stick, stuck them onto some paper and added some details with coloured markers. She made two of these collages, one A4 size, the other A3.

I've seen these little hand-print ghosts done various times before. Yesterday we had a go at making our own. E loves painting and making hand-prints. We simply used white paint on black paper. When they were dry, we added some googly-eyes and they were done. So simple, but so cute.

While we had the paints out, E did some other paintings as well. I gave her some more colours to use and she painted using a combination of brushwork and finger or hand painting. The white-on-black for the ghosts worked really well, so I gave her a piece of red card to paint on using the white and that turned out really well, too. She still wasn't done with painting, so she did some (more colourful ones) on standard white paper, too.

Li'l Death

Earlier in the week, I had cut out some bat shapes from felt, thinking I'd make some bat-bunting or something. I never got around to finishing it, but E used the shapes and other felt scraps to make pictures on an un-cut piece of craft felt. I did make some Halloween-y paper toys. I made a little coffin (from here) which E liked filling with all kinds of treasures from gum-nuts to crayons to socks. I also made the "Li'l Death" from urban threads. Unfortunately our printer doesn't print in black, so I made a white and greyish grim reaper.

We definitely went for the 'cute' side of Halloween this year. E was a bit worried by the little witch (a trick-or-treater, not much bigger than E) who came to our house, but she soon realised that the witch and her similarly spooky friends were friendly witches and such. E gave them a smile and a wave goodbye.

-Polly

Red Paint

Plenty of paper was supplied, but isn't it more fun to paint oneself?