D is for Ducks

E's latest letter focus was the letter D. She did a Dd 'dot' painting that I'd drawn up for her and made a collage of things beginning with D. We made a dice using a wooden cube and a permanent marker. We did some dancing. And we did this duck craft:

To make your own ducks, you will need:

• 2 cardboard tubes (empty toilet paper rolls)
• yellow crepe paper
• glue (we used a simple homemade paste)
• orange card
• white card
• pencil
• black marker
• clear sticky tape

Here's how to do it:

• Cut one of the tubes in half so that you'll have one tall duck and 2 shorter ones.
• Smother the outside of each tube in glue.
• Paste on some yellow crepe paper.
• Cut some smaller pieces of crepe paper and glue a few to each duck for tail feathers.
• Let the paste dry.
• On the orange card, draw 3 pairs of feet and 3 duck bills.
• Cut them out and draw some nostrils with the black marker.
• Tape feet and bills onto your ducks.
• On the white card, draw 3 pairs of eyes (using black marker).
• Cut them out and glue them onto your ducks.
• On the white card, draw 3 pairs of wings.
• Cut them out and tape them onto your ducks.

All done!

E enjoyed this craft. She loves gluing things and she loves ducks. She even got to practice cutting with scissors. She later drew a pond for her ducks to play in.

-Polly

Corn

Here is some sweet-corn that we grew in our garden this year:

Yesterday we had a "corn" themed day. Some of our corn was left until it was dry and I set these out on a tray for E to explore, with the cobs, husks and silk all separated.

She discovered that she could pull the dried kernels off of the cob.

I introduced her to dry polenta (ground corn) and we made some cornbread using a recipe from "The Joy of Vegan Baking".

E made some corn collages using little squares of crepe paper.

We glued on some real corn husks to finish them.

Some of the husks were also used to make this paper flower:

I thought this might be a good theme for the beginning of Autumn (according to the calendar). According to the weather outside, it's still very much Summer.

-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

S is for Snake

The latest picture in our alphabet series is S for Snake. E still enjoys colouring these pictures and will remind me if we haven't done a new one in a while. On the day that we did our S for Snake picture, we did a lot of other snake themed activities, too.

Snakes are an easy shape to make, so anything could become a snake. Even our food was snakes. I saw this fruit snake online and wanted to try making one, but we had already eaten all of our strawberries. Here's our snake made from banana, peach and sultanas on a skewer and one that we made using a (soy) sausage with sauce and mustard:

I printed out the game sheet on this page and E played her first game of Snakes and Ladders. She hasn't really played any board games before. We played through once properly (E won) and after that E was more interested in experimenting with the counters (coins) and dice and tracing her finger up and down the snakes and ladders.

Another new activity for E was threading pasta 'beads'. I had previously coloured some left-over penne and left it to dry. We didn't have a large needle and the yarn we used was a little fuzzy, so E needed help threading the pasta. She did quite well for a first go and we turned her thread of pasta beads into a snake by gluing some googly eyes to one end of the 'snake'.

Having seen this super-easy origami snake online, I just had to make some. I ended up making three of them. I drew on some eyes with a blue marker and glued in little forked tongues. Originally only two of them had tongues, but E said that the tongue-less one wanted to be like his friends. E had great fun playing with these paper snakes and they're much hardier than some of the other paper toys that I've made.

The weather here is getting hotter and drier now, so maybe we'll see a real snake soon. Hopefully not hiding in all the straw mulch that we've just added to the garden.

-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

Orange

Last week, we had yet another colour-themed day in our house. This time it was E's favourite colour: Orange! At first, I thought she simply liked to say, "Orange... orange..." It is a rather strange-sounding word, but then, many words are when you repeat them over and over. It turns out that orange really is her favourite colour at the moment. We went fabric-shopping not long ago and while I was choosing fabrics for myself, E and her Daddy headed to the other side of the store so that E could choose some fabrics for a new dress. They came back with the brightest orange fabrics that I have ever seen. Here's a picture of E using her new dress fabrics as blankets and tucking in her dolls. She's on an orange pillow, too:

I seem to have a lot of sewing projects going at the moment, but I always love to make things for E and my new pattern books arrived in the mail yesterday. :)

For our orange day, breakfast was easy: Orange! I cut up some orange and some mandarin for E to have a few segments. The rest was made into 'very orange' juice, which this time had orange, mandarin, tangelo and carrot. We served it in cups with pictures of oranges on them and used orange straws.

When we got dressed, I wore an orange t-shirt and E wore her favourite orange dress. Then we walked around the house, seeing what orange things we could find. Amongst other things, we found some orange balls, some orange blocks, some orange paper and a doll with orange hair.

We made some orange flowers using pipe cleaners, craft paper and crepe paper. I cut out the flower shapes and E pushed them onto the pipe cleaners. Each flower used one pipe cleaner, one craft paper flower and two crepe paper flowers. E then arranged them in a plastic vase with some wild lupin flowers that she had found the day before.

E had a great time swirling about some streamers that I made from some left-over crepe paper. She also spent a lot of time playing with orange play-dough and some more orange straws that I had cut into smaller lengths. We then used some more of the orange crepe paper, cut and torn into little pieces and stuck onto clear contact, to make another window decoration.

-Polly

Owl Fun

A short time ago, E was heading out with her dad to go visit a friend. I asked her which hat she would like to wear and she replied "Owl hat". The only problem was, she never had an "owl hat". After a short discussion ending with her telling us to "buy one!" she chose a different hat and was on her way. We didn't buy her an owl hat (and I have no idea where she got the idea from), but I did make her one the next day. She loves it and wears it nearly every day. She has a little skirt in the same fabric (the owls fabric, not the spotted one), but she hasn't worn them together yet. Actually, I made her a dress in the spotted fabric... I wonder if it still fits her.

I had planned on doing an owl-themed day with E in a few weeks' time (to give myself time to plan some activities), but her sudden new obsession with owls brought it forward a few weeks. It's a good thing that "owls" is another popular theme, as it was easy to find things to do.

It all started with E waking up one morning, walking over to my computer desk (I wasn't even at my computer at the time), pointing to the printer and saying "Owl". So... I did a quick google search and found a nice owl picture to colour in. She liked that I chose a picture with two owls. "One, two, one, two..."
Then I set about finding some more owl-themed things to try.

We found pictures of owls in some of E's animal books and we read "The Owl and the Pussycat". We 'flew' around the house saying "Whoo, hoo!" like an owl and made 'owl eyes' with our fingers. We drew pictures of owls on our blackboard and played with a little owl toy that I had made.

I found this owl mask and printed one. We got out E's bowl of crayons and coloured it together. The colours were all E's choice. I then cut it out and stuck it to a piece of cardboard to make it sturdier and cut holes to see through the eyes. We took it in turns holding it to our face and E still plays with it, days later.

After seeing these owl cupcakes on Almost Unschoolers, we had a go at making our own. We started by baking some vanilla cupcakes. When they were cool, we made some grey icing and iced them. I then broke open some cream biscuits and realised that they were way too big to stay on our little cupcakes. Oh well. The cupcakes were still yummy and we didn't need cream biscuits with them, anyway. We probably would have chosen a more appetising colour, though, if they weren't intended to be owls.

-Polly

L is for Leaves

We have had so many nice, clear days over the past week, I can't remember the last time I saw a cloud. E still likes to go outside and collect flowers so, the other day, I thought we'd mix it up a little. Instead of going out and collecting flowers, our morning walk became a leaf-finding expedition. E took along her little basket (another op-shop find) and we headed towards a local park where there are lots of big gum-trees. We found only a couple of fallen leaves along the way, but once we got to the park, her basket was soon filled.

We carried it back home and sorted through all the leaves that we had found. Some were long and some were short. Some were green, while others were brown, or orange, or even purple. Some were big and some were very small. It was a really good activity for introducing opposites and adjectives (although E, of course, just sees it all as talking and playing).

E had a great time making collages with some of the leaves, using pieces of clear contact that I had cut for her. The contact works really well for this because there's no need to use any messy glue and once they're finished, the leaves aren't going to fall off. We stuck the finished collages up on a window to let the sun shine through. The morning sun gives them a nice glow, showing all the different colours in the leaves, while the late afternoon sun gives a silhouette effect.


There were a lot of leaves left over after making the collages. I think we collected a few too many, but I may use it as an excuse to do another craft project with them later this week (if they last that long). Most of the left-over leaves were arranged in one of E's vases where she'd usually only have fresh flowers.

I also did a new drawing for our alphabet series (two leaves in the shape of an 'L') and E, as usual, helped with the colouring. It seems that activities with leaves are usually reserved for the Autumn months, when many leaves are changing colour and starting to fall. Doing these activities in Spring, meant that we found a lot of new leaves sprouting (like on our little plum tree which has just 'woken up' after the Winter) and we could compare different types of leaves on each new plant that we found. There just isn't as much variety in the leaves that are on the ground at this time of year.

-Polly

Choo, Choo!

Tunnel from IKEA

After a recent trip to IKEA, we were all in our living-room to assemble our new furniture. E had a great time stacking her new DRÖNA boxes and lining them up with her new tunnel and potty. She sat on the potty and told us that she'd made a train. I don't have a photo to share, but the boxes were the engine, the potty was the driver's seat and her tunnel was the carriage. I just love her imagination! It's not unusual for her to "make a train". It's her favourite thing to do with her wooden blocks at the moment. She'll line up all the larger blocks as the track and sort all the small, coloured blocks into different coloured train carriages. I'm not sure where her fascination with trains came from, but it made for a great theme day (well, two days, actually).

Steam Train

We began with our usual colouring-in of a picture of a train. I showed E a few choices and she chose one of an old American steam train. We coloured it using coloured pencils and stuck it up in our "picture spot" on the side of the kitchen counter. There's a different picture there each week and it's a useful spot because it's at E's eye level.

I have a set of Thomas the Tank Engine books from when I was young and we read a story from one of them before watching Thomas and Friends on TV. E was pretty excited to find out that Thomas has his own show and as soon as the episode finished, she asked "Again?" Now E will often request to watch "Tom Train".

Then lunch was ready: a cheese and vegemite sandwich (one of E's favourites) with a bit of a twist. I made it look like a train by cutting it up and adding some carrot 'wheels', stuck on with a bit of peanut butter, and a dill pickle 'funnel'.

Train Sandwich

Taking E's lead, we made a train from wooden blocks. This time, instead of using more blocks as the track, I drew a train track on our blackboard (laid flat on the floor) and E pushed the block-train along on that.

The next day, we made a bigger train using cardboard boxes, masking tape and a few paper plates. We didn't paint it and make it all pretty like this one, but it was still fun. One of E's dolls became the driver and E sat in a carriage along with some of her other soft toys. Toy Tigger wasn't allowed in the train because he's "too bouncy". E had a turn at being driver, too, sitting where her doll is in the picture with one leg either side of the funnel.

Cardboard box train

Looking around online, I found a lot of 'train' ideas and activities for kids. It's a popular theme. One printable that I found is this set of papercraft trains from Sanrio. They are so cute. Each page has a train and a carriage as well as other accessories such as houses, boats or farm animals. The site is all in Japanese, but they're so simple that it's not necessary to be able to read it. There's little pictures to show you what the models should look like. E's not ready to make crafts like these, but I couldn't resist making some for her. She had great fun playing with them on another chalkboard track.

Sanrio Paper Train set

For a train-themed song, we sang 'Down at the Station'. E didn't know what "puffer-billies" were (who could blame her?). Once I explained it to her, it was requested again and again as we rode along in our cardboard box train. At night, as E lies in bed, I almost always sing 'Morningtown Ride' to her and she was quite pleased to realise that this, too, is about a train.

Chugga-chugga, Choo-choo!

-Polly

Pink Day

Yesterday was "Pink Day" at our house. As the mother of a little girl, I find it difficult to think "Pink" without thinking of tacky, plastic "girl" toys, "Barbie" and "Disney Princess", yet, thankfully, we have none of these in our house (yet?). I'll refrain from going into a rant about pink overload and marketing to girls and instead go straight to a glimpse of what our "Pink Day" was really all about.

Here's E playing on the slide in her pink outfit:

The pink "piggly wiggly" hat is her favourite hat at the moment. It's crocheted and I bought it on etsy over a year ago. I was going to add a link to the shop, but it seems that either the seller is no longer making them, or is selling them elsewhere. The pants, top and jacket are all hand-me-downs from a friend. E has mostly hand-me-down clothes and a good chunk of them are pink. Evidently, she wears at least some pink most days. I have no problem with that. She's super cute no matter what she's wearing. ^_^. Comparatively, the only pink clothes in my wardrobe at the moment are my pajamas and some socks.

Aside from clothes, we have surprisingly few pink things around the house. We did manage to find a pink rubber duck, a pink tricycle and a giant pink teddy-bear. There are also a few pink blossoms in the garden.

For a pink themed craft, I cut out paper shapes (flowers, circles and 'petals') in different shades of pink. E had fun moving them around and making different patterns. After a while, I got out a glue stick for E to make a more permanent collage on a piece of cardboard.

Here's what she came up with:

As is E's style, a bit of extra colour was added with blue and green crayons and a bit of black pen. She's a mixed-media artist, didn't you know? I put it up on the wall and E still points to it and says "Flowers!". I guess she's proud of her work.

Unlike our blue cakes, our pink snack was quite healthy and free from added food colouring. We made berry smoothies with frozen raspberries, strawberry flavoured yoghurt and soy milk. I usually prefer my smoothies with more fruit and less yoghurt, but it was certainly more filling this way. E enjoyed it, even if she did pour half of it out onto a plate and try to eat it with a spoon. (It wasn't that thick). I guess she was just experimenting... There was a little bit left over, so I froze it in an ice-block mould along with some coconut ice-cream.

Part of the reason that I chose pink for our colour-themed day this week is that my new hair-dye finally arrived in the mail.
Here's me with my new, pink hair:

[Hey, Maple, you were right!]

My husband took a few days off of work this week, to be with us, and therefore had a couple of hours spare to colour my hair for me. :) E was a little mystified when she first saw it and kept saying, "Pink... Hair... Pink... Hair..." and wanted to touch it all the time. I found an episode of Lazytown for her to watch on tv to remind her that Stephanie has pink hair. (I didn't even have to point it out to her). She was okay with it after that. My hair is getting kind of long now, so I probably should have bought 2 bottles of dye. Mine certainly isn't as bright as Stephanie's (but hers is a wig - shh!).

-Polly

Good Weather for Ducks

It has been raining a lot this week. E loves ducks, but instead of taking a trip to the "duck park" (a local park that has a big pond where ducks like to swim) in the rain yesterday, we did some duck themed activities at home. I found some really cute, printable duck puppets on picklebums and printed them out for E to play with. E used her crayons to personalise them a little and I glued them onto some sturdy cardboard and cut them out. We used Kate's idea of play-dough to make them stand up.

These little puppets were great for telling duck stories and singing duck songs.

E really does love ducks, so she already has a collection of rubber ducks that she plays with in the shower. They are different sizes and different colours. She loves to sort them and to count them. She also has a few books about ducks, including one which actually quacks when you press a button (thanks Grandma!).

Of course, who can have a duck themed day without the duck song? E's auntie (my sister) introduced her to the duck song and she's loved it ever since. I swear one of her first words was "waddle-waddle".

Quack, quack!

-Polly

A Blue Day

blueberry smoothie

...literally, as we're all quite happy here. :)

Colours make good, easy theme days. Today's theme, in our home, is "Blue". E and I got up this morning and put on some blue clothes. We made blueberry smoothies for breakfast. I know that blueberries are technically purple, but they are called blueberries and blue isn't exactly a colour that is generally associated with food. We used blue straws. E likes banana smoothies and although we did add a banana to our smoothie this morning, she took one sip and said "No!" pushing her cup away. So E had regular, not blue, toast.

I printed the word "Blue" in block lettering and we coloured it in using blue markers and blue crayons.

Next, I gave E a blue bucket and we walked around the house collecting anything blue that we could find. We collected toys, blocks, bowls, books, a cup and a hat. We arranged some of them on our blue couch to get these photos, which were in part inspired by Maple's gorgeous photos here and here...

...and we made some little buildings with the blocks after that.

Yesterday we had clear blue skies, so I thought that I'd be able to point that out to E today. No such luck, as it was raining all day and the view from our back window was decidedly grey.

grey sky

For another blue activity, we baked blue cupcakes. I know, I know, I said blue wasn't a colour for food. What was I thinking?! I usually avoid artificial colours in our food, especially blue. I've even refused to give E blue frosted cake at a birthday party. We had just about every colour patty cases except for blue, so we used pale, purplish, stripy ones. The cupcakes did turn out quite pretty, don't you think? They taste nice, just like normal vanilla cupcakes... but they're blue. That's just not right. We had one each, anyway. E gets excited about cake.

 One other blue themed activity that we did today was about the easiest yet. I gave E a piece of blue bubble wrap to play with. Pop, pop, pop!

Playing with bubble wrap.

-Polly

Elephants in the House

For the last couple of days, E has been learning about elephants. We like to have "theme days" in order for E to have fun and learn new things. We coloured a picture of an elephant and pointed out all the different parts: wrinkled skin, 4 legs, big ears, tail, and of course trunk, a new word that E seems quite proud of knowing. We made an elephant's trunk out of an old stocking and scrunched-up newspaper.

<--Here, E is pretending to be an elephant with her stocking and newspaper trunk. Sorry about the blurry photo. It's difficult to get a good shot of an active toddler, especially with only a mobile phone.

We're singing "One grey elephant balancing, step by step on a piece of string...". Can you see the string on the ground? It stretched all the way through the living room, kitchen and dining room and partway down the hallway. Lots of balancing! Maybe we should have been singing "One purple, sparkly elephant...," judging by her outfit. That just doesn't quite fit the tune. :)

Continuing with the elephant theme this morning, we did an elephant craft that I think I've seen online somewhere, but can't remember where. I printed out a page of four large ovals (bodies) and four small ovals (ears), for E to colour in. She chose purple, red and black crayons. Once the colouring was done, I cut out the shapes and E glued them to pieces of cardboard. Adding little cardboard trunks, googly eyes and a couple of clothes-pegs, they became elephants. 

It kind of annoys me that they don't have tails. I really wanted to keep the ovals as simple as possible as E is still learning her shapes. We could probably add tails of some sort. They're not as well balanced as I'd hoped, either. E has trouble making them stand up.

Tomorrow, I think we may just have to do "E is for Elephant".

-Polly