A New Toy

E loves to build things. On a recent trip to Ikea, we bought her this bead toy and as soon as we were home she wanted to build it all on her own. And she did.

The blue beads are all threaded onto the blue wire and the red beads on the red wire.

E learnt how to use an allen key and was very proud of herself. She then helped her dad to put together the rest of our latest Ikea haul.

-Polly

There's a Wocket in my Pocket

"There's a Wocket in my Pocket" is one of E's favourite Dr Seuss books. It's often requested and rarely read just once in a sitting. She already understands the nonsense of it.
"Did you ever have the feeling there's a WASKET in your BASKET?"
E's standard response is "No"

Here's some activities that we did to tie in with "There's a Wocket in my Pocket".

The first was a toy for E. I drew a wocket on a piece of cardboard and cut around it. E coloured it with pencils while I sewed the pocket from an old pair of jeans onto a fabric-covered, cardboard page. We then added a stick to the wocket so that it could play "peek-a-boo" in the pocket.

I got the idea for our second "wocket" activity from "Make and Takes". I collected some photographs of objects that we have around the house and E made little collage and drawn creatures that might live on, in or behind the objects. She glued each onto a separate page and we made up names for all the creatures. I wrote in the words and stapled the pages together into a little book. E loved reading her own version of "There's a Wocket in my Pocket" over and over.
Here's the pages before I wrote on them:

There's a ZIANO on the PIANO and a FLOBE behind the GLOBE. There's a MIN in the BIN and a NENT in my TENT. There's a DOASTER on the TOASTER and a WATH in the BATH.

What's your favourite Dr Seuss book?
-Polly

Tea Party

We've all had the flu this week, so a lot of our time has been spent "camping out" in the lounge-room (on an inflatable mattress and lots of pillows) and watching tv or sipping hot citrus water and resting. It's not all bad. We don't just sit and watch the telly very often, so it's given us a chance to learn new things from how to make Chinese food to flaws in Newtonian physics and of course the all-important lessons from Dora the Explorer.

I do have some activities to share from before we all got crook, but haven't uploaded the photos yet. Today I'll just share some pictures of E hosting a tea party for her dolls. This was a couple of months ago now, but I don't think I've posted the photos before (sorry if I have).

I hope everyone else is well... and keeping cool. It was 42°C here yesterday and it's not forecast to get any cooler for the next couple of days. Good thing we have that air-conditioner to help us stay comfortable inside.

-Polly

Puppet Show

E had a little, plastic Spongebob Squarepants toy that was always getting lost and has a broken foot, but she liked it because it was her only Spongebob toy. One day when she was looking for her toy, I decided to make her this set:

I printed pictures of some characters from the show, stuck them on cardboard and added some pop-sticks to make puppets. I added black outlines to the Patrick and Sandy puppets after the pictures were taken to make them more cohesive.
Here's E putting on her Spongebob Squarepants puppet show:

It was even better than the television show.
-Polly

Things that make me Smile

Inspired by Kaylah's post over at The Dainty Squid, here's 10 things that are making me smile today (in no particular order).

1. The lovely, cool breeze that lets me have the house open for once.

2. This freshly-picked basket of parsnips from our vegetable garden.

3. E playing happily with her train set.

4. Actually, watching E play with any of her things. She's gaining so much coordination and language skills and all that stuff that kids do. And I'm so happy that she seems to be over her horrible tummy bug.

5. The marigolds that are flowering in our garden. They're so bright and cheerful!

6. Having watched E and her dad build a robot together. And then playing with it.

E did really well identifying gears and placing components. She'll be building robots on her own in no time. :) Her new saying is "That cool robot!"

7. Parcels in the mail. Doesn't E look so sweet in her new dress?

Thanks Maple :)

8. A letter from my sister.

9. This little one kicking me in the belly.

10. Finally getting around to making new bunting for the living room.

I used last year's local map-book. I usually make fabric flags, but this paper one was so easy and looks pretty, too. E was inspired to make a 'flag picture' where she pasted triangular pieces of wrapping paper onto a piece of card and drew in lines for the string.

Having not posted in a week, I certainly had a lot to share. What's making you smile today?

-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

Ballerina E

No, we haven't enrolled E in ballet classes. She has a soft toy of the character "Angelina Ballerina". We don't watch the TV show, but she does like the toy and loves to point out that Angelina has a tutu and a crown. E will often wear her 'princess crown' that I made for her and dance around the house pretending to be Angelina Ballerina. We have a couple of Angelina board books that my husband found in an op-shop, one of which is called "Angelina Can...". It's a very simple book. "Angelina can... leap... spin... do an arabesque... etc." E loves to do "as Angelina can".

Today I made E a "no-sew tutu" using this short video tutorial. I had just enough tulle left over from another project and I already had the elastic on hand, too. I know this next photo is really blurry, but it shows E "doing an arabesque," her favourite ballet move.

E loves to dance around the house, which is great because it has been stormy here for the last few days and we haven't had much chance to run around outside. Her other favourite dance is "Gangnam Style". It's funny to watch her do that dance.

-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

Paper Toys

Back on our train-themed day, I made some little paper trains and scenery that I found templates for at sanrio.co.jp. They were fun to make and really cute. Yesterday, I got the bug again and made a bunch of new paper toys.

 I found the template for the LMFAO robot on so-fresh.fr:

 

By far the simplest toy that I made was this simple cube with Monstro's face (from The Binding of Isaac). The template for this one can be found at the cubeecraft website:

I also made a couple of cute paper toys of the Spongebob Squarepants characters Gary and Plankton. These templates can be found at kamibox.de.

These paper toys certainly don't last long in the hands of a toddler, but I have fun making them and E has fun playing with them until they're too scrunched up to be classed as 'toys' any longer.

Anyone else found a crafty obsession lately?

-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

Uses for a Blackboard

We finally got around to making a blackboard recently and it's had a lot of use over the last couple of weeks. All we needed was a sturdy piece of MDF, some blackboard paint and some chalk. Actually, we've had all of that stuff in the garage since last Summer, but only just got around to using it.

Now that we have the blackboard, we are finding so many uses for it. The most obvious is simply drawing on it. We can lean it up against a wall to stand and draw, or we can lay it flat on the floor. One day I drew circles all over it in pink, green, blue and purple, while E coloured them in. I was saying "circle", for E's benefit, and she kept replying "round dot". I guess "circle" is a bit hard to say, although she did give it a good attempt when she was showing our picture to her Daddy later in the day.

Another use for our new blackboard is hopscotch. I drew squares and numbered them and wrote "HOME" at one end. I don't think E had ever played hopscotch before, but she soon got the hang of jumping from one number to the next. It's such a fun little game that we can now play indoors as well as out.

We have also used our blackboard as a train-track for little toy trains by simply drawing some tracks with a piece of chalk. This idea could be used for any kind of scenery. I'm thinking... draw a river for boats or ducks, or draw roads for little cars and buses. We could draw fences around little toy houses or to mark paddocks for farms or enclosures at a zoo.

We could use it to draw mazes to trace with a finger or for a toy to 'walk' through. I could write little reminders or inspirational quotes or verses or rhymes that we'd like to remember... Once E is a bit older, she can use it to work out math problems or practice writing, just like we did at school.

For now, we've left it out for E to draw on any way she pleases. She also enjoys using a water sprayer to clean it. :)

Does anyone else have unconventional uses for a blackboard?

-Polly

Making Magic

Waking from a nap one day, E discovered that a fairy had come to visit and had left behind her magic wand. I assured her that the fairy had left it as a gift, so E spent the rest of the afternoon 'making magic'.
Of course, I had really spent E's nap-time constructing the wand for her from some craft felt, a bamboo dowel and some fluffy yarn, but where's the magic in that?

I bought this book some time ago and it's one of my favourites. It's called "Creative Play for your Toddler". As I often do, I read the whole book before I tried any of the projects. I believe the book is worth having even if I never got around to any of the projects, but I'm glad that I did. Here's the hobby horse that I made for E:

I don't have an 'action shot' of this one. E 'gallops' around the house on it, saying "Neigh! Neigh!" which is rather difficult to get a photo of. The horse was made from materials that I already had around the house, including holey socks and a cardboard poster tube. I didn't have a nice wooden broom-handle to use, but E doesn't mind and neither do I. She still gets handmade, mum-made toys.

-Polly