Pirate Castle

This was definitely more of a mummy and daddy made activity activity as although easy to make is a bit fiddly. Older kids would enjoy painting and decorating it though.

You will need:

4 equal sized rectangles of cardboard (mine were about 5 x 7 inches)
4 cardboard tubes
Black paint
Tape (I used black duct tape)
Scissors
Straws

First of all take one of the rectangles of cardboard and place one cardboard tube to the side of it.

Cut a slit roughly half way up the tube

Cut a slit halfway down the rectangle

They should slot together. Repeat this for each ‘wall’ of the castle – so each tube and each rectangle will have two slits in, so they all fit together. Don’t forget to cut out an archway in one of the pieces as a doorway.

Cut little squares out of the top of the cardboard tubes to create turrets.

Paint it all black (might be easier to take it all apart to do this). I used for the inside of the castle. I did this because I had used toy packaging for the cardboard and the one side was shiny and printed on, which is a nightmare to paint! It also gave it a little bit more strength.

I then wrapped black duct tape (can you tell I love the stuff?!) around drinking straws, although you could just paint art straws black, and created a flag out of the tape (yes I’m obsessed!!) but black paper would work just as well. I did intend to finish it off by adding some skull and crossbones stickers but, as with a lot of things when two toddlers are about, they disappeared!

Harrison immediately wanted to play with it, so in our big play tub I tipped out our tub of lentils, some sparkly gems as treasure, and added in a cardboard ‘x’. Our pirate small world/sensory tub was finished with some Happyland pirates and our sponge sail boats. We dug for treasure by scooping up the lentils with spoons and poured lentils down the turrets of the castle.

Lots of fun!

Chinese New Year: sensory play

Today we did something we haven’t done for a while – a sensory box! I tried to link it to our Chinese New Year theme as much as possible.

We used the Rainbow Rice we made back way before Christmas. Because it was red and yellow it was vaguely Chinese coloured. I added in some bits of black and red wool, red and black pom poms of various sizes, red and black feathers. I chose red and black as these colours suggest China to me. I also found some laminated red fish from the days when I was a teacher that had basic sight words on. Harrison and Alex are too young to read them but fish ate symbolic in Chinese culture so it just added to it. They also have paper clips attached to make them magnetic to play magnetic fishing games with.

I gave them the tub inside another, larger tub to try and contain the mess (still ended up everywhere!). The large tub is an underbed storage box – a smaller and cheaper alternative to a tuff spot. They had all the usual equipment that we use for activities like this – accessories from the play kitchen , cardboard tubes and bowls. I also gave them some chopsticks which our local Chinese takeaway kindly gave us for free!

Their imagination soon went wild. They had great fun trying to pick things up with the chopsticks and stirring the rice. The bits of wool soon became noodles and then we ended up bringing the play kitchen into the lounge so they could ‘cook’ the noodles and rice. (Excuse the fact Harrison yet again has no trousers on, we are potty training!)

This activity led to some maths investigation. We counted how many cups of rice it took to fill a bowl, talked about which bowl had more rice in and started to look at ‘more’ and ‘less’.

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Under the Sea sensory play and bottle cap fish pictures

Another day of under the idea themed activities!

Firstly, a sensory play activity.
I cracked open the blue water beads that I’d bought before Christmas and had left them soaking overnight. I put these in the tub we use for sensory play, and added in some blue glass beads, sea shells and some seaside ornaments. Obviously, these are all choking hazards so please make sure the activity is supervised! I also popped in their sea creature toys – penguins, whales, seals and sea turtle. It looked great!

As soon as I put it down the kids were straight in there, making the animals ‘swim’ through the beads, and scooping up the beads with the shells and tipping them back in.

I’d laminated some colourful pictures for using with play dough but we ended up getting them out for the tub. I printed these out from here.

After a bit they took all the bits out, just leaving the water bead in! They took their socks off and in went their feet! They love putting their feet in water beads as it feels cold and squishy!

Our second activity was bottle cap pictures. I’ve been collecting then lids from cartons of milk for a while. The idea came from here.. Last night I used the glue gun to stick the lids down on some blue A4 card. These made the bodies of the fish.
I then gave Harrison a pot of pre cut triangles to form the fishes tails. We then glued on googly eyes. We did stick them with the glue stick but they kept falling off so I used the glue gun (my favourite thing ever!).
We used glitter glue to decorate the lids and the tails.
Then came our favourite bit. We dipped the end of a plastic straw in some white paint and over another tray BLEW through the straw. You need to do this as otherwise it leaves a big splodge rather than a white circle. Also, make sure you supervise little ones to make sure they’re not sucking the paint up. Dab the straw onto the paper to make bubbles.
At this point Harrison wandered off so I finished it by cutting some seaweed out of green paper and Alex helped to stick them down.

What do you think?

Sea Life Centre Birmingham : a review

Today was the start of our ‘under the sea’ week, and to kick it off we went to the Birmingham Sea Life Centre, who had kindly put us on their guest list.
I’d been there years and years ago with friends and enjoyed it so was excited about taking the two little people there!

It was incredibly busy when we got there at 11am. I’d forgotten that some schools don’t go back until tomorrow! We didn’t have to wait too long though.
The centre is connected by ramps and walkways, and if I’m honest they’re a little narrow, especially as there was lots of pushchairs, making it extremely hard to get past. It also meant Harrison and Alex were bumped into a lot by adults who don’t appear to watch they’re walking! We didn’t get very close to a lot of displays either. The windows to see things are quite high and in some parts there are a step for the kids to stand on but quite a lot didn’t, which meant we constantly had to pick the kids up so they could see.

We enjoyed the interactive rockpool where you can touch and hold starfish and crabs. If you know me, you know I have a serious phobia of crabs, but I was really brave and managed to touch (albeit extremely quickly!) one. The lady who was looking after the area was really lovely and made me feel at ease and not at all stupid.
It’s a lovely place to walk through. There are areas that make you feel like you’re walking through rainforests, and areas that are very dark and atmospheric. The jellyfish (which were one of my favourite things – never realised how incredibly beautiful they are!) were bathed in neon lights making them look spectacular.

I’m not sure Harrison felt entirely comfortable with the darkness but that’s an age thing. Alex loved it! We enjoyed the big tank of rays,especially Alex who kept waving at them and threw a wobbler when we left it!

However, the absolute highlight of the visit was their famous 360 degree glass tunnel. It is amazing, watching huge rays and hammerhead sharks glide above you, watching tiny fish swim beneath your feet, but best of all seeing the truly incredible giant sea turtle swim past you.

However, I do have a few moans. I remember the 4d cinema being fantastic, and was looking forward to visiting it. However the queuing area for it is in the same area as the otter feeding area so was chaotic and poorly organised. There were no staff to tell us how long it was to wait and no clear queue start/end point, with us and several families standing around feeling very confused. We eventually worked out that the next viewing was a 20 minute wait. The area is on a sort of balcony so is open, and was very cold. The centre is obviously very warm so we hadn’t got coats and was freezing, so had to leave the queue. By this point, all the other families waiting had also given up and moved on. I was really disappointed that we didn’t get that opportunity, but couldn’t stand in the freezing cold with two toddlers for that long. We also never got to see the otters either. A lot of the displays were either empty or covered with a sign saying they were being ‘spring cleaned’,
The centre has the obligatory gift shop, which was reasonably priced. We bought a lovely little pirate chest for our upcoming pirate week which was £3.50 and a shark grabber which was £3 so not horrendous!
All in all? Well, I think I would have been disappointed if we had paid the £30+ ticket price for me and Graham (kids under three are free). We enjoyed it but were only there just over an hour which I don’t think warrants the price. However, I think if you’d had older kids who could see into the tanks easily and were prepared to wait for a long time to see things and went when they’re not doing a big clean and building new exhibitions you would enjoy it.

Plan your visit on the Sea Life Centre website

*Disclosure: thank you to the Sea Life Centre who gave us two free adult tickets for the purpose of this review. All thoughts and opinions expressed are my own.

Autumn Art

I was having a look through some photos on my phone and found this one from back in October.

Because we didn’t have too bad weather, we had been on lots of walks. Our favourite place to go for a walk was the cemetery! Sounds morbid but it’s so quiet and peaceful. The kids can walk around without worrying about traffic and I find it really beautiful and fascinating, especially in the autumn.

Its absolutely full of trees so perfect for a nature walk. We always took our little bucket, and came back with it (and the tray in the back of their trikes!) full of twigs, conkers, acorns, pinecones and leaves. We used them in a lovely autumn sensory bin and then we used them to create some art.

I was having a look through some photos on my phone and found this one from back in October.
Because we didn’t have too bad weather, we had been on lots of walks. Our favourite place to go for a walk was the cemetery! Sounds morbid but it’s so quiet and peaceful. The kids can walk around without worrying about traffic and I find it really beautiful and fascinating, especially in the autumn.

It’s absolutely full of trees so perfect for a nature walk. We always took our little bucket, and came back with it (and the tray in the back of their trikes!) full of twigs, conkers, acorns, pinecones and leaves. We used them in a lovely autumn sensory bin and then we used them to create some art.

Painting with natural materials is lovely because it’s environmentally friendly and creates some gorgeous textures and effects, making it not only an art activity but a sensory one as well. Harrison loved dipping the twigs in the paint and using them to draw with, and rolling the pinecones to make prints. We kept to autumny colours – browns, reds, orange, yellow and green.

With some of the leaves we created a leaf wreath. This was done by cutting the centre bit out of a paper plate and simply glueing the leaves around it. Within a couple of days the leaves had completely dried out which made it really fragile and delicate but beautiful. It was doing this activity that made me realise just how lovely a leaf is, and it really made us think about all the beautiful colours!

Painting with feet

I definitely recommend doing this on a warm dry day and in the garden unless you’re very brave daft, as it does get rather messy!!

Harrison had great fun doing this. I ripped off some paper from a roll of lining paper (£2 from Wilko, great for loads of art activities!) and weighed it down with some large stones. On plastic plates I squirted some red and blue paint (the washable stuff used in schools). Then we took our shoes off, put our feet in the cold slimy paint and walked and stamped and marched all over the paper. It was so much fun!

I made sure I was prepared before hand and had a washing up bowl of warm soapy water and a towel ready to wash feet when we’d finished. Still ended up with colourful footprints on the yard!

We will definitely be doing this again in the summer (weather permitting!) but will change it a bit by putting blobs of different coloured paint on the paper first rather than on plates, and now Harrison is less fussy about paint on his hands we will use hands and feet.

Because we had such a big piece of paper we didn’t keep the whole piece of paper, I just cut an a4 size bit off for their art folder but I would fold it up and keep it next time and use as lovely personalised wrapping paper – could plan ahead and use festive colours for christmas paper!

One of the mum, Kayleigh, in the Activities 4 kids Facebook group (please feel to send a request to join!)  also did this activitiy with her daughter – as you can see messy but fun!!

Play dough fun

The kids love play dough. Truth be told, I love it as well. We already had a big box full of it and lots of cutters,and the n for Christmas they had loads more,and several sets of cutters and rollers and other accessories.

I think playdough is a fantastic thing for kids. On a miserable wet day there is nothing better than laying a plastic sheet on the floor and getting the play dough out. We have hours of fun with it.

It’s a fantastic material for developmental play. It’s malleability means young children can manipulate it easily, helping to develop fine motor skills. The opportunities for imaginative play are endless – we’ve used it for ‘cooking’!

Play dough has been around since the 1950’s – not many kids toys have been going for that long! It’s relatively inexpensive and lasts ages if looked after. We also tried making our own, Gingerbread play dough which is great because you can make it scented -the only the only thing I hate about play dough is the smell!

We have lots of fun just rolling, patting and using cutters on it but I wanted some ideas to make it even more fun. I haven’t tried these yet but will be soon, and wanted to share them with you.

Lolly stick playdough from Seeking Shade

Play dough mosaic from Examiner

Play dough monsters from Crafts and Art for children  from Crafts and Art for Children

Play dough cupcakes from Mess for Less

Embellished playdough animals from No Time For Flashcards

I’m going to try and incorporate a play dough activity into each of themed weeks so look out for those!

What’s your favourite play dough activity?

Water bead sensory play

For ages I’ve been searching for water beads. I know I could probably get them on the Internet but I never got round to it. On Saturday night I went to the German Christmas market in Birmingham City Centre. In the middle of the market I found a little stall that sold fake snow (which of course I bought!) and water beads in all sorts of colours. They were £2 a pack or three for £5, so I bought three packs – a blue one (for our ocean theme after Christmas!) red and green.

Water beads are gorgeous. They’re usually used in flower arranging as a way of making the displays look amazing. They come in packets and are tiny little beads that don’t look much at all.

You put them in a container and add water (follow instructions on pack) and leave for five to six hours. We left ours overnight. They absorb incredible amounts of water and once fully hydrated they turn into beautiful plump, translucent coloured beads. They’re lovely to look at but the texture is something else! They’re squishy but firm, cool, slippery and slimy (in a lovely way!) – absolutely perfect for sensory play. I guarantee every adult that sees them will want to touch and feel them. We have ours in a tub in the kitchen and every time I walk past I find my hands in there!

We mixed the red and green ones together to make it festive. As soon as I put the tub down the kids were straight in there. They loved it!

Harrison then decided he wanted to take his socks off and put his feet in. He persuaded me to put my foot in and it was a lovely sensation!

He then pulled out an egg box from our ‘junk cupboard’ and started to arrange the beads in it. This was a great numeracy opportunity – counting the beads – and sorting and discussing colours.

We had a good hour of fun with these. They did roll around the floor a bit and some did get squashed (just vacuumed them up). The beads can be used over and over again. According to the packet, we should be able to rehydrate them up to 120 times. Not bad for a couple of quid! Once they start looking a little dehydrated you simply put them back in water and they plump back up.

What I will say is keep a close eye on kids/pets whilst they’re playing with them (as you should with all sensory play) as although they are non-toxic and environmentally safe, they’re not designed for children, and certainly not meant to be ingested, so please please please supervise carefully. If they’re likely to try and eat them put them in a zip lock bag and they can still have fun squishing them, or put them in a sensory bottle.

If you had a mirror or a light table this would make a lovely surface to play on as the effects would be magical and add another dimension to sensory play.

Shiver Snow: a sensory activity

Alex is still poorly today – teething, cold and conjunctivitis means a grumpy (but sleepy!) toddler. Whilst he was asleep Harrison and me had fun with shiver snow!

When my shopping came last week I emptied the 2kg pack of rice into a ziplock bag (like the old school reading folder bags!) and whacked it in the freezer.
This morning we got it out and put it on our tub, and added lots of sparkly silver glitter. We took it in the lounge and lay down our fab mini tarpaulin (£1 from Tesco, perfect for art and sensory play!). We again added twigs and pine cones for trees, with some green playdough as the trees leaves. We set up a small world
with mega-blok characters and cars.

Because the rice had been in the freezer it was nice and cold which added a new sensory dimension to the activity, and the glitter made it really pretty. Next time I go shopping I will buy peppermint essence to make it smell lovely and wintry, and I might dye some rice blue and purple to mix in with the white rice. Harrison had loads of fun with the cold snow.
He then took the toys out and decided to put his bare feet in, which made him giggle because it was cold and tickly on his feet! He loved it when I buried his feet and poured the icy cold rice on his feet. We spent a good twenty minutes using our feet in it!

It was a fantastic sensory experience for Harrison!

Snow dough: a messy sensory activity

Today I was brave and attempted some messy sensory play – a big deal with two
toddlers and a fully carpeted house!
We had a go at snow dough. In a plastic tub we mixed cornflour and shaving foam. It took quite a bit of experimenting to get the consistency right but I think it was roughly equal parts in the end.
I then dumped in some pine cones and twigs that we collected on one of our autumn walks and some baubles. I lay down a cheap shower curtain on the living room floor in an attempt to keep the mess contained. It did still manage to get everywhere but was easily vacuumed up afterwards.
As soon as I put it down Harrison was enthralled and identified it as ‘snow’. He picked it up and sprinkled it, telling me it was snowing and then used the twigs to draw patterns in it.

What he did next was lovely. He took the toys from his school house set and created his own little small world in the tub, with a swing, slide, roundabout and the little characters. He used the pinecones as trees and had great fun in making it snow over his little scene.

He then realised if he compacted the ‘snow’ down he could use his hands and other objects to stamp impressions into it.
His next request was for me to add some water to the tub. I wanted to say no because of the mess, but then realised that’s the whole point of messy sensory play. We tipped a small cup of water in it to make ‘gloop’ and mixed it up using the twigs. Harrison described it as ‘gluey’

It kept Harrison amused for a good hour, not bad for a two year old with the attention span of a gnat! Alex played with it on and off but he’s poorly today so nothing really holds his attention.

A messy but fun activity – have a go!