Did you know next week is Walk to School Week? We walk to school everyday, come rain or shine, and are very lucky to have a tree-lined cycle path that runs almost the whole route from our house to school, giving the children a car-free space to run, skip and scoot. This daily . . . → Read More: Walk to School Week ideas]]>

Walk to School Week

Did you know next week is Walk to School Week? We walk to school everyday, come rain or shine, and are very lucky to have a tree-lined cycle path that runs almost the whole route from our house to school, giving the children a car-free space to run, skip and scoot. This daily walk brings such an important breathing-space to our morning, a welcome transition after the hustle and bustle of packing lunch bags and locating coats. We’ve also been joining in with Living Streets #mumswalk project this month and creating a Pinterest gallery of our walks to school.  I know not everyone is able to walk the school run, but if you’re tempted to give it a try for Walk to School Week, here are some ideas you could use to make the A to B journey that little bit more interesting.

On Monday…

join the #mumswalk project and take some photos of your journey. Create your own Pinboard (here’s mine), tag your photos with #mumswalk and have them included in the national gallery – and maybe even in the photography exhibition taking place in June. It’s amazing what every day beauty you notice when you take a little extra time to look. What treasures can the kids spot on the way to school today?

On Tuesday…

hunt for some colour. You could all decide to look for the same colour or pick one each and see how many things each person can find.

On Wednesday…

focus on texture. Take a sensory walk to school and see how many bumpy, spiky and smooth surfaces you can touch on the way.

On Thursday…

go shape spotting. Squares, diamonds and circles can be found in unlikely places if you have your eyes peeled to find them.

On Friday…

find out if all the leaves on your journey are green. What other colours can you find? How many different shaped leaves can your collect. Bring them home and create some art – and add your photo to your #mumswalk gallery.

What walking activities do your kids enjoy?

Do you know Pippi? She’s nine years old, lives by herself and doesn’t go to . . . → Read More: The Museum of Turnupstuffing: celebrating found art treasures]]>
We are very fond of Pippi Longstocking in our house and her inspiration is seen in lots of different ways – from her encouragement to climb trees, through the idea that fun and creativity is rarely tidy to our latest passion: turnupstuffing.

Do you know Pippi? She’s nine years old, lives by herself and doesn’t go to school. Her mother has died and her father is a Cannibal King. And she’s celebrated in a series of books by Astrid Lindgren. She is also an expert at turnupstuffing – and so are my kids!

What’s a turnupstuffer? I’ll let Pippi explain.

‘Somebody who finds the stuff that turns up if only you look, of course. What else would it be?… The whole world is filled with things that are just waiting for someone to come along and find them, and that’s just what a turnupstuffer does.’

{Pippi Longstocking, Astrid Lindgren}

Children naturally make great turnupstuffers, being closer to the ground with eyes peeled to spot things that adults rush passed with out noticing. And what kind of things might you turn up? Pippi suggests gold nuggets, ostrich feathers and dead mice but we haven’t found any of those yet. What you turn up depends on where you look, and sometimes there are surprising treasures to find.

Of course, I want my children to take the utmost care when we are out and about on our walks and never pick up anything that might harm them. That’s where our Rules of Turnupstuffing are applied – so we can enjoy discovering found treasures safely.

The rules of turnupstuffing

:: Keep your eyes pealed when you are out and about to spot hidden treasures

:: You can only touch something after your adult has said it’s OK

:: If you can work out who the treasure belongs to you must do all you can to return it to them (So a lost teddy found in a friend’s garden is returned to them)

:: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. A fir cone, pebble or button are treasures just as much as a gold nugget if you like the look and feel of them

Using your turnedup stuff

And what do you do with the treasures you have turned up? Welcome to the Museum of Turnupstuffing.

Previously treasures have been hoarded in pockets, stashed in the buggy or sometimes displayed on a nature table, but when I discovered this wooden house in a charity shop it seemed the perfect place to showcase our treasures.

A couple of coats of acrylic paint created different galleries within the museum.

And a sign at the entrance welcomed visitors.

When the children turnup stuff, they’re added to the museum. Sometimes like objects are classified together in one of the galleries, sometimes they like to contrast two items that are different in size or texture (like when they found a pompom and a marble on the same outing).

Items ebb and flow through the museum as the children decide to use them in their play, add them to a sensory tub or include them in some art they are making. But a new round of turnupstuffing on our next walk soon turns up new treasures to join the collection.

Ways to use found treasures

Have you ever been turnupstuffing with your kids? You’re good company! Not only does Pippi turnup stuff but so do the Kids Stuff World kids. And what else can you do with the stuff you turn up?

:: use them as part of an Incy Wincy book

:: make a found object mosaic

:: include them in some garden tile art

:: try to identify each item you find: what is it made from, what does it feel like? Can you make up a story to explain how it was lost?

:: what else? How do you use found objects?

First we had a blast of ideas for all the things we might find on our . . . → Read More: Autumn sensory scavenger hunt]]>
Remember the easy sewing project from yesterday, showing how to make a bag? It was a fun project for little fingers but we turned it into a springboard for another activity too, by making a scavenger hunt on the reverse side.

First we had a blast of ideas for all the things we might find on our nature walk . The children shouted them out and we put all the ideas down on some stickers. Some wrote them down, some drew pictures and I scribed the others. Here a some of the things they came up with:

leaves, sticks, twigs, branches, trees, feathers, pinecones, grass, acorns, conkers, squirrels, cobwebs, bark

Then I asked them to think what colours, shapes and textures we might find:

hard, cold, smooth, spiky, soft, sticky, floaty, pointy, round, scratchy, tall, long

Once we’d captured all the ideas, we stuck our stickers all over one side of the bag – we put them on the side without the child’s initial on, and added the stickers before we laminated the paper. This became the reverse side to our scavenger hunt bag. Then we set off on our nature walk to see how many things we could find  to match the words we’d thought of.

Having a bag for each child encourages everyone to join in and gives everyone a turn to find treasures. It also means I’m not the only one carrying everything – and collects a great variety of items to explore in the other activities we have planned for this week.

The list of ideas on the bag is a prompt to invite the children to explore the shape and feel of everything they find, and to use their eyes and ears to seek out lots of different items. The bag design makes it easy for the children to carry the list with them, and the initials on the flip side lets each child locate their bag of goodies.

Come back tomorrow to see what we did with all the things we found.

And hop back to yesterday’s post if you’d like all the instructions for how to make a bag.

 happily shared with nature connections and sunday showcase and  friday’s nature table and  it’s playtime

. We made three batches and for colour we added one tablespoon of food colouring to each, in red, yellow and orange.  To give an extra sensory element to the dough we added one dessert spoon of ground cinnamon to each batch . . . → Read More: Cinnamon autumn playdough: leaf prints]]>
We’re celebrating the change in season by adding an autumnal twist to our easy no cook playdough recipe.

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We made three batches and for colour we added one tablespoon of food colouring to each, in red, yellow and orange.  To give an extra sensory element to the dough we added one dessert spoon of ground cinnamon to each batch . Hello autumn playdough!

The easy no cook playdough recipe makes a dough which is nice and soft and which lasts for ages if you wrap it up in clingfilm or in a plastic bag after each play time.

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The leaves are already falling here so we gathered some on our way back from school yesterday and used them to make prints in the playdough – which was a great way to really investigate the patterns of veins on each leaf and all the different shapes we found.

Playdough is one of our tried and trusted ways for a chilled out afterschool wind-down, providing an activity which is fun but also relaxed – just right after your first day back at school.

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You can get our easy no cook playdough recipe, together with some other favourite recipes and a year’s worth of playdough play ideas in our free Let’s Play Dough ebook.

happily shared with kids get crafty and works for me wednesday and  show and tell and  get your craft on and made by little hands  and tot school and link and learn and  glitter link party and  share your sunday best and the sunday showcase and friday’s nature table and for the kids friday and preschool corner and  it’s playtime