on April 10th, 2012%

Are you planning any Earth Day activities on April 22nd? Celebrated around the world, Earth Day is a great time to pause and reflect the impact you, your kids and your family have on the earth.
Last year we carried out an eco-audit of our play, looking at simple but effective ways we could align our activities with the ideas of reducing, re-using and recycling.
This year, we’re joining in with the Earth Day Celebrations hosted by Mommy Labs and Greening Sam and Avery to bring you a blog hop bursting with ideas you can use to celebrate Earth Day with your kids. Have a browse around the blog hop at the end of this post to find ideas for art, crafts, games, activities and positive action your family can take to go a little greener this month. First though, here’s what the NurtureStore girls came up with as an Earth Day play idea: we grew an indoor meadow!
Earth Day activities: grow a meadow indoors!
I still haven’t decided if this was a crazy or genius idea but Read more »
on March 6th, 2012%

When she wakes up in the morning L likes to check the weather app on my phone to see what’s forecast for the day. I think she likes the animated visual of the rain or the shining sun but she’s also interested in the temperature. We haven’t had such a cold winter this year but there have been a few days when the temperature has dipped below zero and L is fascinated that something can be less than nothing.
We decided we’d investigate further and try to make our own weather station to check if the weather forecasters on the phone get it right. There are few different ways the children can be involved in setting this up and you can decide whether you want to looking at the sky, the wind, the temperature or the rain. A weather station project also gives you lots of scope to include many different aspects of learning: observation, recording data, graphing, guessing and estimating, taking notes and translating results in to real-life consequences.
Our project is part of the Weather Blog Hop which is linking many kid blogs around the world to bring you all sorts of weather ideas you can use with your children – science, art, games, activities, you name it, we’ve got it! Have a browse through the links at the end of this post for lots of ideas. If you have a weather idea you would like to share please feel free to add it to the linky too.
How to make a weather station Read more »
on February 27th, 2012%

Following on from our water bead science experiment, this week we’ve been enjoying some imaginative space play in our water bead sensory tub. With rockets, aliens and a lunar landscape the children have been stretching their imaginations and playing in a totally different world. Here’s how they took their water beads into outer space.
on February 14th, 2012%

After ohhing and ahhing and wishing and dreaming every time we read a post from an American blogger, this week we discovered you can get hold of water beads in the UK. An order was placed, the water beads arrived and we were ready to play!
Water beads are a super sensory material and versatile in lots of play but as they were a brand new material to the children (and me) our first playtime was all about exploring and discovering: time for some water bead science.
Water bead science experiment Read more »
on January 4th, 2012%

We’re joined today by Jo Middleton, who blogs at Slummy single mummy, with a fabulous tutorial on how to make a wormery. Perfect for a school gardening club project and for getting kids closer to nature. Here’s Jo’s guide:
on December 15th, 2011%

This week’s project for the School Gardening Club was to make a bug hotel. The idea is to create a cosy habitat for insects to shelter in over the winter. You can make your bug hotel structure from planks of wood layered up on bricks, pallets or crates, but one of our teachers discovered this cutlery tray in the old school kitchen – the perfect shape and size for our hotel. We stapled a plastic mesh on the back, just so the filling wouldn’t slip out of the back as soon as the children started filling it up. Read more »

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Copyright Information Please feel free to use any of these ideas with your children at home, school or any place you teach and play. You are welcome to pin images from this site onto Pinterest so long as your pin links back to the original article here. If you would like to share a post on a blog or site, you may use one picture so long as you include a link to the original post. Please do not re-post the whole article or distribute printed-out content without written permission from the original author. You can contact me at cathy (at) nurturestore (dot) co (dot) uk. Thank you.
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