Creative Christmas Countdown: Christmas tree bird feeder


Today it’s NurtureStore’s turn to share an idea in the Creative Christmas Countdown hosted by Creative with Kids. A big festive hello to those of you visiting from the interactive Advent calendar and welcome to NurtureStore. While you’re here you might like to take at look at some of our other creative, crafty Christmas activities or sign up for our weekly Play Planner.

For today’s Creative Chistmas activity I’m sharing an idea to make a Christmas Tree for the feathered friends in your garden. Christmas is a time of year when we can really encourage children to think of others and give gifts to those they love. How about spending some time with your kids, giving thanks for the natural world and helping them put together a Christmas feast for the birds?

Here are four easy ideas you can use to make a bird feeder – and if you make them all, you can hang them together on a tree outside to make an Christmas tree that gives your feathered friends a festive feast.

How to make a bird feeeder: popcorn chain Read more »

School gardening club: quirky eco planters

school gardening club

This week’s school gardening club motto was ‘how cool is that!’ When the children arrived for the  club I don’t think they really believed us when we said we were going to plant flowers in wellington boots – but that’s just what we did.

The aim of the school garden is to be as eco-friendly as we can while still creating a beautiful space. Inspired by the wellies, teapots and bottles I’d pinned onto our Kids Gardens Pinterest board we set about gathering some quirky eco planters to create our own wall of colour. The plan was to re-use and upcycle what we already had, were about to throw out or could find in charity shops. And it’s amazing  just what you can find to transform into a plant pot!  Read more »

Welcome to the School Gardening Club

school gardening club
Welcome to our first school gardening club post. Along with another parent I’m running a lunchtime gardening club for the Year 4s (8- and 9-year-olds) at my daughter’s school. And what a lovely first group of young gardeners we have – they all turned up, put on their gloves and got stuck straight in.

Our school gardening club mission

The aims of the club are: Read more »

Can you grow a conker tree?

We are all about autumn crafts and activities at the moment. We’ve had cinnamon playdough leaf printing, leaf collages and gargoyles with lots more to come this week but today is all about what you should really do with autumn seeds – plant them!

Two autumns ago B sneaked away one of our conkers and planted it in . . . → Read More: Can you grow a conker tree?

Sunflower Challenge 2011

sunflower challenge 2

Today’s the Day!

If you’ve been growing sunflowers with us as part of the Compton Hospice Sunflower Challenge you need to measure your sunflowers today. There are fabulous prizes on offer for the tallest bloom, so measure up and contact Compton with your vital statistics.

Our tallest is currently 1m 65cm. They got up to 2m 47cm last year, so there’s plenty more growing to be done. How tall are yours?

Sunflower Festival

If you’ve been enjoying growing sunflowers (whether you’re joining in the official challenge or not) and have a sunflower-themed play idea to share with us – we would love to see them. Please add a link to the Linky at the end of this post. We’ve shared some ideas for art, science and math in our Sunflower Activities ebook, and here’s one more idea for sunflower fun.

Read more »

The Very Hungry Caterpillar craft ideas

the very hungry caterpillar craft idea

Kicking off our celebration of Eric Carle’s birthday this week we’re sharing three The Very Hungry Caterpillar craft ideas.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar is our favourite of Eric Carle’s books and is the first book I ever read to both my girls. It’s masterpiece of a children’s story, a joy to read and look at, and bursting with possibilities to use as a spring board for lots of crafting, exploring and learning.

Mr. Carle is celebrating his birthday this week and Kate at An Amazing Child is hosting a week of fun, linking up many early years bloggers who are sharing ideas for activities and crafts linked to Mr. Carle’s books. We’re sharing some caterpillar craft ideas today and some butterfly crafts tomorrow. On Thursday we have a post full of ideas you can use to explore The Very Hungry Caterpillar with links to the EYFS.

Eric Carle is famous for his signature style, combining colour and texture and The Very Hungry Caterpillar is a perfect book to use to inspire children to try some art and crafting. When creating with young children I always like to give them plenty of opportunity to explore materials their way. Even though these projects are all designed to result in a caterpillar there is plenty of scope for each child to experiment and add their own style to the creations. The caterpillar crafts are all very simple to follow, inviting even very young children to have a try. Read more »

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