kids activities, art and craft, play dough recipes and more
Need a play dough recipe? Salt dough recipe, bread dough recipe, no cook play dough recipe?
How about a year’s worth of playdough play ideas – including math, literacy and creative play.
Download your copy of Up! here: 30+ hands-on projects that explore blocks, building, rockets, air planes, parachutes, pulleys and everything Up! Includes 100 printables
A strange new habitat has appeared in our playroom – what could it be?
Secret surveillance cameras reveal signs of life – glimpses of the wild creatures inside.
Special cameras attached to the animals allow us to penetrate deep into the burrow, where no adults may enter.
The footage reveals that, deep underground, these creatures like to play…
…and sleep in four poster beds.
B says ‘playing dens is our favourite thing ever’. I say a whole day’s worth of happy, imaginative play is well worth having a messy room to tidy.
We’re enjoying the warm weather this week and the opportunity to play outside in the sunshine. As well as playing in their rock pool, the children have been cooking up sand pies and pebble cakes in their play kitchen. Do you have an outdoor cooking area for your kids?
As you can see, ours was improvised by the girls from a deckchair and items borrowed from our indoor home corner – a great reminder that you can encourage lots of creative play outdoors just by relocating resources from one area to another. Do you like the fire they made to heat their oven? Add in few pots and pans and they were ready to get cooking.
Play kitchens give children the opportunity to take on different roles, trying out the skills they see the adults in the family using. There’s lots of measuring and counting to be done and plenty to chat about as they prepare their meals. Providing sand, water or mud offers sensory play and science exploring, as the children combine wet and dry materials and observe how the textures change. Physical skills develop as they try out utensils and spoon and pour their ingredients. But even better than all of this, outdoor play kitchens are fun!
For more inspiring outdoor play kitchen ideas have a look at Worms Eye-View and let the children play. The Frugal Family Fun Blog has a diy travel kitchen, which you could take with you wherever you play – I’d like one made in a wipe-able oilcloth fabric which we could take with us to the beach. And Childhood 101 has a tutorial for transforming a cardboard box into a stove.
Do your children enjoy pretend cooking?
We had a great response to our posts about treasure baskets for babies and shoebox play, so I thought I’d look at another everyday item that makes a great un-toy: clothes pegs. Here’s how my children love to play with clothes pegs – and we’d love the hear some more ideas from you.
How do your children play with clothes pegs? Please share an idea (or a link) in the comments – we’d love some new ideas!
happily shared with preschool creations and abcand123 and we play and Made By You Monday and learning laboratory and the Resource Centre
It’s all about weddings at the moment. I don’t think L knows there’s a royal wedding on the way but maybe it’s just a case of love in the air because all of a sudden she wants to wear a wedding costume and dress up as a bride. And every bride needs some flowers right? Here’s our quick and easy version of how to make a wedding bouquet.
We used the same technique we used when we made our opulent tissue paper flowers for our Mothers’ Day flower craft (follow the link for full instructions). Once we had five or six flowers we simply fastened the drinking straw stems together with sticky tape and the blushing bride had her beautiful bouquet.
Easy-peasy and ever so pretty. A wedding bouquet fit for a queen!
happily shared with get your craft on and homemaker monday and inspire me monday and kids get crafty
Do your children love dressing up?
Along with building dens, dressing up is one of our all time favourite ways to play. I wonder just why children find dressing up so much fun? I think perhaps it makes their play come to life even more if they’re kitted out in the right costume to really get into character. Mine like to match their clothes with their play sometimes – so they’ll wear a hardhat when they’re playing with the trucks – but often they like to accessorise and customise their outfits to see them through the whole day, whatever they’re playing.
If you haven’t got a dressing up box I’d definitely recommend putting one together. It doesn’t have to be an extensive wardrobe or cost a lot of money, and getting together some items can really spark your children’s play and encourage them be creative and imaginative. Here are some Dressing Up Ideas:
Help your child to make their mark with these wonderful projects that help develop a love of writing, creative storytelling, self-confidence and compassion – along with six sets of bonus printables.
Here’s a simple sensory pay idea for toddlers using potatoes.
Yesterday we were printing with potatoes but there are lots of other ways you can play with them too. How about some cooking and mashing fun?
We set up a low table with lots of kitchen equipment and just explored.
We had no plan other than to investigate the potatoes and see what we could do with them.
We used some toy pans from our kitchen set and lots of ‘real’ cooking equipment too.
You can see from the photo that L loved squishing to potato with the masher.
After they’d enjoyed the sensory experience of the play the game then turned into role play, as they served the potatoes in their cafe.
This is just the kind of play we love: everyday materials, inexpensive, new things to explore, and an inviting play space set up where the children can just get stuck in and play their own way.
What I noticed from this play session was that things that we take for granted are fascinating to children. They felt very grown up chopping and peeling the potatoes, and watching the texture of the potatoes transform as we boiled them was like magic. (A good bit of science for them too looking at how a substance changes.)
Are you happy to let your children play with food?
I understand some people don’t like to include food in play because they think it’s a precious resource which shouldn’t be wasted.
My approach to all our toys and resources is to re-use and recycle as much as we can and I try not to buy something that only has a short play time span. Some food items, such as uncooked pasta, rice and lentils can be stored and used several times but obviously when you’re using cooked food this isn’t an option.
Washing off the potatoes we used to make our rabbit pictures and using them for a different kind of play is a good way to recycle them though.
