How to make a child’s hat couldn’t be simpler but with a creative kid involved the results are super fun and oh so stylish!
Mad Hatter’s Tea Party
A Mad Hatter’s Tea Party was the perfect birthday party theme for my little bookworm. B turned nine last week and at the weekend we hosted a Book Party for her family and friends, with crazy food and fun activities. The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party was such fun to plan and prepare, with the kids excited about sharing the mad ideas with their friends.
All the invitations were little books, illustrated by B, with the story inside telling the tale of how all the guests were invited to a party. Everyone came dressed as a favourite book character – I was Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother, although sadly no photos of that incarnation remain. I do have lots of photos of what we made and what we ate though, so here’s our round up of how we hosted a Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. [Read more…]
Five fabulous ideas for feet
Five fabulous ideas for a feet theme.
1. Set up a shoe shop: gather together as many different types of shoes as you can: lace-ups, high heels, flippers, wellies, ballet shoes, walking boots, football boots, slippers. Talk about when you would wear all these different types of footwear – what’s special about them? Add in some imaginary play and have some of the children be the shop assistants and some be the customers. Add in some maths by measuring everyones feet and graphing the results.
2. Explore movement and see what your feet can do: Play musical statues but have the children try out a different movement each time the music re-starts. Can they walk, hop, skip, run, go backwards, walk on tip toes? Try some other challenges such as seeing if they can pick blocks up with their feet and load them into a bucket. Or hold a crayon between their toes and do some drawing.
3. Discover animals’ feet: use toy animals or print off some pictures and investigate their feet. Talk about paws, hooves, webbed feet, claws and talons. Add some classification practise by sorting the animals into those with no feet, two feet, four feet, lots of feet. How do the animals’ feet suit how they live? Which animals can walk on the ceiling?
4. Make some footprints: for a great collaborative work of art tape big rolls of paper to the floor and then play some music. Have the children step in some paint and then dance their way over the canvas.
5. Read all about feet: with this fabulous selection of stories suggested by NurtureStore’s Facebook and Twitter friends. (Come and join us on Facebook and Twitter for lots more resources and idea swaps)
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happily shared with made by little hands Monday and math Monday and preschool corner and Outdoor Play and we play and math Monday and Tot School
Play dough recipe
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.
Now available: an all-new-and-improved Homemade Play Dough Recipe Book!
come and take a look!
Playing dens
Up! from blocks to rockets
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.
Kitchen role play ideas
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?