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Annual egg rolling contest

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We are lucky to have both sets of grandparents coming for lunch tomorrow – I love it when the family gets together. The girls love it too as it means we will be battling it out in our Annual Egg Rolling Contest. It’s a great way to get all three generations enjoying some festive fun together. Here’s how we play…

First you need to get some eggs ready. We’ll have two people playing at a time so we need two different colours of eggs. This year we will be using coffee and onion skins to dye the eggs, but in the past we have also used turmeric, red cabbage and beetroot.

We’ve hard boiled some eggs in a saucepan of water with some ground coffee in. (It does make the kitchen smell like a coffee house!)

Then we wrapped some more eggs in onion skins and fastened them with elastic bands. It makes it easier if you can take the skin off the onion in big pieces as they will then curl nicely around the egg. Once they’re wrapped up, put them gently in a pan of water and hard-boil them. When they’re done, leave them to cool before you unwrap them.

Now you’re ready to play. You need a target to aim for – as it’s Easter we’ll be using a toy bunny rabbit. Place your target a few metres away and then take it in turn to roll your eggs at the target. We usually play in pairs with each person having two eggs each – so two chances to get closest to the bunny. Of course you can also use your turn to aim for your opponents eggs and knock them right out of the way! The winner is the person who ends up closest to the bunny. (And if you’re anything like my family you may need a tape measure to adjudicate.) We usually award a little chocolate egg to the winner.

Looking for more Easter fun? Here are some more Easter activities and crafts.

Easter chick pompoms

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Little is taking part in an Easter Parade at pre-school tomorrow and needs an Easter bonnet. She’s also crazy about chicks, ever since one of the kids at school brought some into class. So, what would suit her better than a bonnet full of chicks?  These pompom chicks are really easy to make, and if you use a thick wool they’re quick too. Pre-schoolers will probably need some help in case they get in a tangle but Big can make them by herself with no problem.

You need: some wool (you can stick with one colour or mix a couple together depending on how you want your chick to look), scissors,2 rings per chick cut from cardboard, card to make eyes and a beak.

The size of the rings will determine how big your chicks will be.

All you need to do is follow the photos below:

Place the two cardboard rings together.  Take a length of wool (say 75cm-ish) and start winding round the two rings. Keep winding! When you wool runs out, get another length and wind that in. Keep winding and adding more wool. Once the ring is full (fuller = fluffier chick), cut around the outer egde of the ring with your scissors. Take another length of wool and use it to tie a knot INSIDE the two cardboard rings. This is going to hold the chick together so make it a tight knot. Tear off the cardboard rings and your pompom is finished. Any bits of wool sticking out can be trimmed to size. You can trim off the extra length of wool which you used tie your knot, or leave it long so you can hang it up (or tie it on to your bonnet).

Glue on some eyes and a beak and your chick is ready. You can use this as an Easter decoration or play with it.

Or, make a family of them and tie them round your bonnet.

Happily shared with  arty crafty party

 

 

Sponge painting shapes

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Here’s  a quick idea you could try to explore shapes with your child.

Take a kitchen washing-up sponge and cut it into different shapes using some scissors. We made rectangles, squares and triangles. Talk with your child about the shapes: How many sides do they have? What are they called? Can they see anything in the room the same shape? What pictures could you make with the shapes?

Then place some paint onto a shallow dish and show your child how you can dip a sponge shapes into the paint and then press it on to a piece of paper to make a print. Have fun experimenting to see what you can create… a house, a train, a spaceship?

Planting Sunflower seeds

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Growing sunflowers with children? Download our free sunflower activities ebook.

Today’s the day – we planted our Sunflower Club seeds! Sunflowers are hardy annuals so you can plant them straight outside from March onwards. We learnt last year however that slugs just love to much straight through juicy, new sunflower stems, felling all your plants and leaving you nothing to grow, so this time we’re starting them off indoors. If you haven’t planted yours yet there’s plenty of time to get them started. Here’s what we did:

We stared off by having a good look at the seeds and drawing them. We’re making a scrapbook to record all our sunflower fun so we recorded today’s date and Big wrote a diary entry to say we’d planted the seeds. We stuck the seed packet in and our seed drawings. Using the scrapbook will give us the opportunity to do lots of writing and drawing and will be a complete story of our growing, from seed through to tall flowers -hopefully!

Then we explored the soil. I asked the girls what it felt like and they said it was crumbly, warm, brown, messy, soft and tickly. We used a spoon to fill the seed tray with the compost – great hand-eye co-ordination practice for Little, who did a geat job and only spilt a bit.

We then put one seed in each cell – counting the seeds as we went along.

seed experiment for kids
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We wrote labels so we know what kinds of seeds we’d planted (we’re growing tomatoes and marigolds too). It’s great to let even very young children have a try at writing – you can see from the photo how Big and Little wrote their labels. For Little it’s good for her to try out holding a pencil and ‘writing’ and lovely to see she understands that the marks she’s making have a purpose.

But, what do seeds need to grow? Big thinks they need soil, water and sunshine. Little thinks they might need worms too.  We decided to conduct an experiment to find out for sure what they need. Most of the seeds are in compost, on the windowsill and have been watered. We put a couple of the seeds in a dark cupboard to see if they’ll grow without light. A couple more are in compost by the window but we’re not giving them any water. And a couple more are on the windowsill in a glass of water, but no compost. We wonder what will happen to them all? They should germinate in 7-14 days so we’ll let you know.

Are you growing sunflowers too? If you’re blogging about them, please link up with the Linky below so we can all come and see how you’re getting on. And help yourself to the Sunflower Club button (on the left-hand column) to add to your blog page. If  you haven’t got a blog we’d love you to leave a comment here or on the facebook page.

Happy planting!

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