Home » toddler » Page 7

Teach the alphabet with dough

by 3 Comments

A simple bread dough is a perfect medium for children to explore with. It’s easy to make using ingredients you can keep in your storecupboard and I find children always take great pleasure in using ‘real grown-up’ materials. There are lots of ways you can use a bread dough to let your children play with counting, measuring, pouring, cutting. Today we’ve been teaching the alphabet with bread. We’ve a recipe and a song to share with you.

 

Weigh 500g of strong bread flour and a teaspoon of salt out into a big bowl. Little thought it felt very tickly.


 

Practise your scissor skills to add a 7g sachet of fast-action dried yeast.


 

Pour in 300ml of warm water and a tablespoon of olive oil using good hand-eye co-ordination. Little liked mixing the colours to combine all the ingredients into a ball of dough.


 

Develop strength in your fingers by kneading the dough for 5 minutes on a floured surface. (Getting fingers ready to one day hold a pencil and write well.)


 

Try out a different texture as you spread a little oil on a baking sheet.


 

Introduce some letters by making your own dough alphabet. (If you want to use the recipe to make a proper loaf you can shape it and then leave it to prove for 45 minutes before baking.)

 

Put your letters on the baking sheet and bake in an oven pre-heated to Gas 7/ 220C for about 10 minutes, depending on the size of your letters. (Bake for 25 minutes if you’re making a whole loaf.)

If you can spot the letters in your name you can eat them!

Mini beast hunt

by 2 Comments

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

Our sunflowers have now moved outside to our little greenhouse to enjoy the Spring sunshine and get them used to being outside. We’ve been out enjoying the garden too. Little has been especially interested to see creatures out there. She will stop in her tracks and peer at her feet, watching an ant running around. Big is interested to know which animals are goodies (that would include worms and ladybirds) or badies (which definitely includes slugs and snails). So we have decided so survey what animals we have sharing our garden with us by playing… Garden Bingo!

First we talked about what animals we might expect to see. (Sorry Little, but no elephants are likely to be found.) Then we drew pictures of them. Everyone can join in with this, no matter how young or artisically challenged they might be. Little did a great worm, ladybird and spider – with carefully counted legs. Big’s cat is very characterful and her butterfly is perfectly symmetrical. I was able to muster some greenfly and wowed everyone with my woodpigeon.

Then we stuck our animal pictures on to our bingo card and wrote their names underneath, along with a tick box for each one. Each time we spot an animal in the garden we’re going to tick them off our card. Take time to have a good look at each animal as you see them. Look at their shape, colour and patterns and count their legs (or note their lack off). Talk about their role in the garden ecosystem and decide if they are goodies or badies.

If you like a competition you could make each person a slightly different bingo card to see who can spot all their creatures first to get a ‘full house’. We like to promote harmony in our garden so we have one big bingo card to complete all together.

If you’re out in the garden and growing things with your children, come and join in with our Sunflower Club to get a Spring and Summer full of activities all linked to growing and gardening.

Annual egg rolling contest

by 2 Comments

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.

Sponge painting shapes

by 4 Comments

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

by 6 Comments

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
[pinit]

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!

NurtureStore