Bubble Wrap Hearts & Valentines Playdough

We decided to have a go at the bubble wrap printing that we saw over at Learning 4 Kids, to incorporate B for Bubble (our next letter, for letter A activity's see here), and an activity for Valentines Day.

 They both enjoyed using heart shaped bubble wrap to print, we used red glitter paint & plain red paint & 2 different shaped hearts. We wouldn't use coloured paper again as the boys printing didn't really stand out however the couple I did as an example on white paper looked much more effective.

As our bubble wrap looked nice painted I placed it on a piece of paper (bubble side out) to dry, I would do this again as it stuck to the paper & looked very effective being 3D. Once the paint was dry I cut out the heart shapes to use as a display on our kitchen/diner wall.

Daniel was enjoying the paining so much he used up the last of the paint with a brush, this made a nice dry brush effect. I used this painting along with several other random drawings & paintings sent home from nursery to add to our heart display.

 

Later the same day we decided to continue the Valentines theme & cut some hearts out of play dough. We love play dough & I did used to make a lot of our own however for Josephs 3rd birthday he was given a huge set & we have still only opened half of the pots that came with it & they are still going strong over a year later. For his 4th birthday he asked for the Play-Doh Candy Cyclone (which they both love) It came with a pot of white & a pot of bright pink, which over time has become this cool pink marbled play dough. It was perfect to use our heart cutters with.

 Valentines day isn't as big in here in the UK as it is over in the US. It tends to be just for couples & those looking for love, rather than to show love and appreciation to people you know. However its still nice to do some activity's with the boys, even though they wont be giving gifts & cards to friends etc. I mentioned to daddy about making some cards for Nanny & Grandma & he thought this was very weird! How do you celebrate where you live?

x Jo x

Christmas Round-Up

I just wanted to share a few pictures of our more recent Christmas activity's.

I changed out our Small World Box, to make a Christmas Sensory Box.

I first got this out for a play date with our friends little boy (2.5), they enjoyed finding 'treasure' the best of which was 3 chocolate Santa lolly pops! After a few minutes play did get a little rough though, snatching & swinging beads around etc. This also happened the second time we got this box out.

We had some fun making code trees. We re-used some cones that we had previously been used to make a rocket, I think they are from knitting machine yarn?

We painted them green, then once dry glued on sequins etc to decorate them. I really like these & will be putting them away to bring out next year.

We had a go at making mini ginger bread houses. We used the included icing to stick them together which held for about 2 minutes before falling apart. So after several failed attempts we settled with the pic we had and went on to eat them!

Next year I think I will go with a big kit & use melted sugar to stick it together the night before. Then let the boys decorate one side each.

We also made some mince pies, the boys love spooning the mince meat (I still find it a strange name given that it contains no meat) & cutting the pastry shapes out. Oh and they enjoy eating them as well!

On Christmas Eve I made the boys a 'Christmas lunch' using the cookie cutters that we bought for our salt dough decorations to cut out the sandwiches. This left quite a lot of waste sandwich so that was my lunch!

The boys received a lovely little tike's kitchen from Nanny, they actually had it a few days early while she was staying with us. We are so glad we didn't leave building it until Christmas Eve as it took 3 hours, even with an electric screwdriver!

The boys were very lucky as Daddy bought them a My 1st Scalextric which I think might have been more for him LOL

We had a fantastic Christmas, made all the better by all the other bloggers & pintrest giving us lots of ideas. I would like to wish you & your family's a very happy new year, may 2013 be kind to us all.

x Jo x

Saltdough Decorations

We decided to have another go at some salt dough after we first tried it for some Halloween bat decorations. So I bought some Christmas cookie cutters, as our current ones we use for play dough were a bit small. We made Christmas Trees, Snowmen & Gingerbread Men. We used this recipe from The Imagination Tree, but I have also got this microwave recipe pinned for future use.

 When making our bat decorations we found that salt dough sticks more than play dough, so we rolled out on banking paper to make it easier to lift the shapes off (lots of flour also helps). Before baking i used a drinking straw to make holes at the top of each one.

 

Then we painted them, we started off using some new glitter paints I'd bought but they were a bit transparent so I ended up adding some of our usual water based paint to the glitter paint, which worked quite well. As with most craft activity's Joseph (4) lost interest after a couple, but Daniel (2.5) would have sat there painting for ages, he is also a lot cleaner & more careful!

 The tree with the cut out in the centre wasn't very strong as the 2 that we made both broke :-(

 

I placed them on plastic to dry as previous crafts have been ruined by bits of newspaper stuck to them! We let them dry for an hour or so then painted the backs. 

The next day we added sequins & other bits we found, and also eyes for the snowmen & gingerbread man.  I then threaded ribbon through the top so that they can be hung up. I used a permanent marker to write on the back of some to use as teacher gifts & for the grandparents.

x Jo x