Lego Junior - Review

The boys were thrilled when they found out that they had been selected to be Lego Junior product testers. When I say the boys I mean all 3 of them... Joseph (5), Daniel (3.5), & Daddy! We were sent the Police Station set (10675) to test out. It has an age range of 4-7, which is a little lower than most standard Lego sets, as its been designed to be easier to build.

Marble Run Fun

Apologies for the lack of posts recently I've been so busy with 1/2 term & Josephs Birthday. He had a great Halloween party which I will post about soon. So I thought I would share this post that has been waiting in the wings for a while!

We picked up this fab ELC marble run at the car boot back in the spring. I'm really trying to encourage more open ended toys & this one is great I'm sure it will be used for many years to come. Both boys love building the towers & then testing them with the marbles. It really is a great toy for problem solving skills, trying to work out where the marble will go & what to change to make it go where they want. It's also great for fine motor skills when putting it together.

Daddy had lots of fun helping the boys build a really tall tower.

In the summer we even took it out-side to see how it would work with water. It kind of worked but only if you pour a small amount of water, pour to fast it it all spills over! It was still lots of fun though! We didn't use the light up battery section with water.

They are still enjoying this almost 6 months on, with it being brought out about once a week.

x Jo x

If you would like to buy your own marble run (it would make a great Christmas gift) Here are a few Amazon affiliate links for your convenience.

Early Learning Centre - Marble Madness Game -Almost the same as ours
Galt Super Marble Run- looks like a good set & Galt are normally good quality
Toyrific Marble Run Game -Looks like much better value, but reviews suggest that its smaller & won't work with normal marbles

Halloween Crafts & Sensory Fun

Following on from our Top 20 Halloween Crafts & Messy Play Ideas post we have been getting everything ready for our 1/2 term group messy play session. We've decided to make bottle ghosts, spider webs, & spiders. We will also decorate some paper pumpkins but I'm yet to prep for this! 

I'm collecting & washing lots of bottles ready for our ghosts. We will be filling them with cotton wool then sticking on eyes & mouths that I've cut out of sticky back felt. I'm also saving our milk bottles to make ghost decorations for Josephs party, by drawing on the face with a permanent marker pen.

 We have lots of wool scraps here courtesy of the boys Grandma, so a paper plate spider web was a great way to use some up! I've got a stack of paper plates (large & small) which I have punched lots of holes in, ready for a length of wool to be tied on & threaded around to make a web. These webs look great with small plastic spiders, but i thought the kids would like to make a spider. I love this spider from Red Ted Art so to make our spiders we will be making the body from a ball of black paper (mine was A5). The legs are made from 2 pipe cleaners in 1/2, twisting all 4 pieces together & taping on underneath. I then glued some googly eyes on & decorated with some glitter glue. He looks really cute sat on a small pumpkin, which is where he is living for now :-)

Daniel (3) has been helping me get our sensory box ready for the session as well. We started out by raiding the cupboard for all the lentils, & split peas etc we used to make our Dinosaurs back in the summer, we then added a couple of packs of soup & broth mix that we picked up reduced to clear. In total our box has nearly 2kg of dried goods to make the base. We then added our collection of spiders, bugs, snakes & a small witch. We found these cute mini pumpkin buckets & eyeballs in a £ shop. I then added some co-ordinating pom poms as the boys love these & later on some scoops. Daniel has had lots of fun testing out this box for me! 

Really looking forward to both the messy play session & Josephs birthday party. However my house (&head) is full of to buy/make/do/cook lists, so will be relieved once I have pulled it all off!

x Jo x

CD Stickers & We Love Weekends Blog Hop

 When Nanny came up for Daniels Birthday she had brought some stickers for the boys. Normally we tend to either use stickers for a specific project or I have a stash that I forget to give out as rewards! So when faced with a whole sheet each, they didn't really want to put them on their t-shirts. Joseph (4.5) wanted to stick them on the walls & Daniel (3) wanted to stick them on toys! So amidst the chaos of greeting & settling in my mum, I had a rummage in my 'to keep to make something with one day' box & found these old CDs. 

We've used CDs for crafts before & the boys have been wary as I'm always telling them to be careful with CDs & DVDs, so I stressed the point that these were old ones that Daddy didn't need any more. The boys were happy to use the shiny CDs as a base for their creativity & I breathed a sigh of relief that my walls were safe! Peeling stickers from a sheet is a great fine motor activity, Joseph finds this quite easy but depending on the type of sticker Daniel can struggle. Once finished I added some ribbon so that they became decorations. They are now hung on the boys wardrobe doors & are a useful place to keep stickers that are coming off of t-shirts at the end of the day, which saves me having to sneak them in the bin!

 

We Love Weekends Blog Hop

What To Do With The Children Has asked me to co-host her weekly blog hop again. 

Its a place for other bloggers to link up with ideas of all kinds and information they think you might find useful or just for a good read. Anything goes on We love weekends, so if you are a blogger please feel free to link up a post & grab the button if you'd like. And if your a follower, crafter, or reader please take a look at all the wonderful ideas being linked up. Bloggers love comments so if you like a post a comment is always appreciated. If your not a blogger but would like to share your fun ideas or what you are up to this weekend, please leave a comment on this post.

Why not take a look back at last weeks blog hop to see some of the great ideas that were linked. My favourite was these Summer Sun Catchers from JB Mum Of One.

x Jo x

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Glowing Disco Fun Bath

Since the success of our Christmas Fun Bath, which we set up several times over the festive period, I have been meaning to set up another fun bath for the boys. 

I picked up a pack of 15 glow sticks from the £1 shop, after seeing them used in the bath over at Growing A Jewelled Rose. I started out by activating all the  glow sticks & using the connectors to make circles. We already had some colour changing light up cubes & we are lucky enough to have a blue light in our bath (something that was very important when I had time for long soaks in the bath - before kids!).

We turned off the main bathroom light & put on some music using a CD player in a nearby room.

The boys were so excited to see what there next fun bath was going to be & really enjoyed using the glow sticks in the water. We used them as mini hola hoops for our arms & the boys even took them all apart and made a big snake/worm. It turned out to be good fine motor practise connecting all the glow sticks together.

 It was another big hit and we will defiantly do this again once I've picked up some more glow sticks.

x Jo x

Nuts & Bolts

On our way home from pre-school we like to pop in to a charity shop or 2! Joseph found this fab Quercetti Techno set:

It has nuts & bolts, different types of screws, flat plates, different screw drivers & a spanner. Best of all it even came with the instruction book, with ideas of how to make several pattens, models & even some scales. I'm not always overly keen on toys with lots of little bits, however as this packs up inside its self it tends to stay quite tidy.

It offers great fine motor skill practise & also helps with shape matching e.g. choosing the right screwdriver. The boys enjoy it now but they need help if they want to make anything specific, so think that they will get lots more use from it when they are older and able to follow the instructions themselves.

x Jo x

Cotton Reel Threading

We have had our cotton reel set for a little while now. I picked it up from a local charity shop after nursery said that Joseph (4) liked playing with theirs, about 18 months ago. It only came with a piece of string that had tape on the end so I bought some new colour boot laces from a market for 50p a pair & tied a knot in one end.

 I keep these in the kitchen as an activity to keep them busy while I'm cooking dinner. More recently Daniel (2.5) has shown an interest in the cotton reels, and before he could manage to use the lace I gave him a long pipe cleaner, as we used with our pasta threading. The cotton reels are nice & chunky for little hands it is an excellent activity for improving fine motor skills. They can also be used for stacking & colour sorting.

Once Daniel had strung several together he started to pull them along the floor, pretending it was first a caterpillar & then a snake.

You can buy a new Galt Cotton Reel set from Amazon US & Amazon UK, they also make a giant button set which, I think the boys would enjoy so I might get one for Daniels birthday in May.