Seaside Messy Play

I have finally got around to writing up the last of our summer messy play sessions. The theme was the seaside, to cover the beach & the sea - as I couldn't choose! We had lots of fun making our CD fish click here for full details.

On another table I set up all our scissors (straight & curvy etc.) & our punches, along with some old magazines. The kids had great fun cutting out interesting pictures & then sticking them on to some paper to make collages.

I managed to get this great roll of blue & yellow paper from our scrap store & it is just perfect for a beach painting.. I love the concentration Daniel(3) has here, he often sticks his tongue out!

In one of our pools I put a bag of play sand along with lots of sand toys. I'm not a major fan of sand & prefer it when its at the beach (& stays there) so it was a treat for the boys. I even let them keep it in the garden (covered) for a couple of weeks.

The other pool was set up as a rock pool, with lots of green & blue strips (thanks scrap store), some rocks & plastic sea life.

In a sensory box we had some water beads & sea life sand moulds for scooping. It was the first time that the other children & parents had experienced them & they kept going back to explore! 

In the second box we had our collection of boats, sea life figures, our shell collection and water with some blue food colouring. Water play is always popular I've noticed that on the weeks without water play that many kids end up playing in the hand washing bowl.

We also had out some blue play dough & our play-doh octopus & several relevant cutters.

We had so much fun all summer (& lots of hard work), its really great to let the boys explore several creative or sensory stations & move at their own pace. We often do things like this at home but only ever one at a time & we also have other distractions. I cant wait for our Halloween special messy play.

x Jo x

CD Fish Craft

I've been so wrapped up in Autumn & Halloween I've forgotten to share the details of the last of my summer messy play sessions. Our theme was the seaside to include the beach & under the sea. I have been wanting to make CD fish with the boys for a while so it seamed like the perfect craft for this theme.

Daniel (3)

Once I had collected enough old Cd's (thank goodness our local scrap store had some), I cut out lots of fins, tails & hearts for lips, form various colours of stiff paper (card or craft foam would also work well). You could glue these on, but would need to wait for them to dry before decorating the front. So we used sellotape to attach them on to the back of our Cd's.

We then flipped them over stuck on a googly eye & then the kids got creative with a selection of decorations to glue on.

My example fish, I love having an excuse to create!

Here are a few of our fab fish..

These would be great to make any time, but would be great if you are working on an under the sea theme or the letter F. Check back soon for the rest of the details of our seaside messy play...

 

x Jo x