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

Frog Pond - We love Weekends Blog Hop

After our finding tadpoles on our picnic last weekend we decided to make a small world frog pond. Firstly the table needed a good clean after being stood up for the winter. After tipping out the water & wiping away the worst of the algae with kitchen roll & anti-bac spray, I re-filled it & let the boys help me finish cleaning it with some old cloths. Another empty & refill & we were good to go.

Ewww yucky water table!

We then gathered our collection of plastic frogs (yes its growing) & I cut some lilly pads out of craft foam. The frogs had lots of fun in our 'pond' they even had a float on the lilly pads. They were then joined by some rocks to play on & some boats (came with water table from Argos). The boys had lots of fun & got very wet even with their aprons on. Joseph (4.5) is getting so tall that he now has to kneel to play. The water table was one of Daniels (now 3) Birthday presents last year.

We Love Weekends Blog Hop

A fellow UK blog What To Do With The Children is launching a weekly blog hop & to celebrate has asked several other blog's including Le Baby Bakery to join in. This will be the first blog hop or linky (as they are also known) we have co-hosted so let me know what you think & if you would like to see more. Why not check out the other blogs who are co-hosting:
Peakle Pie
Diapers-n-Heels
Lalymom

<div align="center"><a href="http://whattodowiththechildren.com/category/we-love-weekends/" title="What to do with the children"><img src="http://whattodowiththechildren.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/we-love-weekends-button-150x150.jpg" width="150" height="150" alt="What to do with the children" style="border:none;" /></a></div>

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 above 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.

F is for...

This week fortnight we have been looking at the letter F. We had so much Fun with Fish in our Small World Aquarium. We also had a go at painting magic fish which wasn't so successful!

 We pulled out our FP Little People Farm, which hadn't been out in a while so got lots of attention, it was even left out for a few days so they could revisit it. It worked well having our Ikea car mat out as well to add to the play. 

I really love seeing the boys play together. Its happening more & more these days and it really makes me realise that a small age gap was a good idea, its only taken 3 years to see that!

We did a few colouring sheets, however as the weather has been nice we have been outside more.

 

We also got our frog figures out - I came downstairs in to the lounge to find that Joseph (4.5) had lined them all up on Daddy's desk. These frogs might make an appearance in a sensory box soon...

x Jo x

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Magic Fish

 I've seen several posts on pintrest about using a white crayon & water colours to make magic pictures & decided fish would be a good time to give it a try. I set the boys up with their watercolour paints, a brush & water. Note to self: buy non-spill cups, as we had a spill shortly after starting!

 I used white card as I knew the boys would end up getting it very wet, which they did mainly in an attempt to get the colour dark enough to see the magic fish picture. I did try to encourage blues/greens but was over ruled, Joseph (4.5) is very fond of his black. I wonder if he will grow up to be a goth?

 I was really disappointed with the effect of these fish, I had put an upper & lowercase F on the picture & scales & weed, but it didn't really show! I think with these paints the boys use to much water & not enough paint. I also think a sharper crayon might have helped. Next time i try this technique I will use pre-mixed water colours, either food colouring or ready mixed paint watered down. However once I cut them out they looked a little better & much more like fish.

Do you like the new 'You may also like...' feature at the bottom of my posts? Its from nrelate. I am also now finally on twitter & would love it if you could follow me.

x Jo x

Small World Aquarium

Firstly apologies for my lack of posts recently We have been quite busy recently including prepping for Daniels birthday party which I will be posting about in a couple of weeks.

We have started working on the letter F, however fitting in activity's has been as hard as posting about them! An aquarium small world box (from my small potato's) was one of the first I found on pintrest & have been collecting clear box's (without holes) since, however once i saw it all set up it occurred to me that take away or sandwich boxes would have worked just as well!

 So we started out with our 6 plastic 'tanks' all the fish we could find (includes Duplo, Lego & bath toys) Some plastic pond weed, rocks, & 2 types of aquarium gravel. I let the boys decide what fish would live in each tank & what gravel etc they would like.

We then used a small watering can to add water to each tank. 

I still find it really hard to let them do things by themselves, even if they are making a mess, but trying to take photos helps keep my hands busy!

We then decided that some people (Duplo, Happyland, & Little People) would like to come & visit our aquarium. And the fish needed more food, so lettuce leaves it was...

They then needed a net to catch the fish & check they were well.

 This was one of our most successful small world boxes to date, they played for over an hour & didn't even leave it when the door bell went. 

We kept it out for the next day & it evolved in to transferring the stones between the tanks & i even think they were creating food & selling it to each other at one point. Most of the water stayed in the main box & other than the odd bit of gravel on the kitchen floor was mess free :-)

x Jo x