Make your own snow

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I saw Growing a Jeweled Roses' Summer Snow the other day and knew we had to test it out.  All you need to create your own snow is shaving foam and a freezer, I also hid a few toys in ours.  This is how we got on...

Things to do with salt and kids

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Today we have the next instalment in our 'Things to do with' series where we take a common item and see what ways we can play with it, this time it's salt.  Just your regular table salt hopefully in your cupboard already and waiting for some play opportunities!

1 - Salt Scoop and Pour

I coloured some salt with food colouring by placing them together in a plastic sandwich bag and giving it all a good shake.  Then I set up a few pots and spoons for Champ to play with.

He enjoyed scooping out the salt and pouring it in to various pots then pouring it all out again.  It always amazes me how long this type of play can keep him entertained.

But, perhaps next time I should use a bit less food colouring - he had blue stained hands for two days, whoops!

2 - Salt Writing

Once he was bored with pouring and scooping we poured all the salt into the tray and he used a chopstick to make marks, write his name and draw pictures.

3 - Salt Painting

I wrote about our salt painting recently, you can check out how we made our salt pictures here.  It was a fun activity and the results were pretty and our first attempt with watercolours.

4 - Salt & Ice Sensory Play

I enjoyed watching all three boys engage with this sensory play.  I'd frozen some water coloured with food colouring in various pots and put them on the tray then I gave the boys some salt to watch the ice melt.  We'd done this once before, but last time I'd 'trapped' plastic bugs inside for them to free.

The ice was soon melted and the boys enjoyed creating holes in the ice blocks.

5 - Homemade Puffy Paint

We made this puffy paint a while ago and the two ingredients are salt and self raising flour.  It makes for quite a different type of painting as it raises up after cooking in the microwave.

6 - Salt Dough

Salt dough is like play dough except that you can dry it out, paint it and make ornaments etc out of it.  We've made salt dough before (like when we made crosses for Easter), normally we air dry it, but this time we followed Rainy Day Mum's recipe and dried it out in the microwave, much, much quicker, but with slight air bubbles - great for kids as they're ready straight away, but I'd air dry it if we were making presents.

Here's our hearts and dinosaurs all ready for painting.

I found lots more salt play ideas pinned on my Salt Pinterest Board, but I'd love to hear your salt play ideas.

If you're looking for more 'Things to do with' ideas you can check out Things to do with foil, plastic bags, wrapping paper, spaghetti, pumpkin, pinecones, acorns, odd socks, chestnuts and carrots.

Water Beads In Snow

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Earlier in the year there was a bit of a craze for water beads in play, because well they're very cool (The Chocolate Muffin Tree has a great round up of loads of water bead activities)  These tiny plastic beads grow in water to create small jelly like beads and make for fun sensory play.  This past week we've had loads of snow and we've done lots of outdoor and indoor snow play so for something new I thought why not mix the two together.

I gave Champ a box of snow, or so he thought....

....... hidden in the snow were lots of water beads.

Apparently it's easier to look for treasure with the help of a toy lizard! 

After lots of digging and moving snow, putting it in different containers etc Champ separated out the snow and water beads and just kept playing.

Only Champ played with the snow and water beads, Bud didn't want to, he played with the beads on their own.  Whilst Little Dude got to play with just snow (we're still at the putting things in his mouth stage and water beads are not for eating).

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Things to do with left over pumpkin and kids

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Welcome!  Given the huge number of pumpkin crafts there's been in the blogging world lately I'm guessing that I'm not the only one who has a pumpkin that needs using up!  We'd done plenty of pumpkin cooking, so I figured it was time for some fun......

1 - Hammering
I've seen this a few places (I think I first saw it on Time for Play) and mostly other people have used golf tees, I couldn't find ours so we used cocktail sticks instead.  It made it less suitable for little Dude who's only one so he had to mostly watch, but Champ always loves the opportunity to bash things!

2 - Scooping and seed collecting

If you carved your pumpkin you've probably already done this, but we scooped out the seeds with an ice cream scoop and the boys had a good old feel of the inside.  We have also dried our seeds hoping to plant them

3 - Small world play

I added some water to the flesh we'd scooped out and we added some dinosaurs for a bit of fun, making the perfect pre-historic swamp. 

Champ's pre-school had done this the day before, but with a large water table and the pumpkin floated making it really swamp like!



4 - Baby Play

Little Dude is only 13mths, but this was a great sensory material for him and he loved scooping up pumpkin, transferring it to a bowl, tipping it back and starting all over again!

5 - Cutting

Champ loves knives and loves to chop things up, so under supervision he chopped up pumpkin.

6 - Mashing

Inspired by Childhood Beckons we got out the masher and Champ got stuck in.

7 - Pumpkin Oobleck

Once nicely mashed we added cornflour for some pumpkin gloop having spotted this idea on Inspiration Laboratories.  Not quite the full gloop liquid vs solid experience you get with regular gloop, but still good fun

8 - Shaving Cream Pumpkin

To a separate batch we then squirted some shaving cream which made it lighter and fluffier, but still pretty slimy!



9 - Concoction Making

All three boys love Roald Dahl and their current favourite is 'George's Marvellous Medicine' so they love every opportunity to make a potion.  We mixed the gloop and the shaving foam pumpkin together then added flour, oats and food colouring at Champs request.

10 - Make 'cakes'

We got the muffin cases out and made birthday cakes as the mixture was thickening up now and then we spread it out on the baking tray. 

What are you going to do with your pumpkins?

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Daddy led messy play

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If I could increase my mess rating I think I'd need to give this activity four splats!  I don't suggest you try this out without making a few modifications, well read on and you'll see what I mean!

 

Hubby is an awesome Dad, extremely hands on and the boys think he is their own personal superhero!  He is also a big fan of all the messy play the boys and I get up to, so last Friday I returned home to find the boys stuck into what they would probably tell you was the best messy play ever!

 

So it started out ok-ish with Bud and Champ having a tub of stones, oats, milk, chives, oil and I came in the room just as the ketchup was being added - all being mixed up with hands of course!

 

 

Apparently they were trying to make cement!  So flour was soon added to create the right kind of consistency.

 

The cement (and the boys) then headed outside.  I tried to convince them to build walls with stones seeing as it was cement they were making, but oh no......

 

..... they wanted to smear it on the walls.....

 

..... our front steps....

 

...... then you've guessed it, each other.

 

Then Bud was very kind and pointed out that he had made cement as stones were now sticking to the wall - just to give you a bit of context... we live on a busy main road so our front door is litterally four foot from the pavement and road so loads of people were walking and driving past - sob!

 

After this we decided to call it a day and Hubby scooped up all three boys and put them in the bath, which meant I got left with the clean up (although I'd rather that than three hyper boys and a tub of water!).

 

No problem I thought.... then I realised that flour and water can be used as glue substitute, and with good reason!  I spent ages scrubbing our wall and front steps (again cars whizzing past) looking like a 50s housewife!!!!!

 

I've decided my new family motto is 'we're not making a mess, we're making memories'!!  Just as well!!

 

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Things to do with acorns and kids

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In my new series 'things to do with...' we've so far covered carrots and chestnuts (part one & part two) so this week keeping with a bit of an Autumn theme its acorns!  Again we've done so many different activities with acorns I'm going to split it into two posts (part two here), here we go with the first five activities.....

1 - Glitter acorns
Whilst I wouldn't want to add anything to Mother nature's perfection, everything does sparkle with glitter so why not acorns!

Champ hard at work painting glue on the acorns then rolling them in glitter.

Unfortunately, he then glittered his hands - hence the two splat rating!

But, glittered hands aside I think they look quite cute all sparkly!

2 - Acorn treasure hunt

Recently I read a post where a Mum had given here kids a drawn map and added x's to mark where the treasure was, unfortunately I didn't pin it and now can't find it to give it credit (if you also saw this post please let me know in the comments).  But, I thought it was a great idea so hid our glitter acorns and marked them on the map.

The map really helped as the acorns are pretty small even if they sparkled making them easier to find.

3 - Painted acorns

For a bit of decoration I painted some acorns, initially I used ready mix paint, but it flaked off so did them again with acrylic paints which worked much better.

The boys also enjoyed painting the acorns, although they mostly ended up brown - fun, but not that pretty!

4 - Painted acorn caps (for matching pairs)

The idea for painting acorn caps came from Paint Cut Paste they used markers to colour the inside of the acorn caps, instead I used paint, but then also like the original post used glue to make a lovely shine.

They look lovely!  I did these without the boys, but it could easily be done with older kids.  My plan was to then using them in a game of matching pairs - by turning them face down and matching the colours - if you get to give it a go let me know!

5 - Autumn Sensory Bin
We also popped the acorns as well as chestnuts (conkers) and pine cones for a sensory bin, ours was very simple, but check out some of the great ones from 1 + 1 + 1 = 1 and Happy Hooligans.

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