Christmas Ornament Alphabet Game

 

Here's an easy and fun way to practice the alphabet.

Type out and cut up the letters of the alphabet. If you have an alphabet puzzle or any other alphabet toy, which has all the loose letters, that would work well too. 

Hide each letter with a Christmas ornament around your home. Then send your little person to look for all the ornaments. When they find the letter and the ornament, they must tell you what the letter is. You can extend this activity by asking them to shout out a word starting with that letter.

After they have found all the ornaments, they get to hang them on the tree. Simple and fun.

Hope you are enjoying this lovely time of year. Till next time. 

14 of the best Shaving Cream activities ever!

I cream, You cream, We all love Shaving cream! 

(sorry, couldn't help myself) :)

What can you get up to with Shaving cream? Well, it's definitely more than just for shaving. Before writing this post,  I had not let my kids play enough with this stuff , so after finding two big cans for under R35 at Discem Pharmacy, I grabbed them (with a smile) and came home ready for some shaving cream fun. And you get the benefit of me having scoured the web for the best ideas and sharing some of them here.

But first off, here's a couple of quick and easy activities we got up to.

1. Shaving cream and paint play. I gave Little One a brush and water and told him to wet the water colours and to mix it into the shaving cream. He loved it! You could use tempera or acrylic paints too.

2. Shaving cream, toy cars and a spray bottle of water to wash them off. The full post is here. We did this back in 2012. (If I had a little girl, I'd still do this, but substitute the cars for small plastic bath toys or dolls perhaps?)

3. Earlier this year we made shaving cream puffy paint to create a lunar landscape. The full post is here.

4. Ocean in a bag. I saw this neat idea over at Pink and Green Mama and adapted it a bit. Take a big zip lock bag, fill it with shaving cream, some blue food colouring and add some sea-themed stickers. Seal the bag and let your kiddo explore. I loved how the shaving cream in the bag felt... I couldn't help but play with it too. I think this is a great activity for a younger child and if you added different colours, you would get a lovely rainbow effect. We'll try that next time.

5. Shaving cream in the bath is a blast. I purchased a nice old-fashioned razor (no blade) from Checkers and Little One shaved just like Dad - I loved his expressions.

We are lucky enough to have a mirror running the length of the bath, so Little One can smear shaving cream all over and use it as a canvas to draw and do letter practice. If you don't have a mirror, smearing it onto the bath sides can work just as well.

6. Shaving Cream Desert. Another great bath activity, although no bath required. Provide silicone cup cake holders, shaving cream and sparkly beads and some spoons. Let the fun begin. (Honestly, not a hit with my Little One, but I think that little girls would love this.)

Here are some other wonderful ideas I haven't tried - yet!

Shaving Cream Painting (Mom it Forward)

Shaving Cream Balloons - you read right! (Aluminum Foiled)

Erupting Sensory Shaving Cream Snow (Growing a Jeweled Rose)

Shimmery Shaving Cream Paint Recipe (Growing a Jeweled Rose)

Shaving Cream Dough (Growing a Jeweled Rose)

Make Indoor Snowmen (Modern Parents Messy Kids)
Teaching spreading skills with shaving-cream and foam blocks (Happy Hooligans)

And last, but not least, Shaving Cream Bath Paint (Meet the Dubiens). This last idea looks fantastic and I'm dying to try it, BUT I'm not brave enough to use food colours in the bath. What if it stains? Those who've tried it, claim it doesn't and perhaps it depends on what type of food colouring you use. Of course you can purchase coloured shaving foam, so that's perhaps the "safer" alternative.

And if after all this, you are actually really worried about letting your kiddos play with shaving cream, here's the infamous shaving cream article (a lengthy read). 

I know this goes without saying, but Shaving Cream should not be eaten, so please don't leave your very little person alone with it. 

Till next time, have some super shaving cream fun! 

Please come back and tell me what you got up to.

Fun with Dinosaurs {Make a Small Dinosaur World and Salt Dough Fossils}

   

Dinosaur week(s) has been lots of fun and the best part for me was the day Little One spent in the garden playing with a friend  - ALL DAY - digging for dino fossils. The fossils were some white shells we found on a walk on the beach a long time ago. I hid them in the ground, gave them each a spade and a paint brush, and I demonstrated how to be a Paleontologist (well best I could). After they got tired of looking for the seashell "fossils", they turned to the interesting bits of rock in the garden and then requested hammers, so that some hammering could happen too.

Perhaps it's too wet or cold where you are though to play outside, so I thought it would be fun to share and create a small indoor dinosaur world... for the indoor Paleontologists ;). 

I actually made this scene on my patio table, so technically it's still outdoors, but you can easily duplicate this indoors of course. 

(I must apologise for the very distracting table cloth.)

I used two cardboard boxes and connected them with a long piece of brown felt. I thought the sides of the boxes kept the scene fairly contained, which is helpful for tidying up purposes, and the sides also created a barrier for the dinosaurs to climb over. 

The following things were used to create the scene:

Pebbles/River stones collected from beach walks

White stones (can be purchased at a garden centre)

Small river stones (purchased from The Crazy Store for R20)

Shells that looked like fossils found at the beach

Blue felt to make a dam 

Home-made salt dough fossils (recipe below)

Egg boxes

Home-made volcano

Waterfall made from bubble wrap

Cave made from a tissue box

 I forgot to add greenery, but that's pretty simple, as all the greenery you need can be found in your garden. I added the big egg boxes, which Little One painted, to be the scary volcanic rocks around the erupting volcano. The dinosaurs had to tread rather carefully when crossing the perilous volcanic rock. :) The egg boxes also allowed me to create some height, as they are nice to stack on top of each other. 

The volcano was made from a foam cup, which I covered with brown felt as best I could. I then cut a red square and folded it over the top and glued it on. It took me a few minutes to make it. (A glue gun does come in very handy here.) 

The cave was created from a tissue box. I added some recycled biscuit box cardboard to the outside of it.

The recipe for our salt dough fossils is as follows:

2 cups of flour

1 cup of salt

1 cup of water

Mix it together and then roll it out to make a nice smooth dough.

Once you have made the fossils (or anything else for that matter), put it on a baking tray and bake for a few hours at 180 degrees Celsius.

Even though the children are very ready to move on to a new theme, I have decided to share one more dinosaur post, so hold on tight...it's a goodie.

Fun with Dinosaurs {Hatching Dinosaur Eggs}

After scouring Pinterest for some cool and fun dinosaur activities, I came across this recipe at Growing a Jeweled Rose for some sizzling, fizzling dinosaur eggs. I had to try it!

The only change I made to the recipe was that Crystal added food colouring, but instead of that, I added some soil from our garden.

Here's the recipe:

500 grams of Bicarbonate of Soda/Baking Soda (found a box at Pick n Pay for R11)

3 tablespoons of soil (not essential)

About 2/3rds a cup of water

Small plastic dinosaurs (usually available in tubes from The Crazy Store)

White vinegar in a squirt bottle (for the hatching to happen)

 

Mix the bicarb and the sand and then slowly add water until the mixture can be molded. Place some of it into your cupped hand. Add a small dinosaur to the top of the mixture you have in your hand and then cover it with more of the mixture. You should be able to mold the egg fairly easily. If the mixture is too sloppy, you need to add more bicarb. I then used a large sized plastic egg to help me get nicely shaped eggs. I used only the one half, just to help shape the egg a bit. Let it dry for 24 hours.

 

When the eggs are dry, place them in the garden for the children to find. Give them a spray bottle with the vinegar in it and let them squirt away. That's when the sizzling, fizzling part happens. :)

This last picture looks quite authentic and gross, don't you think?

All in all a really successful activity. Little One had a friend over to play for the day and after this activity, she told me that she wasn't ever going home. Hehe :)

PS. Some more very cool dinosaur books to read:
Tyrannosaurus Drip - Julia Donaldson (one of our favourites) 
Dinosaurs - priddy books (a sticker book) 
Find Out About Dinosaurs - Dougal Dixon

Sharing this at The Weekly Kids Co-Op.

 

 

How to make an Aircraft Carrier

 

Inspired by a picture in Little One's all time favourite book, I thought it couldn't be too hard to make an Aircraft Carrier and I knew Little One would love the idea! This little man is C.R.A.Z.Y about all forms of military transportation.

I grabbed a big cardboard box (and cut off the lid), a big juice box and some smaller boxes we've been collecting. Using the book mentioned (My Big Book of Cars, Ships and Planes) as a guideline, I cut out the top of the aircraft carrier, after marking the lines in pencil.

That little hand you see in the picture was just there to help my camera focus on my blank cardboard canvas. :) If I had a bigger piece of cardboard available, I would have cut the Carrier a bit longer in shape. 

Then we got to decorating the top of the Ship, using a black marker, some white masking  tape (painter's tape) and a yellow highlighter.

Jerry Palotta's, The Boat Alphabet Book, is another one of Little One's favourites and this inspired our tower buildings.

I used my glue gun to glue it all together. Only thing to be aware of before you glue it, is that the top piece of board must be balanced correctly on top of the juice box, as the tower buildings make it heavier on one side.

And there you have it. Have fun!

S is for The Very Busy Spider

When I planned these "S" activities, I completely forgot about this post in my archives. Do go have a look if you want some more spider ideas. :)

Do you know the book The Very Busy Spider by Eric Carle? It's a great book with lovely illustrations.  In the hard cover version, the spider web is raised, so it's fun to feel how it gets bigger and bigger in the story. It's a very simple story line, so it's an ideal book for a young child. 

I've seen so many lollipop spiders on the internet and this inspired our very busy spider lollipop . For the head you need one green pipe cleaner. For the legs cut two orange pipe cleaners in half. Simply wrap the pipe cleaners around the lollipop stick to make the spider.  The eyes and mouth were cut out from felt and glued on.

Our very busy spider also got her own real life web. Little one punched some holes in a paper plate and was then supposed to thread the string through the holes to make the web. I was told, however,  quite emphatically, that he doesn't like threading, so I did end up doing it myself. If you can get your little one to do the threading, it's really a great fine motor activity. 

We also found some Very Busy Spider activities at Making Learning Fun.

I thought it would be fun to build a "S'" with little spiders. The "S" we used was printed from Confessions of a Homeschooler. If you go to this link and look for a-z lowercase worksheets, you will find all the letters of the alphabet ready to print. Thank you Heather!

Our last bit of spider fun was a small spider building station (Idea via Fantastic Fun and Learning). To make the play dough, I used my favourite recipe - no stove required! Here it is:

1 cup flour
2 Tbs cream of tarter
1 Tbs vegetable oil
1/2 cup of granulated salt

Add some essence for a nice aroma (orange, almond, peppermint)

Mix all the ingredients in a bowl and then add a cup of boiling water. Stir until combined and turn it out onto a floured board and knead until smooth. Colour can be added to the boiling water or at the kneading stage. Just a tip - wear gloves when kneading - the food colouring does stain your skin and it isn't very easy to clean off. Store your dough in an airtight container. 

To make black play dough, I combined blue, green and red food colouring. I kept adding and mixing it until I was happy with the colour. 

Here are some more fun Spider crafts on the blog:

Bottle Top Crafts

Spider Party

Till next time, have fun.

PS. Linking to The Weekly Kids Co-Op, For the Kids Fridays @ Sun Scholars and Kids Activities Blog.

The Lego Movie Memory Game

 

So we have been having a super holiday and have spent a lot of time relaxing at home,  playing,  crafting, watching TV. 

We have also been to see The Lego Movie and my boys LOVED it. I managed to get through the movie without being thoroughly bored or agitated (been there!), so it's not too bad for grown-ups either. :)

We came home with the theme song "Everything is AWESOME" ringing in our heads and the boys were also super-psyched to play Lego. 

I had spoilt each of them to a minifigure after the movie and thought it would be fun to use the cute sheet of characters to make a Memory Game. Little One has just recently started playing Memory Match and really enjoys it, so my guess was that the game would be a winner.

Good call. The boys loved it.

To make this you will need two sheets of characters from inside The Lego Movie minifigure packets. Cut them out and paste them onto punched-out circles. If you don't have a circle punch, cut small squares of white cardboard. It will work just as well.

I knew that if they played with the cards as much I expected, the cards would get damaged quickly and they would also not be very easy to pick up from the table. To get around this, I stuck the circles onto bottle tops using Prestick (stick putty).

We all ended up playing the game - even the Dad. Easy Mommy-made Fun!

Have you checked out The Lego Movie website yet? Pretty cool. You can even create your own Lego movie character. Till next time, have fun!

PS. Have shared this at The Weekly Kids Co-Op Party.

A is for Astronaut

We recently moved and have been settling into our new life, so blogging and crafting with the children has definitely taken a back seat for awhile. But, I plan to be making a super-duper effort to get back into the swing of things here on the blog and of course with the kiddos. Going to join me?

My little one is now 5 years old (oops, I mean 5-and-a-half... he constantly reminds me!) and in his Grade R/Reception year at school. Here in South Africa our school year starts in January, so his first school term has just ended and we have a wonderful 2 week break coming up.  He has been very busy with a new letter of the alphabet every week at school and to consolidate what he's been up to in class, I want to do some extra alphabet activities at home. I plan on sharing these with you, as we tackle different letters of the alphabet. 

To start off ... a is for astronaut.

An easy alphabet craft inspired by one I saw at totally tots. Little One blasts off to the Moon :).

We chatted about that very first landing on the moon and looked at some pictures on the internet. The paper we used was black mat paper from an old photo album. It was perfect for drawing on with chalk. The chalk led us outside and Little One continued writing on the paving. An easy fun way to practice letters.

Next project. Puffy paint. I have wanted to try this for ages, so this idea from Allison at  No time for Flash Cards was perfect. 

No lies, this was messy! 

The Recipe:

125ml/half-a-cup of white glue

375ml/one-and-a-half cups of shaving cream

A few drops of acrylic black paint

Mix it all together.

I cut open a cereal box (like Allison suggested) and Little One had great fun spreading this all over the cardboard. I was really surprised that he enjoyed the texture of it so much.

We made the moon craters with a bottle top. Go over these a few times while the paint is drying to get a nice effect. We left it to dry overnight before playing on the surface the next day.

Another very easy and fun astronaut craft is to make toilet roll astronauts. Cut and glue some white paper to a toilet roll and draw some astronauts (and aliens if that takes your fancy) . Both my boys enjoyed this activity.

Don't you love the vintage spaceman? (top picture) He is from my husband's childhood. :)

For more space ideas, check out my Pinterest Outer Space page.

Till next time.   

PS. Have shared this at The Weekly Kids Co-Op Party.