Summer is here!

Summer is here and we have been busy. Our allotment is now brimming with vegetables! It is great to see all that hard work paying off and it’s great to eat all the veg too.

We have also been doing a lot of cycling. My son, aged seven, is a competent cyclist now and my daughter, aged two, is delighted to be towed along in a trailer. She looks after the picnic while the rest of us cycle along. I would describe myself as a reluctant cyclist but my confidence is growing and I am starting to enjoy myself, particularly on gentle mountain bike trails. We have been up to Glentress and tried the family trail there. It was really great and we finished our cycle completely elated. We then tried the family trail at Kielder but it wasn’t really suitable for us as part of the trail went along the main road up there and we didn’t feel comfortable sharing the road with the motorbikes that were roaring along it.

I do have a problem with all our summer days out. I really lack inspiration when I’m packing a picnic. I am ashamed to say plain ham sandwiches, apples and may be a chocolate biscuit is about the best I can offer on most days. Can anyone give me some inspiration? I need healthy portable food for hungry kids on adventurous days out.

It is two weeks until my son breaks up for the summer holidays and I am thinking of all the things we want to do over the summer. I really like the summer holidays as it is an opportunity to do all the things we don’t normally have time for. I would like to do a project with the kids that will last the whole of the holidays, something we can work on during rainy afternoons. I’d really like to be able to share the project with our friends and family. I wonder if we could make a magazine or postcards that we could send out or may be we could record a “radio” show.

I’ll have to think about it a little longer and see what the kids would like to do. Have a great summer, embrace the opportunity to do all those things you never quite get around to doing!

Fossil hunting!

The spring is a great time to go fossil hunting around the coast. The winter storms have loosened rocks from cliffs and thrown stones up from the sea bed up on to the beach to be investigated by sharp eyes.

Children often like to collect rocks (I think there is still a tomato box in the loft full of my childhood finds!) and many children are fascinated by dinosaurs and creatures that lived along time ago. To find your own fossil is a truly life affirming thing to do! Looking for fossils also encourages children to observe things very closely, an important skill.

Find a likely location.

There is a wonderful website http://www.ukfossils.co.uk/ that will help you find a suitable beach for fossil hunting in your area. This website is very good because it tells you if the beaches are accessible with children. I have used this website many times over the years and often look at it before we take holidays in the UK so we can look for fossils on our holidays too.

How will I know that I have found one?

You are looking for a pattern in a rock that is quite obvious. Look for circles, stripes, changes in texture and colour. There are many books  you can buy to help you identify your finds and pages on the web too.

Tools

We never take tools on our fossil hunts, we just use our eyes and take home anything we can pick up. If a fossil is embedded in the rock, we take a good look at it and take a photograph.

Picnic and hot chocolate

If you are taking children out and about in the spring when the weather is changeable remember to wrap them up to keep them warm. Don’t forget that small children can get cold much more quickly than adults do. A supply of hot chocolate and biscuits can really cheer up little ones and then they are happy to stay out a bit longer.

Our finds:

On our half term trip to the beach we found some pebbles and a larger stone containing fossils of ancient corals.

Happy fossil hunting!

More Big Drawing

 

After using chalk to make big drawings outside, I got a hold of the end of a roll of newspaper. This roll of newspaper is nearly two metres across! I rolled up the rug in the living room and rolled out as much of the paper as I could. We decided on an underwater theme and used wax crayons to make our drawing. My son, aged seven, drew a shark and a diver by drawing around his little sister and adding flippers. My little girl, at just two and a half, drew around me and her big brother. We had so much fun!

When my daughter and I had a morning to ourselves we decided to get the paper out again and use paint. Painting with ready mixed paint feels lovely. She drew all sorts of squiggles and then I thought I’d try to paint a farm or zoo for all our plastic animals.

She put all the animals in the barn.

She then decided to make some hand prints and got me to join in. I had to put her in the bath after this as she was green up to elbows!

I am no expert but I am sure that someone told me that the way to build the fine motor skills needed for writing is to start by making large movements on paper. We certainly had lots of fun!

Big Drawing

I thought it would be nice to make some big art so I gave the children some chalk and asked then to make me some big drawings in the yard while I tidied up the kitchen a bit. I am not sure what I was expecting them to do but here are the results:

My son, aged seven, coloured in the bricks on the wall making a lovely pattern and my daughter, aged two drew around her feet.

I think we might try some more art on a large scale in a little while…

Mini Notebook for Half Term

It is half term next week and I was looking forward to some outdoor activities but I’m not sure the weather is going to be favourable! In light of that I’d like to show you how to make a mini notebook that your children can take with them on your half term travels.

A notebook is a good way of getting children to stop and look more closely at something. A couple of years ago the National Museum of Scotland gave away blank note books on their art cart. My son and I spent a wonderful day in the museum as he filled every page with sketches of the things he saw, a panda, a tiger, a bust of Robert Louis Stevenson, a vase, a model of a ship and many more. I have put that notebook in my keepsake box and will treasure it forever. Some children find the fine motor control required for writing are hard to come by, and my son is one of them. Any thing that gets a pencil in his hand is a good thing!

After the success of the notebook in Edinburgh I bought a blank notebook for each of the children on a trip to Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens. Although my daughter wasn’t much more than a baby and hadn’t been walking for very long, she was determined to "write" in her notebook to be just like her brother.

On my last trip to The National Museum of Scotland in November, no blank note books were to be found. There was a trail with activities to complete in different areas of the museum, but I really didn’t like that as much as I knew we wouldn’t have time to visit all the sections mentioned in the notebook. If anyone from NMS is reading, please bring back the blank notebooks, they were great!

Mini notebook instructions

You will need: a rectangular piece of paper, any type of paper will do

Fold your piece of paper in half lengthways

Now fold it in half width ways and fold it in half again.

Open it up and you should have a piece of paper dived in to eight sections

Now cut a slit down the centre of the paper between the middle four sections

The tricky bit, folding! Fold the paper in half again length ways and open the slit, so you can push the two folded sections together making an eight page booklet.

Now fill your note book with all sorts of exciting things! When the pages are full open up the piece of paper until it is flat. Turn it over and fold it into a booklet again and you have eight new pages for your drawing or notes!

When you are out and about, a few coloured pencils or crayons can be very handy so I keep some in my handbag. If you would like a pretty pencil case to keep your crayons in there are some I made for sale in my folksy shop:  www.folksy.com/shops/creativeclectic

Have a great half term and I hope the sun comes out!

  

When the birds are going to bed...

I can’t wait for the evenings to get a bit lighter but here’s something you can try while dusk is still quite early in the evening. We live in a noisy world, televisions and radios blare at us. Cars and busses zoom past us as we walk along the street. Nature makes lots of noises too but we have to be quiet ourselves if we want to hear them.

Find a quiet spot outdoors, it could be your garden, a park or in the countryside and as it gets dark, ask your children to be quiet and to listen to the sounds the birds make while they are going to bed. Sometimes they make quite a racket! Especially the crows as they fight over the best roosts in the rookery. Don’t worry if your little ones can’t keep it up for very long, it’s really hard to be quiet when you are small.

How many different noises did you hear?

Felt making part one

Making felt is really easy and lots of fun. There are two kinds of felt making: needle felting and wet felting. Needle felting involves using needles to tangle wool fibres to make felt and wet felting uses warm water soap and a rubbing action to do the same thing. This is the best method to use with small children and I am posting a simplified way of making felt that makes it suitable for doing with small people. It probably isn’t the best felt in the world, but you can still use it to make lots of things.

Today I’m going to show you how we make felt balls.

You will need:

Warm soapy water

Combed tops. This is wool that has been washed and dyed and combed but it has not been spun. It usually comes in a loose sausage of wool. A good craft shop is hard to find these days, look online for your nearest one or find an online supplier.

To make a ball cut three or four centimetres off your sausage of wool and rip it up so you have a small cloud of wool with fibres going in all directions. If you would like to mix different colours of wool together to give interesting patterns.

Now dip your cloud of wool in the bowl of warm soapy water (we just put in a very small squirt of dishwashing liquid).

Roll the ball of wool in your hands, just like you would if you were making a ball of clay. Keep going until it feels quite hard and all the fibres have tangled together. Give your ball a quick rinse under the cold tap to get rid of the soap and leave to dry.

After all that you have made some very cute felt balls. They came out about one and a half to two and half centimetres each. What shall we do with them? You might have to wait a while to find out but we will make them in to something. Have you got any ideas?

Welt felting is a very tactile process. My son (who is seven) really enjoyed mixing different colours of wool together and liked the lustre of the wool. He was also thinking about it’s physical properties. He said “It’s so light you don’t know it is on your hand except by looking at it.”

My daughter, who is two years old, took the task enthusiastically. Her felt pieces didn’t really come out as balls and she called them her “fossils”. Even though they are not spherical I am sure we can still incorporate them in to a larger project. These activities are not really about the end results. It’s the process and exploring different materials that counts!

Here are some that I made just to give you an idea of what you can do. They are quite dense and nearly spherical.

Making Bread

I love making bread with children, it is such a simple thing to do, and such a tactile process and has such satisfying results!

I won’t include a recipe here, for there are thousands to choose from depending on what type of bread you would like to make. Quite often we make pizza dough using the recipe in Delia Smith’s Frugal Food cookery book.

It is all about getting your hands in! Mix the dry ingredients with warm water with your hands and get them all sticky. As the dough comes together there is great fun to be had in pulling bits of dough off your fingers and sticking them back on to the ball of dough.

Now it’s time to start kneading. We don’t have a great kneading technique; we just enthusiastically pull, stretch and thump the dough around. It has to be said the children have much more stamina for kneading than I have, I’d get bored after a few minutes but they will keep going until I ask them to stop giving a lovely fine texture to the dough.

Then we pop the dough back in the bowl, cover it with a tea towel and come back to it at tea time. This is the magic moment. We peak beneath the tea towel, has it worked? Oh yes it has! The dough has risen! For the next five minutes we attempt to stretch the bread out over baking trays. The dough is very elastic and shrinks back from the edges of the tray but after a bit we have some irregularly shaped pizzas that we cover with tinned chopped tomatoes, cheese and what ever we can find in the fridge!

In one simple and cheap activity we have a wonderfully tactile experience, a magic moment as we reveal the dough has risen and something to eat.

What's this blog about?

I am inspired by the creative and curious minds of children. I love the way they investigate everything they come across. I love the way they learn from their new experiences and the way they change so quickly.

Keeping these curious and creative minds busy, can be quite hard work and I hope that these pages will inspire you to show your kids interesting things and do all sorts of activities with them. I am sure you already know a lot of the stuff I will post here. It’s really just an excuse for me to look in the dusty corners of my mind to find cool things for the kids to do.

I had to start the blog today because there are two things I must tell you. Firstly I found the first snow drop of the year in my garden at the weekend. Spring is on its way!

Secondly while we still have very dark mornings, you must look out of a south facing window just before the sun comes up. See that very bright star? It’s not a star at all, it is the planet Venus! Isn’t it beautiful?