One thing I love about Missy 10 belonging to such a small school (50 kids total!) is that they have time to do such cool things. Sure, at the end of term, they had the usual watching of DVDs, which I don’t mind. But they also had the kids make their own board games.
I’m happy, because I was going to eventually post about this idea myself, now the school has saved me the hassle. Although this is loads of fun for kids, there’s many benefits to be had without them even realising:
Having kids make their own board games let them:
- Make choices and design something, giving them a feeling of autonomy and creativity
- Have an opportunity to problem-solve and mentally plan something in advance.
- Have a maths experience that is more fun than usual. It also doesn’t feel like maths!
- Be sociable, take turns, share, cooperate and be a good sport.
- Use their own imagination.
- Have ‘something to do’ during school holidays; not only as they play the game, but during the creation of it.
- do something fun that is cheap and resourceful.
The name of this game is an insect themed version of snakes and ladders. Missy 10 has added instructions on how to play at the bottom. You can make counters out of just about anything: buttons, coins, even cut up paper or cardboard. You can use a dice you already own, make one out of a box or create a spinning dial. Anything extra that needs to be made just means your kids will be busy for longer.
Of course, you have to be careful if you have under 3′s in the home, due to the small parts in the game. I’m loving that my youngest child is now three, because all three kids are at the perfect age to get pleasure, educational benefits and social skills out of it. Most importantly, they’re all interested!
Missy 10 plans to make more of these over the holidays. I will post her different versions of the games over at Hear Mum Roar’s facebook page, if you’d like to see them. If you have any board games your kids have made, I’d love to see photos of them too, so please upload them to the ‘school holidays’ album so we can all be inspired!
What are your kids doing these holidays? Are you over it yet, or still enjoying the break?
I love doing coloured window art with young kids. It’s easy, yet something out of the ordinary for them. I find it holds their interest for ages. As you can see, all I’ve done is cut up some collage-type materials for the children; today it was fabric scraps. Other times, I’ve given the children flattened cup cake cases, confetti from the hole punch, chopped wool scraps, chopped streamers, basically whatever I’ve had lying around. It’s also important to make sure nothing would be a choking hazard for your kids. I’m lucky in that my kids are past the stage of putting craft/art items in their mouths, but if you know yours will (it’s the under 3′s we need to be careful with, generally), simply use bigger, safer pieces and supervise.
Then, I provide the kids with a sheet of clear contact with the adhesive side facing upward. I turn each corner underneath to stick it to the table. Now all the kids need to is to stick their collage pieces on to their hearts’ content. Once they finished each masterpiece, I stuck it to the window for them.
…Until the kids decided to do it for themselves.
I love that this is an open-ended activity that doesn’t add any pressure to look like anything in particular. However, if you keep the backing sheet from the contact you’ve cut for your child, you can stick the finished piece back onto the backing paper. This lets a child take their art work home, or give it to their grandparents as a very special gift. Once it’s in its new home, it can still be proudly displayed on a window.
This is a great time of year to be doing this activity too, because I find after doing back to school shopping, I have loads of contact to spare.
If you have a child who loves to paint, but is looking for something a bit different to simply using a paintbrush, they will love this. It’s the weekend here, and Missy 2 was once again begging to paint. Missy 10′s been away at school when the little ones have been painting, so it was nice for her to get the chance to join in.
So, how did we paint with balls? I got a big plastic box, and Blu-tacked some paper to the bottom of the inside.
I sat each ball in a different bowl or container for separate colours. Then, the kids just picked up a slippery ball, dropped it onto their paper, and moved the box to make the balls roll.
Kids have so much fun with this activity and learn a lot without realising it. They get to:
- work their fine motor muscles, trying extra hard to pick up those slippery balls
- experiment with gravity and physics, tipping the box this way and that to make the ball go where they want it to on the page
- challenge their eye-hand co-ordination in a more intense way than usual. It’s one thing to try to watch something, and get your hands to work together with your vision, but imagine trying to do that when the ball has a mind of its own!
- learn about colours mixing together, as one coloured ball rolls over previous stripes painted by other colours.
- apply trial and error to see what happens if they use smaller balls, such as marbles (for the over 3′s, of course we have to be vigilant about choking risks), tennis balls, or even basketballs.
- learn about cause and effect: what happens if we use a four-sided container? What about a round container? The child will observe one is more likely to give stripes and criss-crossing lines, the other will give more rounded, spiral shapes.
One thing I’ve never gotten around to trying though, when doing this activity is painting with a football! If anyone’s child ever gives that go, let me know how it went.
‘Please Mum, I do painting?’ is the plea I hear from Missy 2 on a regular basis lately. She talks about it all day long. She just adores it.
So, my partner and my son went out to run some errands, and Missy 10 was off at school. This left just Missy 2 and I for some Mum and daughter time. Bliss.
I decided to let her engage in some string painting.
This couldn’t have been simpler to set up. I just tied some lengths of string to clothes pegs then let her dip it in the paint, and squiggle it across the paper.
What I love about this activity is that there cannot be any pressure on the child to make the painting ‘look like’ something. Regular readers will know that open ended art/craft/play in general is something I like to get on the soap box about!
Hands up who thinks she’s enjoying herself?
Missy 2, much in the adventurous spirit of any toddler, got all experimental after a little while. This is cool, don’t try to fight it… Even though an activity has been set up in one way, it’s great if it ends up evolving into something else entirely. Our children need to explore the paint, the paper, their hands, textures, concepts, and so on. Just roll with it.
See how she just immerses herself further and further into the experience? What have your children painted lately?
As you can see, I’ve shown where I usually write the child’s name and date (I didn’t put my child’s actual name for privacy reasons). Labelling artwork in this way reinforces name recognition, and writing it on the left side mimicks the pattern in which we typically read and write. I like to add the date for sentimental reasons, but it could easily be left off.
No, you’re not seeing things! He, who hates messy play. He, who wouldn’t touch the fingerpaint or spaghetti paint, has busted out of his comfort zone, gotten paint on his hands and enjoyed it!
This wasn’t the plan, but of course I’m not complaining at all.
It all started with a humble sponge and a string bag from a bag of oranges.
I wrapped it tightly around the sponge with some string…
And we had mesh dab printing, ready to go!
Don’t stress, it’s an old plate…
Printing is a marvelous way for children to apply trial and error to their painting. They learn via cause and effect what will happen if they use something patterned such as a mesh-covered sponge to print onto paper.
It’s a nice, ‘safe’ way to get a child who doesn’t like mess on their hands to have a try at using paint. As Mr 4 has shown us, sometimes all it takes is the need to feel comfortable first, then it’s time to dive in. I think it also helped that his little sister was already using the paint for hand prints anyway, so he felt happy to try what she was doing.
How does your child feel about messy play? Do they love it, or does it bother them?
Today was much like a hot summer day in the middle of spring! We took our spray bottles out the back, hung a sheet over the fence and Missy 2 and Mr 4 sprayed the heck out of it. Last time we played with spray bottles, we did it flat on the ground on paper, but hanging a large sheet of paper or cloth allows the children to be more free with it.
Daisy, as always, was faithfully hanging around the kids, you can see by how muddy Missy 2 was, that Daisy was happy to see her! The poor thing got knocked over in the mud. Not to be deterred, her and Mr 4 got on with the important business of playing.
Mr 4 instigated lots of experimental play with these spray bottles. He believed that if he sprayed lots of colour onto flowers that he could make them grow faster…
He was deeply dissappointed that they didn’t grow before his eyes! So, he turned his attention to our irises (some of which were taller than him) and painted them blue.
…Now that’s what I call art!
Also, you’ve probably noticed by now Hear Mum Roar’s new look. I have the wonderfully talented Violet Le Beaux to thank for designing the new graphic art, so thank you!!
We did this activity last weekend, and I’ve been too flat out to show you until now! I filled four water spray bottles with water and food colouring to make a pretty water colour for the kids.
We took it outside to spray on paper on the ground. This is even more fun if you can hang gigantic pieces of paper over the fence, but we didn’t want to get our front fence stained, and going out the back to do it on an old fence isn’t an option at the moment. Never mind.
Mr 4 and Missy 2 had a ball squirting away with their bottles. Here’s Missy 2 using both hands to squeeze the trigger and watching the mist shoot over the page. Spray painting is:
- cheap
- open-ended
- strengthening for the fine motor muscles (hands)
- requires eye-hand co-ordination as the child watches the direction of the spray and tries to manipulate it where they want it to go.
- great for teaching children about colours
- gives the child a chance to use trial and error
We tried spraying over ourselves:
Then we turned to nature:
And we learnt what happens when part of the page is covered then painted!
One day we’ll do this with the paper upright against the fence, and I’ll show how much fun that is, too. Are you all having a lovely weekend? I hope so!
Edited to add: we did this again later down the track with a sheet hung over the back gate.
Missy 9 made this beautiful butterfly. Playdough appeals to all ages.
Home playdough is special. There’s no denying it. Sure, it’s fun for kids to play with the store-bought stuff, but there’s nothing like the smell of freshly cooked playdough to bring back fond childhood memories. When I smell it, I remember our old Playgroup hall and I can hear the noisy feet of my peers echoing on the floorboards. I hear table legs screeching as mums drag them away from the walls and set them up for us to play happily at.
What I love about making playdough yourself is that you get so much more to play with than what you’d buy in a lousy, plastic playdough can. It’s also great that it costs next to nothing to make. Playdough brings many benefits to the child, apart from being messy, good fun.
Playdough helps children to:
- strengthen and develop fine motor skills (use of hands)
- engage in creative play
- play dramatically, as they make up stories about what they’re making. It’s common to hear children making up pretend voices of their creations’ characters.
- develop their cognitive skills. Children use trial and error, cause and effect and basic experimentation to manipulate the dough into what they want it to do. They learn to problem solve.
- further develop their language. Children love to talk about what they are doing with their sculptures, and this in turn allows them to socialise with other children or adults.
- experiment with different tools and learn about how they work.
- watch how colours change when they are mixed together
How to cook playdough
You will need:
4 cups of water
4 tablespoons of cooking oil
4 cups of plain flour
8 tablespoons of cream of tartar powder
2 cups of salt
Dump all the ingredients into a large saucepan or frypan. I like this gigantic non stick electric frypan, because it’s less likely to spill over. Before you turn the heat on, mix it well. It should look like this:
Turn the heat on to medium-low (my frypan heats up very rapidly, so I have to watch this. You don’t want it to burn or develop a crust along the bottom). It will start to thicken and look lumpy. This is normal.
Now, just stir constantly until it is a lovely, firm playdough consistency. Put it aside to cool before adding any goodies to it.
Once it’s cool, there’s so many things you can add to your playdough. Kool Aid can be used to colour it, or food colouring. You can even try beetroot or spinach juice if you and your kids are feeling experimental!
But don’t feel that you have to stop at colour. Sight is just one of our senses. Why not appeal to your child’s sense of touch, with some glitter shaken in, or some coloured rice? To colour the rice before adding it, shake some rice and food colouring together in a jar and spread it out to dry before adding it. It looks best if the playdough colour is a contrast to the colour of the rice. Below is red and yellow food colouring added to rice.
It looks pretty, but children enjoy the granular sensation, and they notice a difference when flattening it with a rolling pin, or cutting it with a knife or a cookie cutter. This in turn often leads to much discussion! Why not throw some hundreds and thousands in for a mighty crunch? Then the children can watch the colours blend.
And what of our sense of smell? I’ve already mentioned how pleasurable the smell of playdough can be for a child (or adult. Ahem), so play around with that, if you will. You could make coffee playdough, mint scented playdough, just look around your kitchen and garden to see what you have.
The batch in the picture below has been mixed with Kool Aid and coffee, to encourage the children to experiment with different smells. We have cherry flavour, grape, tamarindo, lime, and raspberry. This cooked playdough recipe makes a large amount, so it’s excellent if you want a large variety of playdough types, or have a lot of kids using it either at home, playgroup or daycare.
Uncooked playdough
Sometimes, you might just want playdough quickly, and couldn’t be bothered cooking it, waiting for it to cool, yadda yadda, yadda… Or your kids might be keen to help you make it. Or, you might be at Playgroup and want to quickly make some for the kids, and not have time to cool it down before using it. My uncooked playdough recipe is handy for those times.
You will need:
3 cups of plain flour
1/3 cup of salt
1 and 1/4 cups of water
Plain flour for dusting
Colouring of your choice
Mix the first three ingredients together with your hands. Then turn it out onto a bench dusted with flour, and knead it until you are happy with its consistency. It should be just like bread dough.
Separate into the desired amount you’d like for each colour, then knead the food colouring through. Or you can use some of the suggestions mentioned in the cooked playdough recipe.
One thing that’s lovely about uncooked playdough, is that if children make it, they can give it to friends or family as a nice little homemade gift. We kneaded a little glitter through part of the batch for a little extra sparkle.
Fun ways to play with it.
The ideas here are endless, but I’m going to give you some good ones to get you all fired up.
- using bare hands only.
- rolled into ‘sausages’ and children encouraged to cut it into pieces with scissors. This is an excellent way to familiarise children with scissor use and strengthen their little muscles in preparation. It’s also much easier to cut playdough with scissors than paper when a child is starting to learn.
- provide an old garlic press and let the kids watch the playdough squish out like spaghetti. Again, this is great for fine motor strength.
- raid your useful box for straws, lids, cupcake cases etc for your children to add to their play.
- give your children rolling pins and cookie cutters to play with. We’ve not unpacked our rolling pin since the move yet, so I improvised and gave the kids this empty tissue cylinder.
Make sure to store your playdough in some cling wrap or a sealed plastic container. It’s great to encourage the kids to help pack up, too!
Mr 4′s caterpillar. He became deeply engrossed in this activity.
Now, to make life a little bit easier for anyone who likes to make their own playdough or fingerpaint, not only can you find the recipes at Hear Mum Roar, you can also download them in a handy printable format to keep in the kitchen. Click here to download.
I’d love to hear what your kids like to do with their playdough.
Edited to add: Here’s where Aussies can source Kool Aid (not sponsored links, just adding on request):
Sometimes, when my fiance goes out shopping or anywhere else, he likes to take one or two of our kids with him and leave me behind with just one child. At these times, I make the most of some rare one-on-one time with the child who stays with me.
Today, Mr 4 stayed at home with me, and we had lots of snuggles. Then, he turned around and asked me to take photos of him. Like many mums, I like to take the child’s lead with their play whenever I can. So, I grabbed the camera, and he, being a little bit precious about the whole thing, moved a chair in front of the fridge, because he felt that was where he wanted to pose.
And so we snapped up one picture after another. He tried to make each face a little bit more ridiculous than the last, and checked how he looked on the digital camera’s display screen. It’s weird, he’s the only boy living with two sisters, and yet he’s the most vain of the three kids!
The great thing about this game was that Mr 4 was given the opportunity to be creative and also engage in some dramatic play with the only prop being a camera. I think it is also a nice thing to do for a child’s self esteem, as they enjoy having the undivided attention of a parent, and being able to make mummy laugh. I know he felt really good about himself after playing this game. He also enjoyed the process of looking at the photos on the computer, and he’s learning a little bit about technology along the way.
My favourite part of the whole experience? The laughter. He thought he was brilliant, and we were both in hysterics.
This is a nice, simple, open-ended media that kids can paint on. Here is a canvas my eldest daughter painted that is now a cherished gift at her grandparents’ house.
Visitors love to admire it and talk about what they see in it, often. It’s also a lovely way for parents to decorate the home, capturing a time, an age, a memory. Best of all, they are cheap and easy to buy! Here’s some painted canvases we’ve done over the years:
Have you ever given your children canvas to work with? Next time you’re stuck for a gift, you could give this a try.
