What a Difference a Week Makes

Not overly springy but I thought it was pretty good for a 4 year old 

This time last week, the temperatures were lifting and the sun was shining. We were (and still are) car less and Daddy was working from home. So in order to give him some peace, and to indulge Daniels new found love of ducks, I took the kids to Charnwood Water. I had the vaguest sense of hope that we might be seeing a turn in the weather, so I suggested to beth that we look for signs of Spring. I gave Beth my phone and asked her to take pictures of anything she saw that was springy.

We got lots of photos of new leaves and buds, but I had to try and hurry her along from taking a photo of every flower in every garden, as we were starting to get some funny looks.

Some of the pictures Beth took

When we arrived we were set upon by the ducks, geese and swans. There is a sign up asking people not to feed the birds bread because it is essentially just sugar - basically duck McDonalds. Now from what I can tell the birds have been on a diet all Winter and I rock up with a bag of duck crack, the ensuing madness was not pretty but we were prepared*. We slipped past the main way in where the swans and geese hang out and found some high ground to throw from. Daniel loved it! He has started to make some animal noises and was quacking and shouting "look duck!" His quack and oink are very similar though so I'm only guessing it was a quack.   

Look Ducks Quack! 

Swans from a defensible position

On the way into the park Beth saw some furry buds, but we couldn't reach them. However we found some later on the bank and Beth felt them, she said they felt furry, warm and soft. She asked if she could help Daniel touch them so we took the pushchair off road and let Daniel have a go.

We then carried on round and found the part of the park where the fairies live. Beth went for an explore to see if she could find any fairies out and about...

...and came back with a "fairy bedroom".

We decided to play "sink or float" and Beth collected some bits to drop in the water as we finished walking round and I picked some bits for Daniel, its a pretty simple concept you throw bits of nature and see if they sink or float.

Some of the things Daniel threw

               

* in the autumn we had gone to feed the ducks and I was bitten on the bottom by a swan whilst trying to move the one that had stuck its head in the pushchair and Beth was chased by a goose.

Unseasonal Snow

The recent unseasonal weather has reminded me of  how desperate the kids were for snow before last year.

Last November, Beth was getting really impatient for it to snow. During the summer we had found some fake snow at a charity shop, I decided to hurry nature along a bit and created a sensory activity for her and Daniel. Along with the fake snow (which had been in the freezer for 30 minutes to make it realistically cold) I added iridescent strands and blue and turquoise sequines.

At first they enjoyed exploring the new textures, running the strands through their fingers and squishing the snow. I asked Beth to tell Daniel what the snow felt like, he was also exploring it and hearing me and Beth describe the sensations as cold and squishy helped reafirm his vocabulary.

After a while Beth asked to get the animals out. We have a box of animal figure and cards that get pulled out for alsorts of play. When Beth was around 18 months old she really liked penguins so we had quite a few that went straight in. We then started to sort through the animal cards I made for a story sack*. We took out all the cards that could live in the arctic. Beth took out the pengin, whale and the dolphin, I suggested the walrus, Beth thought that this should live somewhere hot because it was "skinny" rather than furry. I pointed out there was snow in the background and she conceeded that it might live in the snow.

the "hot" animals

* The cards were made by laminting the card with photos of  animals. the story sack was for one of the most beautifally illustrated books I've come across Can You See a Little Bear?

Sticker Fun

For her birthday, Beth's Nanna bought her some geometric shape stickers from France. I really like these as they are brilliant for encouraging imagination. I've had a quick look to see if i could find anything equivalent here, and you can get them from Amazon.

Beth started off trying to copy the suggestions on the tin, but the colours and exact size and number of stickers didn't always match up. I was secretly a bit pleased about this as it felt a bit to prescriptive to have her just copy the images.

Robot

Front 

The next picture that beth attempted was from the rose from the back of the tin.

She was happy to accept the same colours different shapes and we briefly discussed the anatomy of the flower; where is the stem, petals, leaf, do you know what a sepal is? Beth didn't know what the sepal was so I showed her and asked what she thought it was for. Beth guessed it was left over from the bud. I told her in some flowers it helped to keep the petals together.

The last picture was my favourite. Beth wanted to make the house and sun from the box but changed her mind. So the picture is of me in the sun and rain. Beth added the eyes with pen.

Aquarium

About a year ago Beth was poorly, she'd had a temperature and been sick a couple of times during the night but was in very high spirits the next morning. The weather was terrible and Daniel was feeling a bit warm so I didn't want to risk taking him out and getting him cold (he was only about 12 weeks at the time). Normally this is the kind of thing I would let TV field but we every Lent we have a no daytime TV (9am-5pm) rule. Faced with a dull Monday I asked Beth what she would like to do, she said she wanted to go to the aquarium, I told her we could make an aquarium if she liked, little did I know what a big project it would turn into.   

I had just started to follow a really good blog (be warned, this link will make you cry with jealousy even if you don't have children, you'd wish that you had a playroom like this for yourself) Play at Home Moms and whilst we don't have even a small fraction of the space or resources I had been inspired to create an art shelf that Beth has free access to and as a result we had all the resources we needed. 

The first job to do was write a list of everything Beth could remember from her last visit to an aquarium (about 6 months previous). I was expecting this to be quite limited but Beth is a little like an elephant in terms of her memory so we came up with this list. 

• Shark tunnel 
• Fish tank
• Penguins
• Jelly fish
• Touch pool with star fish

Beth was pretty good at thinking big and a lot of the ideas she knew how she wanted to do it, but there were a few things where I needed to think on my feet. I wanted her to realise that if you dream it you can do it, so I didn't say no to anything and I think we came up with a pretty amazing aquarium. 

sorry about the picture quality

We decided to start with the shark tunnel. We have a loverly period arch between our living room and dinning room and it was just the right shape for a shark tunnel so I drew and cut out a shark and a turtle  on Art roll, (although lining wall paper does the same job and can be a lot cheaper) and got beth to colour them in then I cut out the seaweed from sugar paper. 

Then we moved on to the penguins, we had just sent off for a sun holiday so had plenty of newspaper around that would never have been read. We scrunched some up and used them to make a head that, we taped these to toilet rolls, and painted them black and left them to dry whilst we went digging for some rocks for our rock pool. Later we added some googley eyes a barely visible white patch and foil wings, oh and Beth cut out the beaks. 

Of course they needed a home and we painted a box white but again the white wasn't very white and we decided to use cotton wool to make some snow. The penguins also had there own pool made from foil and a little dish complete with tiny fish (cut out from yellow paper). Beth still loves playing with this now and creates a loverly small world scenario, where she feeds the penguins fish in the dish and then they come along and eat them and drink from the pool.












The rocks for the rock/touch pool, were  cleaned then placed in the biggest Tupperware I owned and I added blue food colour and luke warm water. We drew out a star fish, a little crab, an anemone and some different shaped shells on white paper and some seaweed on green paper. We coloured these in then cut them out. I tried to be clever at this point and water proofed them with Sticky backed plastic (contact paper on the other side of the pond), which did act to make them water resistant for about half and hour but by the end of the day they'd come apart and the colour had run. *

The fish tank was another exercise in sticking and colouring, we also found some handy net shaped packaging to add a bit of scenery to our tank.

The jelly fish were an inspiration from Beth in the end. I asked her what she thought would make a good jelly fish and she thought about it and said a plastic bag. Almost all the bags in the house were multi coloured, except for the corners of two Home Bargains bags, we stuffed them with tissue paper and tied them with embroidery string then taped them above the glass on top of our stair way.

 

By the time Beth had finished and played with the aquarium we had spent most of the day crafting and it was only an hour or so before 'daddy o'clock'. I asked her if she wanted to watch telly and she said no she wanted to make a sign for the aquarium. This was just as she was learning to differentiate sounds in words and I was very proud that she had managed to tell me that aquarium started with an 'a' and then a 'q'. After I wrote 'aquarium' she coloured it in, and we placed it above the door to the dining room. We also made daddy a ticket (cost of £14 was Beth's idea, which I thought showed a good grasp of the value of money) and a Booklet/map (£2.50). Although by this point Beth's hands were getting tired she pointed to where everything should go on the map and I drew it for her, it was surprisingly accurate.
When daddy got home he was given a tour of the dining room (in fact most people were for the next month wether they'd seen it before or not).

What Daniel did all day 

 *I now own a laminator and may have more luck, but i've not repeated the experiment, I might in the summer use this as a water play idea and add hidden treasure for them to find, or make some shapes for role play at bath time.

Rainy Car-less Day

Today it rained, it rained a lot. Normally if it rains we can find somewhere to go in the car, there's a load of really good museums and national trust properties nearby, but our car is out of action (or at least long distance action). I firmly believe in the saying "there's no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothes" so we wrapped up the kids and headed out to enjoy Loughborough. 

First off was a bit of shopping, we needed some boring stuff from Wilkinson's, but instead of trying to hurry Beth so that we could get on to the "fun" part of the trip, we decided to slow down and enjoy the boring bit which lead to this moment of comedy gold from Beth.

We took the time to enjoy the towns architecture as well, we climbed every ball and walked on every wall between the shops and the library.

We are a bit of a family of book worms so Beth was very excited to find out that the library was selling books. Luckily the majority of the children's books were missing pages so that limited how many we brought home; it will at least put off the heartache of a book cull.  We did manage to find some Biff, Chip and Kipper books, so Beth was happy. After we had scoured the sale, Beth and I settled to read some books and we found a young puzzle book. Beth also read a good chunk of "Fat Cat on a Mat" to me, which was fantastic. She is in the very early stages of reading at the minute and it is so exciting to see her recognise a sight word or puzzle out a nice phonic word (today she read tree, after being told the rule about ee). We also indulged my love of Julia Donaldson books and read "The Smartest Giant in Town" which was new for me but Beth told me "We have that one at my school".

Outside the library Beth wanted to slide down the hand rail but it wasn't very slidey so Daddy help give her a push...

By this time Daniel had woken up and we'd migrated to the park. Queens park in Loughborough is fab! It has everything you could every want from a park. We started out at the aviaries, but very quickly Daniel had spotted his current favourites, ducks.

It looked quite a lot like mummy duck was nesting so we tried to keep our distance

After a while we managed to move on to the "stone duck" (well it's a swan but thats how I sold it to Daniel)

After a little squabble over who got to sit at the front Beth decided she would let Daniel have a turn at the front so she could teach him how to steer the duck (I have no clue how you would steer a stationary stone duck but apparently its an important life lesson that can only be imparted by your big sister).

We then moved on to tree climbing, I have never had any skills in tree climbing but after daddy gave her a few clues about possible footholds my fearless baby got about 3 foot off the ground. Which is when we saw two young men tying straps to trees....

Beth was very intrigued by what they were up to and watched them as they started to tightrope from tree to tree, after walking past several times, and copying their movements on twigs I finally got the hint that Beth would like to talk to them. Normally Beth will talk to anyone and had only just finished a pretty long chat with an old lady we didn't know, but she was a bit shy of the "grown up boys".

For numerous reasons that are better left to a foot note* I (out of character) decided to speak to them for her. It turns out that they were slack lining, which if you've never come across it is sort of a cross between tightrope walking and trampolining Learn more here. I am so mad at myself that i didn't get a photo but they were amazing and asked Beth if she would like a go.

My internal voice was screaming "are you crazy you want my baby to walk a 5cm wide twisty, tape 4 foot of the ground?' my outside voice said "wow beth that looks like fun would you like a go?" I lifted her on and the guy tried to hold her other hand which freaked her out a bit and she started trembling like a leaf. I reassured her that I would catch her if she fell but that she didn't need to do anymore, that seemed to do the trick and she managed a few steps before over balancing into my arms. She got off saying that it was really really fun, which I counted as a win.

* Recently it keeps coming up through one thing or another that we need to model the behaviour we want our children to learn or retain. I've never really felt confident talking to people and I worry that will rub off on Beth. I'm also enjoying stretching myself at the minute and "being the change I want to see" (sorry to Gandhi for using that quote in a much more self-centred way than it was intended)