Space Satellite craft

To continue our space theme, P wanted to make a satellite.

He used silver foil, toilet tubes, kebab skewers and foam packaging.

He likes to use reference books and make things that look real. The foam was really soft and easy to push the skewers through which meant he didn't need to ask for help and manged it himself.  He was really pleased with the result.

Solar system craft

Half term we took the boys to a space centre.  They loved it and have been space mad since they got home. Our eldest decided as soon as he got home that he wanted to make the planets. 

We started with the sun and paper machied a balloon.  This was painted orangey red.  Then decided to make the other balls from rolled up news paper.  Really wish we hadn't as they were really heavy and have made the hanging really difficult.  I would recommend using balloons and just blowing up to different sizes.

Each planet was made with crumpled up paper, 2 layers of kitchen towel pasted on with a mix of glue and water and a final layer of coloured tissue.  This was done to save time as you can put the tissue on the wet paper towel.  Sometimes I find that by the time the paper machie has dried the excitement to paint it has gone and a different project has been started.  Which sometimes is great as it gives a bit of inspiration and a base for new project - but other times its nice to see a finished project and gives the kids a sense of completion and achievement.

P spent ages looking at books to find the colours of each planet and creating it as accurately as possible. Not all necessarily accurate but he was very proud of what he achieved.
Next, the impossible task of hanging the really heavy planets with out getting to technical as i wanted P to do as much as possible.

We taped lots of kebab sticks together - his choice as they are kept in the craft box.  The planets were hung on thread from the end of each stick.  Next, P created circles of card (should have been a much heavier card and I might have to change this) which he inserted the sticks into.  These were held between two pieces of wood from the outside resource box. .  All held together with a long screw. It isn't the strongest looking but the planets spin and rotate around the sun.  Success! It will hopefully hang from his ceiling.

Light art

A night time activity. You need a dark room, torches and coloured cellophane (or coloured torches!!) and your camera.  Set your camera to slow exposure or fireworks setting.  Place the coloured cellophane over the light, attach with elastic bands.  Then get your kids to grab torches and see what they can draw in the 3 - 10 seconds the camera gives you.  When they see the photos they are amazed, but just jumping around with torches in the dark is exciting enough.  Squiggles were the favourite but we did try some shapes, fish, flowers and writing names.

Crayon grating

We have had lots of snow over the last few days, so crafts have been forgotten for snow fun!! Todays crafty activity was crayon shavings.  I placed crayons and a grater on the table and the box for recycling/junk/craft!!. 

A little help was needed with grating the crayons but as they were big and chunky and we only ever managed half a crayon no little fingers were hurt.  First step  was grating lots of colours, we mixed all the colours but i'm sure putting the seperate would give some very cretaive results. First he tried putting glue on the tubes and boxes and sprinkling on the crayon, then rolling it in the colour.  Both were fun and gave good effects. 

After he had covered a few things in crayon he decided it looked like a giant daddy.  So then he set to work creating his giant.Green arms (he asked for a clean board to grate the crayon on as they had to be green), a belt, chin and big ears were added.  The crayon then was used to draw the face and our giant crayon daddy was complete.

Dip and Dye pictures

STEP 1:  Party plates make this craft slightly less messy and give a rainbow look to the colours.  We fill each section with a mixture of food colouring and water. The more colouring you add the darker it is. STEP 2:Boys choose the colours from the box and choose weather to add one colour or a mix of colours to each one. STEP3: Next its time to get either kitchen roll or (heavy/expensive) toilet roll (the thin toilet paper just turns to mush). The boys then fold or roll the paper as they choose.

OTHER OPTION: use a paint brush to dab the colour on.  It still spreads out and can give more control

STEP 4:Dip corners/edges into the different coloured dye.  Don't hold it in too long just in and out.  They are always amazed as the colour seeps up the through the paper. 

STEP 5:  As each piece of paper is dyed its mum or dads turn to very carefully open up the paper.  Once open place on a piece of kitchen towel to dry.  This works better than newspaper as it soaks the excess colour away and nothing gets smudged.  Also you get extra pieces of paper as the bottom piece usually soaks up enough colour to look good on its own. 

STEP6: Once dry its suitable for all sorts of projects.  We tore up the dyed paper and rolled into balls , stuck onto a printed dinosaur shape and displayed.

Valentines idea:  To link this to valentines day, you could cut into heart shapes.  It gives such a pretty effect that could be used for cards etc.

Playdoh and craft sticks

I was inspired with a construction blog that I saw yesterday so decided to see what would happen when I put similar resources out.  Before we got started it was toilet stop time and back he came with an empty toilet roll tube!! This was obviously the first thing he wanted to play with.  He cut it into treasure maps and hid it inside the playdoh islands!! Then he put flags on each islandusing cut up craft sticks.  Next some characters had to be added to be kings and princesses for the islands.  Each King and princess then received a comfy chair (a piece of cut up toilet roll tube coloured in with chalk).  Just as he looked about ready to go, he spotted that each character had left footprints in the playdoh. With great excitment he squashed out lots of playdoh and made jumping footsteps, giant "boom, boom boom" footsteps etc. 
Playdoh and craft sticks - what does your child make? Giant constructions, islands, footsteps or something else completly?

Lets read.

Lets read.

I am not a fan of phonics being the main system for teaching reading - which it is at the school the boys attend - and although only in nursery they have started to learn letters and are sounding out words.  He is really enjoying it and has been asking to read words that he sees.  A couple of weeks ago I dug out a tree poster we had made when teaching the oldest son to read and quickly printed out comon words on dinosaurs.  When interest arises we have brought out 3 or 4 new words and played some games to encourage him to read/memorise these words.
Today was one of those days and today he chose "me", "on" and "dog".
(dog and am don't seem to be on poster guessing they were still on table!)
When we use the words they are removed from the tree and played with.  He likes to choose the games now that he has played a few times  his favourite is running up to the ballon with the correct word and popping it before running back with the word.  He also likes bashing the words with a squidgy hammer from one of his games. To start with we have a few in a tub and he chooses which he wants as I read them out (I put about 10 in a box that should make sentences but if they don't we make up any words we need.)
At nursery they sing "I am going on an adventure" so with "I" "am" and "going" already on the board "on" was added, "me" for look at "me" and "dog" to add to "cat" which we already have.
Other games we use are hiding the words under colourful bowls and as he turns the bowl over he has to say the word - or I lift the bowl up and he has to shout the word before the bowl eats his fingers!
I will add some more of the games we use as we go.
The sentences he makes at the moment all start with I so I would definately recommend starting there.  We have "I look up" "I see a cat" "I am big" "I look at a cat" "I look at me" - this game obviously used a mirror!! "We look at a cat" "I am going to look at a cat" and then today dog replaced cat and was added to cat "I look at a cat and dog".


We also sound out the words phoics style but he doesn't know the sounds like "oo" etc

Marble run

Marble run

Both the younger boys love marbles and with the arrival of some coffee boxes and a collection of tubes we set to work on a marble run. Blue was the chosen colour and each piece was given a quick coating.  The older of the boys kept telling his little brother how it made it more exciting for the marble!! while the youngest kept saying "wow" (he's only 1 and not at sentence level yet!) in reaction to his brothers excited voice.  Anyway, after lots of painting the hot glue gun came out (youngest was distracted with the bag of marbles and an ice cube tray) and we stuck on the pieces going down the box.  Sometimes he glued and I held in place, sometimes I was allowed!! to glue.  After a few experiments to check the piece were in the right place, we set to work making bumpers so the marbles couldn't escape.  These consisted of the cut away pieces of tubing and some cotton wool! his choice.  The finished run was quite impressive and the boys were excited to show big brother when he came home.  This then led to our shop bought marble run being brought out and an extravagant marble run being built next to the box. They really wanted to build it on top of the box and have the marbles drop from one to the other, but little one kept climbing into the box and knocking the whole thing down.  This is maybe a task for when dad is home or youngest is having a rare nap.

Maths - Taking away by adding on

Maths - Taking away by adding on

5 year old

This week we were working on taking away by adding on.
We started by looking at small sums and moving coins around to show that we could work out any missing number if we had 2 parts of the sum.
Then we went outside and drew a large number line on the driveway.  We placed an alien on the number line and choose a number card to take away (alien had to be on a number between 10 and 20 and the number cards were from 0 - 9).  We started of on the alien card and jumped down the correct number.  Then we started on the number of the card we had drawn and jumped up the number we needed to see how many we needed to add on to get to the alien.  (if number card was 8 we started at 8 and jumped up to alien who was on 12. sum 12-8= 4: 8 jump up to 12 is 4.) We did each sum both ways to ensure his understanding was there.
Next we used coins to buy toys and receive change.  I let him choose which way he wanted to do the sum.  Finally, we moved on to some alien worksheets. This is usually received well as i try to include his favourite TV show or toy of the moment!
He loved the sheets, happily drew out the number lines and after ensuring he wrote the number above the jump for both the tens and units, was able to answer each question easily.

Lets make light

Lets make light

One of the kids got a new science kid for Christmas.  His school project at the moment is light and dark, so he asked if we could try out making some light.
Kid was quite complicated having to join positives and negatives the right way round but this was great for encouraging the kids to look really closely at the pictures and make sure each piece was in the correct way.
We successfully made a few circuits, making the lights stay on, switch on, flash and finally adding buzzers to our circuit.  Boys came up with loads of ideas where their circuits could be used.

Make the world

Make the world

A project both boys are enjoying!
We started off by covering a balloon with kitchen towel dipped in a mix of glue, blue food colouring and water. This would be the world.  We normally dry paper machie on top of the aga as it dries amazingly fast - so not thinking that's where the balloon went.  But NOT a good idea half an hour later a big bang sent us into the kitchen to find the world had blown up!! Blue coloured paper covered the kitchen.  After blowing up another balloon and recovering it in the rescued bits of paper, we had almost saved the world!! It wasn't quite as good as the first attempt but the kids had spent ages on it so I decided we would continue and see what happened.
Day 2 - balloon dry and fairly solid. We set to work drawing in the continents.  I had printed and cut out the correct sized shapes so the boys drew around these, using a globe and world map poster to position them correctly.  The boys used red thread to represent the equator. This helped them to work out positions.  When we thought we had a good representation we started to colour the continents with pen.  We had to finish off with paint as all the green pens manged to run out. 
We had to rescue Africa when the youngest had gone a bit wild with the pens! A bit of blue paint rescued the situation.
Next job was looking at the arctic circle and after a quick look in some books we decided to paint the arctic circle white. We used a bit of white thread to represent this and painted the area white and icy.  The boys have been watching "polar bears on Ice" on the TV so this was their choice of starting place. Next job was to find some pictures of arctic animals.  This was the oldest job, he searched the web and copied the pictures to publisher.  After we had looked at the size of our arctic circle and the number of animals he wanted to fit in, we decided that each animal would have to be pretty tiny.  After printing and cutting out. We glued the animals in place and used some sticky foam letters to spell out arctic.

Foam stickers were found in the sticker drawer and with a very useful animal globe and some of the kids books we found out where our animal stickers homes were.  Youngest had great fun sticking on the stickers while his brother was busy on the computer.  each continent was labelled (and places that the kids were particularly interested in).

The kids loved this project and the finished result looks great.

Paper Tearing pictures

Paper tearing - spotted some fab pictures while out made of torn paper. Took this idea home and started off with lots of sheets of coloured paper on table. Boys panicked when they found out they were to tear the paper, as normally torn paper means a ripped book - which spells TROUBLE!

However, we started and very quickly realised neither boy had any idea how to tear paper.  After lots of explaining and demonstrating we eventually got a few strips torn.  This was enough to get started.  The boys had already chosen favourite toy and they were going to use this to copy.  (My original idea was to develop the kids drawing skills - both draw sticks for arms and legs and round circles for heads and bodies.)

Boys started gluing their torn strips and copying their models, they copied a lot more than I thought they would but this was their choice . I tried to encourage them to add backgrounds and think of 'bad guys'  they could be fighting but both wanted to accurately show their character. As the pictures began to look like the characters the were really impressed. By the end of the pictures they were happily tearing away at the paper and had developed a new skill.

The final pictures were quite impressive and have been hung on the wall - when daddy recognised the character the boys were really pleased.