Happy Chinese New Year!

One of my (Chinese) New Year Resolutions is to update my poor neglected blog more often! This week we've celebrated Chinese New Year with some lovely crafts and activities for kids of all ages, as well as trying some Chinese Food.

Using footprints to make a horse picture was very popular, the children really enjoyed the tickly feeling of the paint on their feet!

  

They made Chinese lanterns too - great for practicing scissor skills:

Using some printables from the fantastic Red Ted Art the older children made these Chinese Dragons

Noodles made for some lovely messy play:

And we tried a variety of different Chinese food today, chicken and veg stir fry for dinner and vegetable spring rolls and prawn crackers for lunch!

Happy Mother's Day!

We've spent the week making lots of lovely presents and cards for our Mummys! I wanted to make things where the children could really get involved in and enjoy the process.
We made truffles that had crushed biscuits in them, it was lots of fun making the crumbs:

So was mixing and rolling the truffles, as well as decorating a cone to put them in:

Painting the cards and a flower pot was also fun! We went to the garden and I let the children choose which flowers they wanted to put in their flower pot.

The end result looked pretty good too:

Dydd Santes Dwynwen Hapus!

Heddiw ro'n ni'n dathlu Dydd Santes Dwynwen gyda crefftiau a coginio:
Today we were celebrating Santes Dwynwen Day (the Welsh equivalent of St Valentine) with crafts and baking:

 Quality sweet wrappers stuck onto some sticky back plastic make a lovely suncatcher!

Oes ti ddim yn gwybod amdano Santes Dwynwen, dyma'r stori/If you don't know about Santes Dwynwen, heres' the story; Pwy Oedd Santes Dwynwen?

A festival of Christmas activities!

We've rounded off a brilliant year with some lovely Christmassy activities. I've not got round to blogging much as we've been so busy, so here's a quick run down:

We've made christmassy cupcakes:

 Saltdough decorations:

 Mincepies:

 We've partied!

 We've played with snowy sensory trays:

 And peppermint christmas tree playdough:

 We've decorated the Christmas tree:

 And exlpored a Christmassy discovery box:

 Done Christmassy colouring in:

 Made snowmen:

And gingerbread Christmas trees:

 Explored the oaty, pepperminty Christmas sensory tray:

 Gone on a trip to Winter Wonderland:

 Made Christmas cards:

 Been to see the Coca Cola lorry:

 And finished off with Christmas dinner:

It's been so much fun - hope Father Christmas brings something lovely for all these good little boys and girls!

Sinking and floating

It was a lovely afternoon so we spent it out in the garden, our bulb planting lead to watering..

Which lead to filling buckets with water. Which lead to a sink or float experiment. The 3 year old I was looking after wanted to know why a toy frog was staying on top of the water so we talked about how and why some things float and some things sink and found lots of things around the garden to experiment with: 

A big pine cone:

A toy car:

And lots more. Lots of fun and lots of learning!

Discovery Boxes - Fabric

Every week I make up a different Discovery Box for the younger children I look after. So far we've had one filled with different shape, size and texture balls, another filled with blocks of different description. This week is fabric. The one year old I look after loves opening and closing lids so I always use a box with a lid and give him a 'spare' empty one so he can move the fabrics around, opening and closing lids to his heart's content!

As ever, when the older children came home from school they wanted to get stuck in too. So I dug out some larger fabrics which they laid out, explored thoroughly and made into costumes:

Hedgehog bread rolls

Today we made bread rolls and shaped them into hedgehogs. Making bread is always great to do with kids, they get to mix:

Knead:

And, best of all, eat the finished result for their lunch!

We made the spikes with scissors - that part was too closely supervised to take pictures but the kids really enjoyed, although we did end up with a couple of decapitated hedgehogs along the way!

Almond Playdough!

I had a bit of a homemade playdough disaster today. I'd promised one of my new mindees some pink sparkly playdough to play with after school but something went horribly wrong with my food colouring and it turned out a wierd orange colour! To make up for the wierd colour I added something with a nice smell - almond extract. None of the kids could get enough of it and many, many almondy cakes were made!

Oat-so much fun!

Today's messy play activity was oats! My 2 year old and the 1 year old I was looking after loved this - they scooped them with spoons and put them in cups and bowls, they chucked them all over the floor and ate a fair few as well! Definitely one to do again another day:

Today was B-day!

We made some letter Bs (and bs!) today, once I'd cut out all the pieces it was easy enough for the children to glue them all on:

You can't tell very well from this picture but I made their toast into letter Bs using a cookie cutter:

 

Then we had fun with a Big Bucket of Bubbles:

And I drew some Bs on the wall for them to paint off with water:

We also made some Butterflies by painting kitchen roll with watered down paint: