A load of old rubbish

If I've learnt nothing else in my time as a mum and now childminder, it's that very young children like very simple things. Last week we made a very basic Autumn Sensory Tray using twigs, pine cones and leaves that we collected from the park:

It was very successful and I ended up getting it out a quite a few times.

It was especially successful when used in conjunction with a load of recycling:

These aren't just cardboard tubes and empty plastic bottles you know, they're actually musical instruments!

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:

Jelly - but not on a plate!

More messy play today, and this time we used Jelly! It's perfect for messy play with babies who still like to put everything in their mouths. I buried some wooden animals in the jelly to encourage the children to get digging around in it. My 2 year old loved it and had a really good time spooning it into different containers and digging out the animals:

Of course, they couldn't resist having a little taste too!

'Magic' sand

Remember this? I had it in my stocking as a child and gave some to my children last Christmas. I found some leftovers the other day and thought the 3 year old I look after might enjoy playing with it. It kept him in and my 2 year old occupied for a while, 'wowing' and 'oohing' at the way it looks like playdoh under the water and turns to sand when you touch it:

 They even enjoyed scooping it back out afterwards to help me tidy up!