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!

Making an Advent Wreath

There are so many lovely Christmassy craft ideas out there, we just have to try them out over the next few weeks. We started with an Advent Wreath, the finished article didn't look that spectacular if I'm honest, but the kids really enjoyed the process which is the main thing!

First we painted the wreath (made out of paper plates!) red

Then we glued green hand prints made out of tissue paper onto the wreath

This bit was FUN! The babies rolled cut up tissue rolls in white paint before adding glitter. We'll use this method again, they loved it!

The finished article; an advent wreath - kind of!

Treasure Rocks

Last week the 3 year old I look after really enjoyed the dinosaur part of our letter D activities. So I decided to do something with dinosaurs again this week. I made treasure rocks (recipe here) and hid dinosaurs in them. The kids had great fun bashing them open to discover what was inside:

It turned into a really brilliant activity, the kids played with them for ages, exploring the texture as the rocks crumbled:

They used the crumbled up rocks to make 'cakes' and even made a dinosaur land out of them - hours of fun!

Diwali Inspired Footprints

It was Diwali this week and I wanted to do something age-approrpriate for the 1 and 2 year olds I was looking after. The story of Rama and Sita went over the heads (not surprisingly!) but in my research I found that some homes put out footprints to guide the Goddess Lakshmi along with the lamps. So we decided to make some footprints of our own:

My 2 year old particularly enjoyed this and we decided to add a bit of glitter - more inspired by Holi the festival of colours than Diwali I admit!