Home pre-school - Foot prints in the sand painting

Our theme for the summer is The Seaside, we have had some lovely sunny days this year so I decided it would be fun to do some outdoors painting.  In my mind I was thinking about footprints in the sand and making a way of capturing the footprints that are so fleeting on the beach. 

I got a couple of baking trays and poured some different colours of poster paint into them.  My boys stood in the paint (with help - it was slippy) the walked and ran along the paper, creating a crazy mess of painty footprints.

The paper was some packing paper than came with an Amazon order. 

Gotta love those little feet. 

And those even littler ones. 

It was a fun, quick activity, I have stuck the strip of paper up the stairs in our house and when we change theme I will probably cut a few bits out to keep.

THE WINNER

Congratulations to Fiona McCormick who has won the brilliant Lion King activity kit,

Please message on Facebook me and I will send you your prize.

If you are interested in buying one of these kits you can now order one online at a bargain price of £18.00 and for a limited time I will be selling them with FREE POSTAGE!  Check it out!

COMING MONDAY - LION KING GIVEAWAY!!!

Tune in on Monday evening for my first giveaway on this blog!!

I will be giving away this fabulous kit containing everything you need for a fun Lion King themed activity week.

The kit includes:

Jungle shaped playdough cutters,

Silicone bug cake/ice/jelly mould,

Six plastic bug toys, 

Six plastic jungle/safari animal toys,

One dropper pipette,

Instructions for making jungle play dough

Cotton bag to keep everything in.

This kit is worth £18.00 and I will be taking orders from anyone who wants to buy one after the giveaway is finished.

Details of how to enter will be shared on Monday.

Home Preschool - Sand hand print

Quite often when I come up with an activity for the boys I get caught up in the moment and forget to take photos of the process, sometimes it's only after that I think "Oh I had better take some photos for the blog!"  so please forgive the serious lack of development photos, I will try to describe it as best as I can so you get get the picture. 

Following on with our Seaside theme, and thinking about hand and foot prints in the sand I thought it would be interesting for Boris to help make a permanent memento of his little hands in plaster of Paris, but with a beachy, sandy effect to make you think of holidays on the beach. 

To to do this activity I began with a small plastic bowl that I pressed some sand in to.  I then got Boris to press his hand into the sand and I neatened it up after he took his hand away, I had to press it quite firmly in and press in each finger.  

Next in a separate bowl I mixed up some plaster of Paris by pouring in some water then adding the powder until I got a creamy texture, I got Boris to help me scoop the powder and pour it into the bowl and give it  stir with a wooden spoon.   

Next Boris helped me pour it onto the sand and I gave the bowl a little nudge to get any air bubbles out.  

I left it about 15 minutes to set then carefully tapped it out.  I have it a little brush with a dustpan brush to get the lose sand off, and there you have it!  A lovely sandy hand print. 

Don't forget to stay tuned for my brilliant GIVEAWAY coming soon.

Home Preschool themes - Seaside 1

I have been struggling for a while with coming up with ideas for themes that my children would find fun and interesting, but then the sun really started shining, the shorts were on, the flip flops donned, the sun cream slathered. So The Seaside seemed like an obvious choice, why didn't I think of it sooner. 

I got the water table out (this was a really great buy because it's so versatile): 

and filled it with a scintillating variety of sensory stimulating materials including sand, shaving foam, water beads and hair gel!

The hair gel was just 16p from ASDA!  I used 1 1/2 tubs, the shaving foam was £1 also from ASDA, I got the waterbeads and little animals on line and the sand from our sandpit! It probably cost about £5.15 in total, but of course I can re-use the animals and water table.

I really enjoyed setting it up a little bit secretly then bringing the boys out for the big reveal.  They were very curious and tentative at first, not sure about touching the more slimy materials, but soon getting stuck in and eventually very purposefully smooshing it all though their hair!

I really enjoyed watching them play and mostly left them too it, but could have asked them some open questions to get them thinking such as what does the shaving foam/hair gel/water beads feel like? What are the animals doing/thinking? What creatures do you find at the seaside?  What sort of things do you like to do at the seaside? etc.

Boris even did a bit of imaginative play with the little sea creatures which really thrilled me because has just been getting into it and it's so sweet.  This activity was great for stimulating the senses and relaxing, it was also good for fine motor skills with the boys practising the pincer movement by picking up the animals and water beads, they also had to work on co-operation whilst playing together at the table and taking turns. 

Towards the end it had turned into a bit of a swamp!  But it was fairly easy to clean up.  I scooped out and rinsed the water beads in a colander to use again then just hosed out the table. Good clean fun. 

Check back in a few days time for more seaside related activities for toddlers/preschoolers. And if you have got this far, I will be doing a GIVEAWAY in a few days time so be sure to check back.  You can sign up by email on the right side bar, or you can stay up to date by liking my facebook page.

Home Preschool Themes - Dinosaurs part 2

Continuing on from Monday, we have done some more Dinosaur related activities.  It's worth pointing out that I am not, at the point in my children's education, too worried about what they are actually learning from all this, I don't expect them to learn any of the Dinosaurs names, or what periods came before or after the Jurassic, or how to spell Piatnitzkysaurus!  For me the most important thing they do is play, and my hope is that I will be providing them with opportunities to play whilst also having fun and exploring new things.

So here are some more activities we have done this week with our Dinosaur theme:

Salt Dough Dinosaur Bones:

Boris and I had a go at making some salt dough dinosaur bones,
1 cup of plain flour,
1 cup of salt,
1/2 a cup of water.

Obviously I made most of these bones, but Boris had a good time rolling the dough into little worms which was good for his fine motor skill development and creativity.
I made a lot of vague bone shapes and used a picture of some dinosaur bones from a book as a guide but I wasn't trying to make it anatomically correct or anything.

We laid them out on a tray to bake in the over for 3 hours at about 170 degrees. 

I over baked the bones so they came out golden brown like biscuits so like some crazy mother I painted them white with poster paint at about 1.00am in the morning!!

Then we had a good time laying out the bones to make them look like some kind of prehistoric monster. We can also bury the bones to search for in the sand pit.  

Plaster of Paris Dino Eggs:

So I decided to use our plastic Easter eggs as part of a little archaeological excavation activity. I filled each egg with plaster of paris and squidged a little plastic dinosaur in each one to chisel out.  I think this would have been a really great idea if I had coated the inside of the eggs with vaseline, or lined them with cling film or something because I had a nightmare getting the blinking things out. Anyway I got them out eventually and we had a ball smashing them with wooden hammers.  (Probably would have been a good idea to wear goggles)

I decided to take the activity outside onto the patio after Biscuit dropped one of the eggs onto my breakfast tea plate and smashed it.

Woo hoo!! A Dinosaur!!  (I think Boris wasn't convinced there was actually anything in there till he saw a bit poking out)

The little dinos left lovely imprints in the plaster of paris.  I might do a bit of dry brush painting on these to really bring out the shape and textured. This activity was definately one for the gross motor skills.

Finally - Dinosaurs in Jelly!:

Because, why the hell not?!  You can never go wrong with three year olds and jelly. 

Another mad moment; me mixing poster paint and black food colouring into some jelly at stupid o'clock in the morning.  Now that's commitment!

How raaaaawesome does this dinosaur look coming out of the jelly?!

Obviously the jelly didn't stay in the water table and I had to warn visitors who went into the garden to watch out for the prehistoric slime on the patio. 

Grey jelly mmmmmm.

Home Preschool themes - Dinosaurs part 1

So I have a pre-schooler!!  When did that happen?  Boris is three now and is absorbing information from all around him, he is learning so much; how to think, how to make decisions, how to use materials, how to move, how to make, I could go on and on, it's amazing the things he picks up and remembers, (his memory is much better than mine!)

So as a three year old Boris could be taking advantage of his 15 free childcare hours.  Although we haven't actually made a decision not to send him to preschool, we kind of just haven't.  I am not sure what the point would be, we are planning on home educating the boys so there is no need to prepare them for school as such (how to stand in line, put his hand up to ask to go to the loo, follow instructions without question that sort of thing - only joking...or am I?).  He has plenty of opportunities to socialise with children of his age with friends and at toddler groups, and with children of all ages at home education groups that we have joined.

So with the fact of him being preschool age in mind I have been feeling like I should start making a bit more effort to facilitate his learning. Of course he is learning in everything we do every day, on the walk to toddler group, as we bake in the kitchen, through reading stories, playing in the garden etc, but it is nice for him to be exposed to as many new ideas as possible. We have done a few themes already over the last year or so and have enjoyed this approach so for now, because it seems to work well for us and we enjoy it, that's how we are approaching "home preschool" (as I am going to call it).

This last couple of weeks we have been loosely exploring the theme of Dinosaurs.  It began with Boris and his Dad watching the Dinosaur Zoo Live show which was on in the Hexagon Theatre in Reading, it sounded really great, highly recommended (though I am not sure it is on anymore)  according to my husband Boris wasn't sure what to make of it all, I don't think he realised the dinosaurs were puppets, and he was afraid of the very big dinosaur at the end, and it was also very noisy which unsettled him, but it sounded very exciting.

The first week was off to a slow start because we were very busy with our usual activities, but I managed to pick up a few books from the library and found this cool dinosaur sand mold set in ASDA, (there were legs, arms, ribs and a tail too.) so we had a bit of fun with that in the garden enjoying the glorious weather we have been having recently.

Playdough is always a win in our house so I rustled up a batch in dino colours and we played with it with some dinosaur cutters that I picked up at the Natural History Museum in London when we visited there a few weeks ago.

The playdough is: 2 cups plain flour,

                              2 tbsp glycerin,

                              1/2 cup salt,

                              2 tbsp cream of tartar,

                              1 1/2 cups boiling water.

I cooked the dough in a pan, then kneaded in food colouring and poster paint to achieve the required tones.  I think I cooked it a bit much, or else used a bit too much flour because the dough was quite dry, but it did give a nice wrinkly texture which I felt added a life like element to the dough.

We also stomped dinosaur footprints into the playdough with some model dinosaurs we already had.

And finally of course I had to have a go at making a little model of a dinosaur.  I call this one a imperfectlynaturalosaurus.

We also took a visit to Wellington Country Park, which is a really fun place to spend the day with lots of playgrounds and a little farm and things, but more importantly has a dinosaur trail!!  Here I am hamming it up with a T Rex. (Boris took this photo, hence the slightly dodgy angle) I actually hurt myself on one of those teeth. 

I have more dinosaur activities to share with you in the next few days so stay tuned.  Please share, pin, tweet and like and visit again soon x