Happenings in the garden

As well as a 30 foot by 15 foot allotment that I rent from the council, we are also lucky enough have a little garden attached to my house, I mostly grow herbs in it and have a little space for Boris to kick a ball around and we also have a Braeburn apple tree!  We got it for free after collecting coupons on boxes of cereal about 4 years ago.  Every year we hoped and hoped for blossom and apples, one year there were 5 flower, we got very excited, they started to swell and were then eaten by birds *sad*.  In the winter I decided it would probably be a good idea to prune it, we had let it grow as much as possible thinking it was only little so we needed to give it some time to grow.  I cut back quite a few of the branches and a few months later the tree was covered in blossom!  We were thrilled and immediately covered it with net to protect it from the birds and hung old CDs from it to scare the bird off.  It has been positively cosseted ever since and is now heavy laden with apples that we are waiting with baited breath to fully ripen, then eat!  It is so heavy that we have had to prop it up with the frame of a portable green house!
So I couldn't resist sharing some photos with you of our beloved tree with it's apples, having waited so long for them I am sure you will forgive the slight boasting nature of this post!

 

What's growing in your garden?

Fun Things to do with Toddlers - Flour Play

I started a series of "Fun things to do with Toddlers" over on my old blog, but seeing as I still have a toddler and am still looking for fun things to do with him I thought it would be appropriate to carry on the series on this blog (with a few possible repetitions). 

Entertaining a toddler can be challenging, as you probably read from my "body painting" post he isn't always as excited about the activities I set up for him as I am!  However it is still fun to try out new things for him to explore and to give him new learning opportunities and chances to develop new skills.  Even if he only engages with the activity for a few minutes I still think it is worth the effort of setting it up for the sake of giving him learning opportunities. 

Obviously at his age we aren't talking counting of writing, when I say learning opportunities I am talking about helping him to find out things about the world.  For example when water is in a cup it is contained, when it is poured on a flat surface the water spreads, when it is poured onto an absorbent surface it disappears!  So the toddler is learning about the qualities of liquid, the effects of gravity and the reactions between materials.

This week I thought we would have a go at playing with flour

I got the idea to get some flour out for him to play with because I was just beginning to make a loaf of bread and Boris wanted to look in the bowl and see what I was doing, he dipped his fingers into the flour and was intrigued by the texture, I didn't really want him messing about with my bread flour that I was about to use to got some other cheap flour I had out and I just piled it on the mat to let him poke it, he wasn't all that interested and didn't seem to know what to do so I went back and got a bowl to put it in because that was the way it had been when he had first been interested.
This got him more intrigued and with the help of a wooden spoon and some stacking cups he was soon transferring flour from one pot to another, stirring it and scooping it up and putting it back into the bowl. 
He then decided to sprinkle water from his beaker onto the flour which changed everything!  He also tried to shake flour through the little holes in the stacking cups and pressed the cups into the flour to create shapes and patterns.

It was a fun activity which I will definitely do again with him as I feel there is scope for more exploration as he gets older.

Please share what activities you do with your toddler, I am always looking for ways to keep him entertained.

Body Painting

My plan for this post was to showcase some fabulous pictures of my sons hands, feet, tummy etc covered in paint, a mat with paint smeared all over it and some prints with beautiful painty patterns on them.  However, as with most things toddler related, things didn't quite go to plan, here is what happened:
A few weeks ago I have a fantastic idea that I would get the mat out that we normally put under Boris' highchair for mealtimes and put it in the garden and squirt some paint onto it and Boris would smear the paint all around and roll in it and generally have a wonderful, crazy, painty time and I would take beautiful prints from the patterns he created on the mat.
However...it didn't quite go to plan, basically Boris was really not particularly interested in smearing he paint around, he didn't really want to touch it much at all.  I gave him a brush which he used a little, but I can honestly say he spend about 30 seconds on the mat actually playing with the paint, very disappointing as it took be about 45 minutes to wipe it all up and remove the grass and moss stuck to the back of the mat! And then I had to clean him up because somehow, even though he hardly seemed to touch the paint, he ended up with it all over him.

I am hoping it is because he is still small and didn't really know what to do and/or was a bit frightened.
 I did manage a couple of snaps though for the short amount of time when he was engaged with the paint.

Might work with your kids though, perhaps if they are a bit older?  Have you tried this with your toddler?  How did they react?  Did you get some better results than me?