From the category archives:

Activities

Marvellous Marbling

February 2, 2012 Activities

The big girl received an art book for Christmas. Most of it is way too old for her, but she loves picking things out and then we get to work out how to modify them for her. She wanted to try marbling, but we had a few problems to solve so we tried lots of [...]

Engineer’s Report: Gingerbread House

December 22, 2011 Activities

Location: Slab has been well prepared, very smooth and level on a hard substrate. Block is minimum size, house too close to front boundary. Floorplan: A simple rectangle with only one room and firepit in the centre for cooking. Entrance centre front is decorative only, 6 windows give adequate light and ventilation but difficult to [...]

Holiday Activities

December 19, 2011 Activities

I‘m seriously out of touch but I know everyone is doing the Christmas Links post. So instead I decided to do holiday links, and include ideas of things to do with your kids over the holidays. I’m trying to go for some of the older ones, so unless you’ve been around since the beginning these [...]

Can You …

December 15, 2011 Activities

For us, our bodies are familiar and generally predictable. We know what we can do, we are confident in our movements. But this is something that babies and children need to learn. For my little drama princesses, getting a camera out is a sure-fire way to get them to try new things Can you kiss your [...]

Grass Weaving

December 1, 2011 Activities

Learning about materials is a good way for little kids to learn about, well, materials. It’s a great start because they are something they know and are familiar with, and they can easily see and feel differences in their own clothes. We are always having discussions about whether clothes will be too hot or too [...]

Sparkles

November 24, 2011 Activities

Little girl loves gluing at the moment. She doesn’t care if it’s a stick or brush, the sheer pleasure of spreading glue around is enough. It’s even more important than actually sticking anything to the glue, which is driving the control freak in me mad. In a bid to make it a bit different I’ve [...]

Creating Books

November 17, 2011 Activities

Both the girls love being read to, and big girl is reading. Of course this means little girl needs to as well, she’s at the stage where she can identify pictures and follow a pattern to ‘read’ to us and thinks it’s the best thing ever. She’s also starting to draw recognisably and loves making [...]

Eggshell Seedlings

November 10, 2011 Activities

Some people seem to have the erroneous impression that I’m good with plants. This is probably because of the number of plant projects I start, but trust me they don’t last. The peas and terrarium sprouted but didn’t survive transplanting. One of the peas went mouldy. The seedlings in egg cartons were blown away in [...]

Baked Icecream (that, um, melted. Help?)

November 3, 2011 Activities

I‘ve tried to make meringue a couple of times and it hasn’t worked, so that was probably a sign that I shouldn’t have done this. Or at least that I should have tried it several times before putting it in the blogging schedule. But given trips to Melbourne and husband travel and another trip to [...]

Cooking with Solar

October 27, 2011 Activities

In the brief weeks between freezing and pouring, I thought we’d try a solar oven. I’ve made them before with mixed success so I wanted to see if I could modify them for little ones, and there isn’t going to be a better place to do it than central Australia in hot weather. In the [...]