From the category archives:

School age

Pendulum Waves

February 6, 2012 Energy and Change

First watch this video: How cool is that? And did you like the setup in the beginning when they showed you there were no tricks, it’s just a line of pendulums of different lengths. This, my friends, is all about maths. And physics, but at this level physics is pretty much applied maths. Pendulums Pendulums [...]

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 [...]

The Social Media Users Who Could

December 28, 2011 Babies

I‘ve been umming and ahhing on whether to post this, because it doesn’t really fit with this blog. I know I do vaccine posts occasionally and it’s always a balancing act, but this isn’t really about vaccines at all. It’s about information, and if bloggers and social media users (ie you readers) don’t talk about [...]

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 [...]

Wordless Wednesday – Rubbings

December 14, 2011 Materials

Do you have any idea how many patterned, textured surfaces you have around your home? Hundreds. Trust me. Obligatory Christmas tie-in – use rubbings to make wrapping paper, just use crayons or pencils on butcher’s paper. Kidlet’s creatively entertained and personalised paper as elaborate as you want.

Wordless Wednesday – Budgie’s First Egg

December 7, 2011 Life and Living

When birds first start laying their reproductive system doesn’t always get it together straight away and you can end up with some strange eggs. One of our budgie chicks is starting and she laid an egg without a shell – we’ve had this with a couple of chickens, but you can see how tiny this [...]

Kid Questions: Why do we see the lights after they are switched off?

December 5, 2011 Kid Questions

If you stare at a light for about 30 seconds then turn it off or look away you will still see a light in front of your eyes. This is called an afterimage, or technically a positive afterimage. In the back of your eyes are lots of little cells called cones. When certain types of [...]

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 [...]