From the category archives:

Activities

Natural and Built

May 16, 2012 Activities

I‘ve always been a bit meh about natural and built landscapes. I mean it’s so obvious – do we seriously need to point this one out? But then a whole series of little things happened at once, as they do, and I realised that maybe it does need to be discussed. Not taught as such, [...]

Building Bridges

May 10, 2012 Activities

It’s one of the classics – give children a pile of objects, such as newspaper, straws or pipecleaners, and tell them that they have to make a bridge across a gap that will carry a certain weight. I’m not suggesting you try that with little kids, but we did have a fun time trying to [...]

Palmar, Power, Precision, and Prints – Hands and fingers for all ages

May 3, 2012 Activities

Hands are one of the things that have made humans so successful, you could call them fundamental to what we are. But they aren’t unique or specialised. In fact it’s pretty much the opposite – every primate and lots of other little brown animals have hands. Horses’ hooves are specialised. We have been successful by [...]

Bubble Painting

April 26, 2012 Activities

Some bottles of food colouring were an excellent investment of about $5.50, we’re really cutting loose with them We’ve dyed eggs, used them for normal painting, marbling and now we’ve been bubble painting. In the last few weeks I’ve actually suggested it many times to have it flatly turned down, until a few days ago I just did [...]

Weather Fish

April 19, 2012 Activities

Last week during the school holidays it suddenly turned to winter, complete with thick jumpers and woolly socks. One of the games we played a lot of that both girls enjoyed was Go Fish. In case anyone doesn’t know this one, you have cards in your hand and have to try to make pairs by [...]

Baked Icecream Revisited

April 12, 2012 Activities

A while ago I tried to make Baked Icecream with fairly dismal results, but my lovely readers came to my rescue and concluded the recipe was wrong. So using suggestions from Jamie, Veronica, Lisa, Alicia and Trinity and based on Ann’s never-fail recipe, we tried again. First I turned the oven on to 230C so it [...]

Hoop Surveys

April 5, 2012 Activities

The last time we did this type of thing we were outside with cameras, the whole yard was our canvas and we were skimming over the top, picking the highlights. This week we did the opposite – pulled it back to a piece of ivory two inches on a side, on which we worked with [...]

Wordless Wednesday – Easter

April 4, 2012 Activities

I thought I’d look at Easters past. Last year we made home made paper Easter baskets with seeds embedded then gave them to big girl’s school friends. We dyed eggs with petals and cabbage. They were completely different to using food colouring. The Easter Chicken was a collage of petals. And the year before that we made paper [...]

Little Girl’s Easter Egg Activity

March 29, 2012 Activities

Sometimes it’s tough being the youngest. You rarely get to lead, you’re never the expert, and everyone’s done it before. And if you have the same teacher as your older siblings, you don’t even get to come home and say ‘Guess what we did!’ because they probably did it two years ago. So when the [...]

It’s not the Snowy River Scheme

March 22, 2012 Activities

When we were in Perth we spent time at the newest nature playground in Kings Park, seeing ‘children in their natural habitat.’ One of the things I loved were the groups of kids, who had never met and didn’t introduce themselves, working together to dam the creek, then undam it, then dam it at another [...]