From the category archives:

Toddlers

Wordless Wednesday – Whirlpools

February 22, 2012 Babies

I can’t say how happy it makes me that the girls love watching the whirlpool when you pull the plug out. I love seeing the two waves on top of the water – the huge influence of such a tiny flaw. A shining, silvery hole twisting and turning in the water. Excuse the scum.

Girly Construction (Boys can do it too)

February 16, 2012 Activities

Sometimes it is brought sharply home to me that I have girls. And not just girls but fairy princesses. I don’t know if this is popular culture or some sort of cosmic payback, because I’m one of the least girly women you could think of. I don’t know if I even own high heels although [...]

Wordless Wednesday – All Around Us

February 15, 2012 Life and Living

I had a couple of examples of interesting life around us on the holidays. The first was the enormous moth above – it’s as long as my finger! It’s a hawkmoth, which comes from the Yeperenye caterpillar and is an important Dreaming spirit in the Alice Springs region. It was just in a corner of the [...]

A Farm in a Box

February 9, 2012 Activities

When we were kids we, like so many others, had silkworms. It was a fun introduction to lifecycles, responsibility and the ethical dilemma of collecting the silk easily or letting them eat their way out. Now I’ve discovered there is an even easier version where you can see the pupae rather than having them tucked [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]