Back to school craft!

With three weeks to go before school resumes I know many of us are still trying to complete our to do list of activities that ten weeks ago seemed possible! However, the return to school is looming and for many of us our thoughts turn to how we can help prepare our children for the school year ahead.

If you have children starting pre school or kindergarten or even grade one you may like to start the children on this ongoing project.

An ABC book created by the child themself would be something they would treasure and would enjoy practising their ABC knowledge from. Creating it themselves also gives them ownership over the book by aloowing them to decided what pictures go in it! It will be a great reflection of their interests at the time also.

To create the book you will need 26 pieces of cardboard cut into rectangles or squares plus a front cover, yarn or string to join it together, pictures and decorations, glue, scissors and a pencil.

Use one piece of card for each letter. (You may wish to pre prepare these with a letter stcker or by writing the letter on, show the capital and lower case version of each letter also ie Ee)

Encourage the children to draw pictures or find pictures to cut out and glue on for that letter and decorate the card. You may wish to label each picture as well.

I would suggest creating the books over a number of days to avoid the children becoming bored, it could be a special project at quiet time for those who do not nap!

Once completed , create a fromt cover (My ABC's plus the child's name work well) and join together.

This idea could also be adapted to make a colour book, numbers 1 - 10, my book of animals, vehicles etc.

For more craft ideas check out www.ohmycrafts.blogspot.ca where this craft idea came from.

                                

Water fun in the sun.

There are so many free or cheap activities that can keep children occupied in the summer and here is a great one to do on a sunny day.

Provide the children with buckets of water and various painting tools and then let your driveway or a patio be their canvas.

The kids will have great fun painting their pictures, being creative and developing their fine motor skills and, best of all, the sun will dry them up and they can start again!
A great idea would be to photograph their works of art.

An alternate activity would be to get the children to 'paint' the fence, if you have wooden fencing around your back yard.

Loads of sunny, water fun and no mess to clear up afterwards!

1 foot and 2 hands makes a lobster?

Apparently so!

Check out this very simple painting activity seen at a day home last week. A great idea that could easily be done outside to avoid foot prints on your floor.

Paint each hand and make a print on the top of the paper, then paint a foot and print below.

Finally, paint a line joining the foot print to each hand and add on the eyes, and you have a lobster!

For a variation you could add googly eyes, or have glitter in the paint for a sparkling lobster or add some shreads of green tissue paper to make sea weed!

Olympic sports fun!

A couple of weeks ago, myself and some of our providers enjoyed a couple of hours in the sunshine celebrating the start of the Olympics in England with our very own olympic event!

Why not try out some of these fun games and races in your own back yard or at the local park!

• Hug a ball race - You need one ball and two children. Each pair hugs a ball between them and race to the finish line trying not to drop the ball.
• Egg and spoon race - A classic, fun race! We used plastic spoons and the plastic easter eggs to run this race!
• The straw race - Line the children up and place a drinking straw between their top lip and their nose. Encourage the children to curl up their top lip to hold the straw in place. They then race to the finish line trying to keep the straw in place.
• Hula hoop race - A wiggly race! Try to get from the start to the finish line whilst keeping a hula hoop spinning around your middle.
• High jump - Use a skipping rope or a swimming noodle to form the jump and move it up a little each time. When you have finished that hold it higher and have a limbo competition.
• Shot put - replace a heavy shot with a tennis ball or a small soft ball and see who can throw the furthest.
• Finally, running races which are enjoyed by all. Crepe paper steamers make a great finish line that the children can break. Have them run forwards, run backwards, jump, hop, roll!

We finished our olympic event with a medal presentation and everyone felt like a winner!