Treasure baskets

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 Everyone with a baby knows that the best toys...are not toys at all!  Treasure baskets are designed to give your baby a variety of textures and shapes to explore, it also gives you at least ten minutes peace!

This is a yellow themed one I made it contained - paint brushes, lolly holders, blocks, teething toys, spoons, plastic plate, rattles and cuddly toys. 

It is also good for getting another older child to identify colours - you can make iti n to a challenge of how many yellow (other coloured) items you can find!

Loom bands

Have you caught the loom bug yet??

Decorating eggs

You can do this with hard boiled eggs or as we did crack a small space in the bottom to remove the egg with.. We used the inside of the eggs to make a yummy banana loaf. 

We decided to decorate our eggs with paints and used egg cups to hold them still - 

   

 

 

You could also use glue and tissue paper like this - http://giraffescancraft.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/egg-shell-animals.html

 

Eat some pears then make mice!

If you buy packs of pears they come in cardboard that it lovely and pear shaped...or mouse shaped! 

You will need - 

• paint
• sisscors 
• pear packet
• glue

Once chopped up we decorated them with paint.  Older children can try to create a realistic mouse pattern but for younger ones it is all about painting on a different surface.  

Here is one of our finished mice....

We set our mice up around the house to give people a fright!

Pancake day!

So tomorrow is Shrove Tuesday (AKA Pancake day!) and we made a batch today to practice!  I always make Scotch pancakes or drop scones.  These are thicker than normal pancakes and I think they are nicer!  They are also easier to make.

We used this recipe - http://www.be-ro.co.uk/recipe/showrec9.html

The kids enjoyed adding and mixing the ingredients!  When I was cooking them the children did a pancake colouring picture while they waited for their pancake! We used this one -  http://www.supercoloring.com/pages/cooking-pancakes/ but there are lots of pages available!

Boxes and wooden spoons!

Funny isn't it - how you can have all the flashy light up toys in the world and what do children want to play with? - Wooden spoons and boxes!

10 month olds favourite thing to play with is this colander filled with all sorts of kitchen utensils! He spins them round inside it to watch the colours reflect on the side.  He takes them all out one by one and inspects them, then puts them back in again with a bang!

With this old box we spend a morning playing cafes!  We turned it in to an oven.  Wee one already has a real toy oven but she was very enthusiastic about this one.  It became a microwave too!

You really don't need flashy toys to keep children amused! 

Making new crayons from old ones!

I decided to spend some time sorting out the crayons/pencils and pens from the craft boxes.  I found loads of small broken crayons that would never be used and that were destined for the bin.  We decided to rescue them and make them in to new crayons! 

We peeled the paper from them and broke them in to tiny pieces - children love this, when do they ever get permission to snap crayons?!

We popped them in to cake cakes as we wanted to make cupcake shaped crayons!  5 minutes in the oven and they had all melted.  

Once cooled and set they looked like this - 

Perfect for wee baby hands to grasp and explore with!