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!

Invitation to play...snow!

This past week we have had some snow here in Glasgow.  Not enough to play in though!  So we decided to get out our snow that we made in December! Here is the recipe for it - http://giraffescancraft.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/snow.html

I set it out along with some egg cups and spoons.

Lots of fun was had building sculptures, digging and measuring out the snow!

Chalk love hearts

I saw this idea from The Crafty Crow blog and thought we would give it a try! 

Basically you draw round a template of a shape - we did love hearts for valentines day!  Then with the template still in place, you use cotton wool to smudge the chalk out.

The red one shows up well in the picture above.

When you smudge it out it makes a pretty effect on the paper.

We also tried drawing round different objects...like baby food jars!

Link to the craft crows blog page - http://www.thecraftycrow.net/2014/02/chalk-stenciled-hearts.html

Glue sponge

http://www.housingaforest.com/how-to-make-a-glue-sponge/

What a great idea! We are going to try this!

egg shell animals

This is from the 365 things to do Usbourne book.

We saved the egg shells from our lunch! Trying as hard as we could not to make the holes too big!

We glued the edges together and then covered the eggs in layers of tissue paper using PVA glue - very messy!

Then we added on eyes/legs etc.  This is our bunny...

And here are our spiders - 

We also did a blue bird.  We put them back in their egg boxes and decorated their house for them using pipe cleaners!

Here are all our animals in their happy home -