A recent delivery came in a big box! The was much excitement as the big kids and I surveyed the long, but shallow box and pondered what we could do with it. It wasn’t big enough for a cubby, and it was too big to make into a car. Then I had an idea…

I got out the markers and drew some roads on the bottom of the box, then left the kids to decide what to do next.

A little while later there were many more roads, a beach, some paddocks for the horses, Hargid’s house, a droid workshop and somewhere for the Ewoks to sleep.

The big box had become a whole town. More drawings have been added since then and the legos have been built and rebuilt, arranged and rearranged…

Not only has it keep the kids engaged for hours and hours, it’s also contained all those tiny bits of lego. No more standing on a droid head and trying not to swear!

Stay tuned for more things we’ve been doing with the big box!

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What To Do With a Big Box? – Make a Town is a post from: picklebums.com

My four year old has discovered a new found love of all things letters and writing.

He is at the stage of wanting to write way beyond his abilities. He is still learning to form most of the letters and to manipulate his pencil well enough to write them. He wants to know how to write everything and constantly throws random combinations of letters at me and asks what it spells.

I needed a break from figuring out how to pronounce the word ‘dmjko’ so I devised a cunning plan that encouraged his new found love of letters, spelling and writing, but needed less input from me.

I printed out some pages of upper and lower case letters and threw in some numbers for good measure. Printing a few pages, each in a different font I cut them up into individual letters and got out some paper and our handy dandy home-made paste.

“oooh lots of letters” He said when he discovered what I was doing.
“Yep… lots of letters, now you can make lots of words…. any words you like!” I told him and left him to it.

After a few minutes he called me back to read what he had written…

“It’s all the important words Mum” he told me…. and it was, all the very important words.

Do your kids enjoy cutting and pasting?

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Easy Art For Kids – Letter Collage. is a post from: picklebums.com

Some days you need to pull out something magical. Something that will wow your kids into submission and get them all sitting quietly doing instead of running around the house fighting. The older my kids get, the fewer of these tricks I have left, but the other day, with rain induced anarchy threatening to take over I decided it was time to break one of the remaining items from my bag of Mummy tricks.

I cut some long thin strips from our Ikea paper roll, found scissors for everyone, and got out the tub of markers and then I sat down. That was all it took to entice the big kids and they came over to watch as I folded the strip of paper, concertina style, and drew a funny looking person on the front. Before I began to cut the girls had figured out my magic…

“Oh I know this, you are making a paper doll!”

They watched as I cut, showing them that you needed to leave the hands and feet attached to the edges of the folded paper, and then carefully, carefully we unfolded the paper and dazzled the four year old boy…

“Wow!” was all he could say at first then…. “Make me one!”

It took the girls a few goes to figure out how to draw their shapes and cut them so they would be joined together in a string, but they got the hang of it and designed their own chains of people, flowers and hearts.

It was too tricky for the big boy to draw or cut out the shapes, so he told me what he wanted, I drew and cut and then he carefully unfolded them, and decorated them.

Paper dolls are not rocket science, but they kept my kids entertained and stopped World War 3 breaking out at our house for at least an hour!

Do you have any magic tricks that you pull out when things get grim at your place?

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Easy Art For Kids – Paper Dolls, and Boats, and Flowers… is a post from: picklebums.com

Yep, I’m blogging about play dough again!

I am collecting quite a few blog posts about play dough ideas and activities. It’s a good thing I like playing with dough as much as my big boy does.

The small boy is even starting to take some interest in the activity. He’s had a few tastes but he’s generally more interested in squishing it between his fingers and running off and hiding bits all over the house!

Morgan likes something a bit more exciting than a quick squish and run, so yesterday I collected a variety of things to make patterns in the play dough – shells, glass pebbles, a few different seed pods and gum nuts, and a selection of little plastic threading bits.

First we rolled out the play dough into big flat slabs, then we experimented with patterns and prints.

There was lots of classification and grouping going on, as well as a beginning understanding of repeating patterns…. and it all looked so pretty too!

Joining in with It’s Play Time at Let The Children Play.

What’s your favourite things to add to play dough?

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Play Dough Patterns is a post from: picklebums.com

I’d been saving up this activity for when I really needed to pull out something special. After a particularly bad day last week with lots of yelling (by the kids and me) I knew that time has come…

I quietly got out two tubs, a couple of containers, funnels and some scoops I’d been saving from the laundry soap. Then I went outside to the shed and filled up one of the tubs with chicken food. Yep, you read right, chicken food.

I try not to use food as a play material, especially when there is an easily available, cheap, just as good, alternative. Rice for sensory play is lots of fun, but rice is a food that we could eat if we didn’t play with it. Using the seed mix we feed our chickens is a ‘just as good’ alternative to rice, since our chickens don’t mind eating the seed even after we’ve played with it.

At first my school aged girls thought I was a little crazy.
A tub of chook food?
To play with??

But the Four year old sunk his hands in immediately and lifted them up, letting the seeds run through his fingers, saying “it feels funny!” That was all it took for the girls to sink their hands in too.

Hours later they were still pouring, mixing, sorting and running their hands through the chicken feed their crazy mother gave them to play with.

The chicken feed does end up on the table and on the floor, but given a couple of dust pans and brooms, my kids had as much fun sweeping it back up as they did playing with it.

With the lids on the tubs and stored somewhere dry and cool we played with this again and again over a week until we wanted to use the tubs for something else so we recycled the seeds back into the chicken feed bin, with a few handfuls going straight to our hen who has five new chicks.

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Sensory Play – A Tub Full of Seeds is a post from: picklebums.com

We usually use a glue stick for collage as they are quick and easy to get out and pack up, don’t need a brush and easy for small hands to manage. But for some collage materials you need something with a bit more sticking power, that’s when we make corn flour paste.

Corn Flour Paste Recipe

1 part corn flour – 1/3 cup
3 parts water – 1 hot cup

In a saucepan, mix the cornflour with a little cold water to form a paste. Then add the hot water (the hotter it is the less time it will take to ‘cook’ the paste) a little at a time, stirring vigorously to get rid of any lumps. Once all the water is added cook the paste, stirring continuously, over a medium heat until it thickens and becomes opaque.

This paste is thick and gloopy so it doesn’t drip off brushes or run down pages. If you require even more sticking power, add some pva glue to the mix.

The above amounts make up enough paste for four kids to paste and paste until the collage materials run out. Add a few drops of tea tree oil and left overs will keep in the fridge for ages.

This paste also makes excellent finger paint. Increase the quantities to 1 cup of corn flour and 3 cups of water and add food colouring or paint after you have cooked the paste.

We are enjoying lots of gluey activities around here at the moment. I will posting some more collage ideas and activities soon, but check out some of the gluey activities we’ve done in the past…

From left to right : Autumn Leaf Collage, Simple Paper Mosaics, Paper Covered Lanterns, Personal Letterboxes.

Linking up with the Play Academy at NurtureStore this week.

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Easy Art for Kids – Corn Flour Paste Recipe is a post from: picklebums.com

I saw this idea to make liquid water colour paints at Artopotamus and pinned it to save for ‘one day’. Then ‘one day’ arrived as I cleaned out the art cupboard and was about to throw out all the markers that no longer worked and I suddenly remembered!

I only had a couple of markers in each colour so I wasn’t sure how successful it would be, but I set up a few containers of water and left the markers to soak for a week or so.

With one home from school sick today, but not too sick to be ‘bored’, I got down the container of markers and put a little of each colour into a container, grabbed some cotton buds and paper and sat down to experiment and create with my kids.

The colours were not quite as bright as I was hoping, but considering we only used one or two markers per colour it turned out great.

After a bit of fun with the paints Izzy wondered if the paints would work with candles or crayons as ‘magic painting‘ so we had a go and discovered they did. The marker paints are very similar to food dye but they cleaned up much easier and didn’t stain our fingers as badly.

So don’t throw out your old dried up markers… they still have a lot of creating left in them!

Linking up with It’s Play Time at  Let the Children Play and The Play Academy with NurtureStore.

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Easy Art For Kids – Marker Paints is a post from: picklebums.com

Hardly a week goes by without play dough making an appearance at our house. Morgan just loves play dough and while the girls may groan and roll their eyes when I get it out, they almost always end up playing with it for hours as well!

Yesterday we decided on dinosaurs to go with the play dough. Dinosaurs and ‘sticks and other good stuff’ – which translates to a few slices of silver birch and some of our stick blocks. Simple, easy but lots of fun!

While the kids are busy using their imaginations and creating ‘dino world’ together they are, of course, working on social skills, sharing, negotiating and using their language skills but that’s not all. Rolling, pinching and manipulating the dough is working the small muscles in their hands and forearms, developing and practising pre-writing movements and skills. They are using problems solving skills to work out how big a piece of play dough is needed to make the sticks stand up right and how heavy the piece at the top of the ‘tree’ can be before it falls. They are experimenting with shape, weight, volume and countless other maths concepts.

A humble blob of play dough offers so many opportunities for play and learning. When was the last time you got out some play dough? It’s kind of fun for adults too!

Joining in It’s Play Time with Quirky Momma this week :)

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Dino Play Dough is a post from: picklebums.com

School holidays are in full swing here at The Pickle Farm and it only took two days before they asked to ‘do something cool with the paints!’ Luckily I had just bought two big rolls of paper from Ikea and had a few fun painting ideas tucked away in the back of my mind especially for the holidays. This activity is an old one but a good one, a little messy, but lots of fun and the results are fabulous regardless of how old you are, or how much skill you have!

Squish Painting

What You Need:

What To Do:

Start by folding your piece of paper in half then opening it up again. This helps identify the centre of the paper and makes it easier to squish later on. Then drop blobs of painting somewhere around the middle of your paper. If you put paint to close to the edges it’ll get messy later, so try and stick roughly to the middle.

When you have as much paint as you want, carefully fold your paper in half again and begin squishing! Press and push the paint around between the folded halves of paper, spreading out the paint as much as you can.

When you are done squishing carefully open up the paper and check out your squish paint creation!

This easy art activity is lots of fun, even I made a few. We painted and squished and created till our whole living room was full of wet paintings! Now that they are dry we have some ideas for how to turn them into other cool creations, so stay tuned!

Linking up with the NurtureStore’s Play Academy and It’s Play Time with The Imagination Tree.

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Easy Art for Kids – Squish Painting. is a post from: picklebums.com

Sensory play doesn’t have to be a hugely messy activity, even if you set it up inside!

Today we set up a little tub of bubbles, just for one, or maybe two!

We started with a small tub and some small measuring cups, scoops and spoons that come with all the kids medication. We set it up on a table covered with a towel and made sure we had a cloth near by for wiping hands and spills.

Then I added a small amount of water, just enough to barely cover the bottom of the tub. I squirted in quite a bit of detergent and threw in two bits of sponge. I told my big boy to squeeze the sponges and watch what happened.

He was delighted to see white foamy bubbles explode between his fingers! He squeezed and smooshed, and squashed the sponges until the whole tub was full of white foam.

We had a lovely time scooping and pouring and mixing the foam and because there was hardly any actual water involved there was no spills and not even much damp clothing.

Joining in with It’s Play Time at The Imagination Tree this week.

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Sensory Play – A Tub of Bubbles is a post from: picklebums.com