Your Very Own Train and More Stuff To Do With Pebbles Bought Home From The Beach

Pebble Painting

You Will Need:

• Some largish stones
• Paint, on a tray or plate
• Paintbrushes

How to do it:

• Go for a walk in the woods or search your garden for some reasonably large pebbles, sit outside with some paints and some paintbrushes and start decorating. 
• Try making different patterns on the pebbles, or paint each one different colours and moving them around to make pictures.

Train

You Will Need:

• Empty cardboard or plastic boxes, at least one big enough for your child to sit in.
• Some toys
• Pens or paints
• Paper and glue or sticky tape
• Smaller cardboard or plastic boxes from the recyling
• String
• Scissors

How to do it:

• Line up the boxes in a line, make one the engine and the other the carriages, sit inside and go for a ride!
• Plastic boxes are good for pushing around the floor, use toys for passengers and make them paper tickets.
• You can use the pens, paper and glue to decorate your train, adding wheels, smoke stacks and windows, or string to attach the carriages to each other. 30g cereal boxes and great for making mini-trains.

Host Your Own Mini-Olympic Pentathalon and Slightly Creepy Family Self-Portraits

Mini-Olympic Pentathalon (Inspired by Change4Life)

You will need: 

• Some excitable children/grown-ups 
• A wall 
• Some chalk 
• A bean bag 
• A hula hoop 
• A Bucket 
• Play Equipment 
• A soft ball 
• A plastic bottle
• A small prize (eg, choice of tonight’s telly) 
• A pencil and paper 
• A watch

How To Set It Up:

High Jump: Stand next to a wall, get each child to jump as high as they can and touch their hand against the wall, put a chalk mark where their hand touched. Highest chalk mark wins.

Shot Put Darts: Put the hula hoop flat on the ground and the bucket inside. Mark a point a child sized throwing distance away as the throwing line with chalk on the ground or a jumper. Give each child the bean bag in turn and give them 3 tries to throw the beanbag into the hula hoop for 1 point or the bucket for 5 points. Highest points wins.

Hula Hoop: Time each child spinning the hula hoop around their waist, time from the moment they let go to the moment it hits the floor. Longest time spinning is the winner.

Obstacle Course: Design a course around your park or garden, eg race from the bench to the climbing frame. Touch the top bar on the frame, climb down and race to the swings, two big swings on the swing, run twice around the tree then once down the slide before trying to make it back to the bench first to be the winner.

Relay Race: Grab an empty plastic bottle and use it is a baton. Split into two teams and each team into two. Stand one half of each team at either end of a small race area. Eg Team A, members 1 + 3 stand by the tree, Team A, members 2 + 4 stand by the bench. Give number 1 the plastic bottle, they have to run to member 2 pass them the bottle and then go to the back of the line. member 2 runs to member 3 and so on. First team to have the bottle back in team member 1's hands is the winner.

Family Self-Portaits

You will need: 

• A small mirror (shaving mirror works well) 
• Small pieces of paper + a big piece of paper 
• Colouring pencils or pens 
• Scissors 
• Glue sticks 
• Photographs of any family members not present

How To Do It:

• Sit with your paper, pens, mirror and photographs, on each piece of paper draw a different piece of each persons face, eg Mummy’s hair, Uncle Bob’s moustache, Jeff’s left ear – make sure you have drawn hair, 2 eyes, 2 eyebrows, nose, 2 ears, mouth, 2 cheeks, 1 chin.
• Cut each part out and stick them onto the big piece of paper into the shape of one big face.

How to Geocache and What To Do With All The Twigs and Pebbles The Kids Came Home With

Geocaching

Geocaching is a great way to liven up a healthy walk, just go to geocaching.com and enter your postcode to find the location of hidden treasures world-wide. The idea is simple, small boxes of kid sized treats are hidden in hedgerows and trees all over the country, find one and you can write your name in the log-book inside, and log it on the geocache website. You won't need a phone and app to do it, just sign up to the website (for free) and you will be able to see the location of the cache as a co-ordinate.

Copy this co-ordinate into google maps (or your map provider of choice), who will find it for you. You can then ask google for directions to the cache from your house, or a local car park or bus stop. Using your local knowledge and the closest zoom on the area will give you a better idea if there are footpaths you can take instead of following the road. Write the instructions down or draw a map for your kids to follow.

Do watch the introductory videos on the website, they'll give you an idea of how large a box of treasures you are looking for and the best way to find them.

At the cache you'll usually find a small log book to write down your visit in, a pen and possibly some small pieces of treasure (along the sparkly hairband or shaped eraser lines), take something similar with you so if your kids want to take something that's in there you can replace in for the next person.

You will need:

• Wellies and waterproofs or sunhats and cream
• A map
• A pen
• Some treasure.

 Take it further:

• If you do have a swish phone the app is useful and can find caches nearby via GPS.
• Send older kids out to find a cache on their own.
• Drive or take the bus to a cache further away.
• Make and hide your own cache
• Take a picnic and take yourselves on a detour to a picnic area or park on the way.

And what to do with the delightful collection of gravel and dandelions the kids have come home with afterwards? Try nature printing.

You will need:

• Leaves, pebbles, pine cones, flowers, feathers or anything else interesting you've found on walks out and about.
• Paint on a large plate
• Paper

How to do it:

• Give each child a piece of paper and put the paint and their natural finds in reach
• Let them at it. Plants and pebbles can be used as paintbrushes or to print, a small amount of paint of the underside of a leaf pressed against the paper will leave a copy of the veins/skeleton of the leaf behind.

Why You Should Go To The Library and How To Make Rain A Bit More Exciting

Libraries

Last week saw the opening of Story Lab this year's Summer Reading challenge! Encourage your kids to read 6 new books over the summer and they could win prizes! Younger children can earn certificates too with the Bookstart Bear Club.

Libraries are brilliant - they're free, warm, dry and keep rotating their stock regularly. The staff are keen to help and if you're utterly forgetful like me ask about fines - many authorities don't charge for overdue returns on children's books anymore.

Have a look at the noticeboards too, library story time sessions often still run over summer and sometimes they have extra weekday activities too, ours offers a range of afternoon craft sessions either for free or a small £1 charge.

Libraries have internet access, sometimes free, particularly for children. As well as: computer skills courses for adults; puzzle, magazine and book swapping stations; daily newspapers; child friendly reference books for when you want something a little more succinct than wikipedia; access to information about local services and plans; dvd rental; large print and audiobooks; board books for babies; colouring to keeping small children entertained while you browse and automated machines so your child can check books in and out themselves.

Plus hundreds of new stories for both the kids and you to get stuck into.

Make a Rain Catcher

You will need:

• A plastic bottle
• A stick or wooden spoon
• Scissors
• Sticky tape
• Pens and a permanent marker
• String, wool or fabric strips
• A small spade
• Ruler 
• Notebook and Pen

How to make it:

• Cut the bottom off your plastic bottle and throw it away, you want the top section with the lid screwed on tightly.Where you have cut through the plastic the edge may be jaggered and sharp - try covering it over with sticky tape.
• Decorate the bottle with the pens and the top of your stick with knots of colourful wool or fabric.
• Use the ruler to make marks every 1cm along the length of the stick.
• Dig a small hole in the garden and put your plastic bottle inside, lid down.
• Wait for it to rain. Once water has collected inside you can put your stick inside and count how many marks the water has covered to see how much it has rained.

Take it further:

• Can you collect more rain in different parts of the garden, or in different shaped containers?
• Where do you see animals in your garden (slugs, snails, frogs, foxes, cats) and is more rain collected where they like to be or less?  
• Use the internet to compare rainfall in your garden with average amounts for the area or country.
• Decorate the wooden spoon water-measurer as a person.

If It's Different, It's A Trip and A Plastic Bottle Based Ode To The 80s

Get There Differently And Call It A Trip

If you normally get the train, try the bus; if you walk, scooter/cycle; if you always take the bridge, try the boat.

View from the Bristol cross-habour ferry

Not Quite A Lava Lamp - But It Is An Awesome Glitter Shaker

You will need:

• A small plastic bottle with lid
• Glitter/sequins
• Water
• Sticky tape
• Pens

How to Make It:

• Decorate the outside of the bottle with the pens.
• Put a few scoops of glitter inside the bottle, then top up with water to almost totally full.
• Put the lid back on and tape it down well
• Shake it up!

Take it further:

• What else could you put in the bottle?
• Could you change the colour?
• Can you make your own snowglobe?

Love Your Local Park and How To Make Your Own Really Truly Floating Boat

Since the weather is going to be beautiful for most of the UK this week, this week's ideas are all about the outdoors and water.

Local Park

Get reaquainted with your local park. Make the most of the early morning quiet if your children are small and pack up your usual lunch in a coolbag for a picnic.

Boats

You will need:

• a small, light waterproof tub (wash out a margarine tub, yoghurt pot of fruit tray with the holes covered)
• a small stick
• blu tac
• piece of paper of fabric
• scissors
• sticky tape
• pens or pencils.

Extras:

• string
• fine wire
• an electric fan
• toys
• small pebbles
• hosepipe
• plastic sheet
• stream with a bridge and ford

How to make it:

• Make sure the tub is waterproof by covering any holes with sticky tape.
• Cut a sail out of paper of fabric and stick it to the stick with sticky tape.
• Decorate the tub and sail with the colouring pens.
• Put a blob of blu tac in the centre of the tub and push the base of your stick-sail into it.

Make it more fun:

• Can you make your sail adjustable and your boat really sail?
• Are your boats strong enough to carry cargo? How much?
• Make more boats and race them - either drop your boats into a stream from a bridge and race them downstream to a ford, you should be able to collect the boats at the ford without entering the water but be prepared for lost boats! (WARNING: Please be sensible playing near water, even small streams can be deceptively fast flowing and riverbanks banks steep and slippy - never allow children to play in or near streams unless you are sure that it is safe.)
• Or make your own stream, put the plastic sheeting down in your garden, position your hose at the highest point and turn it on so that the water flows down the plastic sheet. You can use this top position to set the boats off from, and the end of the plastic as the finish line. (WARNING: the plastic will be very slippery!)