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.

More Exciting Things To Do With Toy Cars and A Bit Of Baking Too

Tyre Painting

What You Need:

• Toys cars, trucks or trains, 
• pieces of paper, 
• washable paint, 
• lots of plastic sheeting, 
• big trays/plates

How To Do It: 

• Put the paint on the plates or trays thinly spread around.
• Load up the cars by pushing the cars through the paint so their tyres get covered in paint, then drive them across the paper.
• If you’re feeling adventurous, try it in the garden with push along toys, scooters/bikes, make a big puddle of coloured water with food colouring (or paint if you have a lot of paper or plastic to cover the garden with) and peddle through the puddle on the bikes, they can ride around the garden leaving coloured trails behind.

Cooking Scones

Try this recipe at BBC Good Food for perfect scones.

Why not try different flavours? Add an ounce or two (50-100g) of cheese, marshmallows, raisins, olives, cherries or anything else that strikes your child's fancy! (Don't forget to take out the sugar if you are making savoury scones)

Change4life - Mini Olympics

A little bit of extra summer fun arrived on our doorstep this morning - we filled in the form at Change4Life for our family with details of the kind of activities we do on a regular basis, and have been sent a pack with ideas, tips, an activity chart and stickers - the age appropriate packs have great ideas on how to keep fit without spending money.

We tried out our first one today, just a simple ball game, but my 3yo loved it.

I find it hugely tempting to let kids crash in front of the television when the weather is bad, but getting up and joining in with the kids makes it more fun and gives us all some healthy exercise bonus points. Lots of childrens shows are interactive now. If your kids enjoy Lazy Town they've teamed up with Change4Life too, with a site full of videos for kids to copy - Tree Fu Tom and Waybaloo are also great to get little bottoms to move along too to.

Give it a go!

If You Go Down To The Woods Today, Your Child Can Eat Jelly And Become An Arborist

Teddy Bear’s Picnic

Gather a few favourite teddies in your child’s back pack, a picnic blanket, plastic cups and saucers, a few cucumber sandwiches and some juice then head to the park for a teddy bear’s picnic... or the living room floor if it won’t stop raining!

Tearing up jelly - easier than it looks!

Combine it with a bit of baking by making individual fruity jellies for a picnic pudding:

• Small jelly moulds can be found cheaply in supermarkets and poundshops but if you haven't got any kids plastic cups work really well. 
• Simply make up the jelly - kids can help cutting it into cubes or stirring the hot water until the cubes dissolve. 
• Chop up a few pieves of fruit (not kiwi, papaya or pineapple or the jelly won't set) pop them in the bottom of each jelly mould/cup and then pour the jelly on top. 
• The jelly will take a few hours to set, so best to make it first thing or the night before.

Our super-cheap jelly moulds

 

How Old Are the Trees In Your Park?

You will need:                                                                                                           

• A fabric tape measure (or a paper one from Ikea)
• Some trees
• A notebook and pen

How to work it out:

• Take the tape measure and wrap it around the tree trunk of your chosen tree to measure the circumference.
• Because of the average rate of growth of your average British tree, the tree will be roughly as many years old as it is inches around the middle, or the number of centimetres divided by 2.5.
• Try measuring other trees to compare, put the tape measure at roughly the same height you measured the first tree at.
• Are all the trees in the park a similar age? Were the trees all planted at the same time, or were groups planted at different times?

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.

I Never Knew City Farms Were Cheap! Plus Bubbles Make Everything Better

My 3 year old with the Olympic Torch

Was running so late this morning that I was thinking of throwing the whole Six Weeks plan out - we popped into the supermarket and one of the London 2012 Olympic torch runners was there offering to let shoppers have their photo taken with it! Lovely surprise and an excellent motivation for me to keep the kids out and about. You never know what you'll find.

City Farm

Goat at St Werburgh's City Farm

Have a google for local city farms - you might be surprised to find that your local one is free, asks for donations only, or has a very low entrance fee as well as picnic areas - a more interactive version of the zoo, at a fraction of the price.

Bubbles Make Everything Better (Except Soap In Your Eyes)

You will need:

• Buckets
• Paddling pool
• Water
• Bubble bath
• Paintbrushes
• Bubble mix + blowers

Spice up water play in the garden by adding bubble bath to your paddling pool.

Take it further:

• Try getting some paintbrushes and buckets of cold water too, instant out door paint to colour in the patio with.
• Can you make your own bubble blowers? Do different shapes make different bubbles?

When It's Sunny All You Need Is The Beach And A Bucket (Spade Optional)

Beach

Even from Coton In The Elms in Derbyshire, the furthest point in the UK from the coast, sea water is only 70 miles away. Where there is sea there is beaches, sand, ice cream and kiddy heaven. There are several inland beaches in the UK too, so you might well be closer to a minimum effort day's entertainment than you think.

As it happened, I took the kids to Weston-Super-Mare and there was a beach-view airshow today. Just as the kids were starting to get a little restless a Spitfire and a Mustang shot across the sea in front of the beach! They were delighted.

Sandcastles

You will need:

• Sand!
• Water
• A tub of some kind
• A scoop of some kind
• Shells and pebbles

Make it last longer:

• Add a moat, can you make it stay full of water?
• Make sand sculptures of each other.
• How much water makes perfect sand castle sand?

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!)