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.

Ball Pit-Bingo and An Excellent Excuse To Play In The Mud

Ball Pit-Bingo

You Will Need: 

• A paddling pool full of plastic balls/large box full of shredded paper (or similar) 
• Card, 
• 9 pictures of objects/characters printed from online or cut from magazines for the ball pit bingo balls,
• Pens

 How To Do It:

• Take the 9 pictures for the ball pit and stick them onto card. Cut each one into a similar sized circle, and hide them in the ball pit, these are your bingo balls.
• Make up bingo cards, a 3x3 grid with each square matching a picture you have collected for the ball pit. If you are printing the pictures out, you could make up the grids on the computer as well, using smaller versions of the pictures for the ball pit. 
• If you are cutting out/drawing them try and make the ‘matching’ pictures similar enough to recognise, or you could use letters or numbers. Each grid should have the pictures on in a different pattern.

Eg:
ABC  ECA
DEF   GID
GHI    BHF

• Hand out a bingo card to each player and explain that you will take one bingo ball out of the box at a time. Each player will mark the bingo ball on their card. The first person to have 3 marks in a straight line, in any direction is a winner.
• If you want to re-use the game, laminate the bingo cards and bingo balls and use dry-wipe markers to mark them.

Cave-painting

Use mud and water, crushed up chalk and berries (please check that the berries aren't poisonous before letting your children play with them!) and sticks, draw pictures on your patio or garden walls.

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)

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.

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?

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!)