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.

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.

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)

Free Museums: Way More Choice Than You'd Think And How To Really Watch Seeds Grow

Local Museum

Local museums are often free to enter and ask for only a donation, just pay as much as you feel able too. If there isn't one in your area you could try a trip to a larger town or city. Money Saving Expert has a great interactive list here of all the free museum’s and galleries in the UK (scroll down past the map of the UK for drop down area menus). There's a huge variety on offer from pumping stations and Victorian police cells, to modern art and dinosaurs.

Watch Seeds Grow

You will need:

• A clear glass or plastic cup
• A seed (sunflower or beans work really well)
• Thick absorbent paper or blotting paper
• Scissors
• Cotton wool
• Water

How to do it:

• Roll a tube with your paper, cutting it to shape so that it will fit inside the cup from the base to the rim all the way around, put it in place.
• Stuff the inside of the paper tube with loosely packed cotton wool.
• Place your seed in between the paper and the inside of the cup about 2/3rds of the way up, so that you can see it from the outside.
• Pour water into the cotton wool, so that the water level inside the cup is about 1/3^rd of the cup (don’t cover the seed), and all the paper and cotton wool stays damp.
• Put the cup somewhere dark and leave the seed to grow.
• You can check on the seed every few days to see how well it is growing as well as topping up the water. As the buds at the top develop into a small plant with leaves the plant will start to need light and it’s time to move the plant into a flowerpot.

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?

We're Going On A Bug Hunt, Finding Fuel For The Sport Of Kings: Snail Racing

Bug Hunt

Get your wellies on and take your camera out with you to look for insects high and low. Extra points for spotting anything you can’t name straight away. Take a picture, and look it up in a library book on bugs or on UK Safari. Remember we'd love to see any photos you have! 

Is it a Grey Dagger Moth or a Brown-tail? We can't decide.

Email them to lfwstubbs@gmail.com. Great places to look are the underside of leaves and under fallen wood.

Take it further:

• What types of insects have you found? Are any of them rare or only found in your area?
• Collect the pictures or drawings you have made in a book and record the place and time of day you saw them.

How To Put On A Snail Race

Number 4 races to victory.

You will need:

• A plant pot
• Paintbrush
• Bright coloured non-toxic paint (Our DK kids science guide recommends enamel paint, but we're using washable poster paint)
• Flowerpot

How to set it up:

• Carefully collect snails from around the garden or local area – they can easily be found in damp places after rain and first thing in the morning. Pick them up gently by the shell.
• Paint numbers or names on the shells, be careful not to get any paint on the body of the snail and to hold the snail carefully.
• Stand the flowerpot up and put the snails in the bottom.
• Wait to see which snail makes it first over the edge of the flowerpot!

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?

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?

Some Days You Have To Wander and My Favourite Bit Of Science Ever

The Best Way To Find Something Exciting Is To Explore

Take a bus to the next district, town or village and ask at the Library or Tourist Information office for a local map, go somewhere you've never been before - a different park, library, garden, museum or family pub that you didn't know was there. Let your kids be your guide, buying tickets and reading the map.

Best Science Ever: Colour Changing Plants

You will need:

• A white or pale coloured flower with a reasonably long and thick stem - a carnation works well.
• A sharp knife
• 2 hi-ball glasses, or other tall thin containers
• Water
• Food colouring

How to do it:

• If your flower in shop bought, cut an inch or two off the bottom of the stem before you start.
• Fill both glasses 2/3rds full with water, then add a few drops of food colouring to one glass. Put them next to each other in a sunny spot, as close together as you can.
• Then cut the flower's stem in half lengthways from the bottom to about 2/3rds up the plant.
• Put the flower into the 2 glasses of water, one half of the stem in each.
• Leave for about 2 hours, then see what's happened.

Take it further:

• What happens if you add food colouring to the other glass?
• Can you use several glasses and flowers to make different colour combinations?
• Do some types of flower work better than others?
• Does anything else change how quickly it works?

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!)

Welcome to Six Weeks of Summer!

Nervous about six weeks of summer with no playgroups, rowdy toddlers and not much money for days out?

Introducing Six Weeks Of Summer! Two new ideas every weekday to stir up inspiration and fend off boredom based wall art (and emergency gin at 6am).

Activities planned around pre-schoolers but can be adjusted to make harder or easier to match different abilities.

We would love to see what you've been doing in the holidays, send photos to lfwstubbs@gmail.com and we'll put them on the blog.

Enjoy your summer!