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.

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.