Birdseed & Diggers

I picked up a bag of bird seed from Poundland with the intention of one day making these yoghurt-pot bird cakes but in the meantime I thought it might make a good sensory play ingredient. I put it out with Poppet's digger and truck outdoors on the Tuff Spot during a lull in the sunshine.

We borrowed a digger book from the library recently so Poppet is quite well versed in digger vocabulary - she can point out the 'boom' and the 'bucket' and loves comparing the digger's 'elbow' to her own. She also does cute engine noises when she drives it around.

She enjoyed filling up the digger with seed then emptying it into the truck to drive away somewhere, when I quizzed her on where it was going it was as ever "to buy pizza". Everyone is always buying pizza. Sometimes "man" was "going to shops" and sometimes man was "sleeping" on top of the seed.

This was a lovely little quiet activity that kept her engrossed for a wee while. It was also really good for those important fine motor skills as she tried to pick out only the black sunflower seeds.

She took the truck to make a delivery of seed to her own little garden too. I hope to pick up some more construction vehicles (these ones were just from the charity shop so I am keeping my eye out!) and do this more using different materials as she really enjoyed it.

Poppet: 2yrs 6 mos

Little: 9 mos

Tea Party in a Tent

I've been taking a walk down memory lane recently, buying Poppet books that I remember reading as a child. It's funny the ones that you remember. There was one in particular I really wanted to find, all I had to go on was a memory of a little girl having a tea party in a bush at the bottom of the garden. The image had stayed with me all these years, and finally after quite a bit of google searching I found the book.

It was called Sally's Secret, and the illustrations are beautiful. It's about a little girl who makes houses in all sorts of places, and one day makes a house in the middle of a bush and has a tea party in it. Our second-hand copy arrived a few days ago. We've been reading it a couple of times every day and I can still see why I loved it so much when I was little. Poppet has been as enamoured with it as I was/am, and it inspired us to have an old-fashioned style tea party in an old-fashioned style tent.

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I made a simple A-frame tent using bamboo sticks stuck into the ground tied together with twine, and a large sheet secured with clothes pegs. It wasn't the sturdiest tent in the world and was a bit vulnerable to the wind but it managed to stay up for the day.

It looked charming once it was up and was the perfect setting for an old-fashioned style tea party complete with homemade lemonade, china cups and saucers and ham sandwiches, all served on Poppet's tea set ('her best rose-patterned teaset, with all the handles still on it'). Very Famous Five. Poppet also insisted they both wear 'pretty dresses'. Yeah sure the dresses are pretty but they dyed everything in my laundry pink so they are not my favourite just now! Thanks Aunty Anna.

I left the serving of the tea party entirely up to Poppet. She loved being in charge. My tea cup was kept topped up with lemonade at all times but she ate both the jammie dodgers for her lunch which I should have anticipated happening.

It was a beautiful tea party. One day I would love to recreate the actual tea party from the book - 'some plums and tiny biscuits with pink and white icing, and some real milk and lump sugar for the tea set.' But I don't know if that is for my benefit or for the girls!

Also if anyone knows what this book is, please let me know! It had a little girl in it who I think was called Anna who had no friends and wrote letters that she posted.

Poppet: 2yrs 6 mos
Little: 9 mos

Cafe Role Play!

 Poppet had spontaneously been imagining her kitchen as a Cafe for a few days, fruitlessly trying to order 'pizza' from Little, so I decided to set the area up as a mini Cafe. This role play scene has been providing some brilliant opportunities for learning through play in areas like language development and emergent writing skills, but more importantly it has been teaching her manners! When I visit her cafe I get ushered to a seat and then my seat pushed in for me! And there is a lot of "please", "thankyous", "there you go's, "bit hot" and "is that nice?" being scattered about in her speech.

Poppet helped me create some menu's for her little cafe (or tafee as she calls it). I have been trying to provide different opportunities for her emergent writing to flourish, for her to see writing has a purpose and that it conveys a message. I am starting to put together a writing set for her with things like old cheque books that I will blog about soon. So in any role play set ups that we do I will try and incorporate writing in some form. There are lots more ideas for encouraging children to write during play here. I asked her what foods we should include in our menu and her answers of 'pizza', 'milkshake' and 'cheese toasties' make her diet sound a lot worse than it is! She made her own little menu as well, making sure she wrote on each side of the piece of paper. I also made a 'Cafe' sign for the kitchen (Poppet wanted to make one too but Little got a hold of it).

Together we set up her desk like a table, dressing it with a tablecloth, a jam jar of flowers, a little basket of condiments, sugar bowl and milk jug and our menus.

Inside her kitchen playhouse corner I made a little 'till' area, using milk bottle tops with numbers written on them as our currency and her little laptop (a christmas gift I very much regret buying her now, it was a bad choice) as a till. High on my list of toys that I would like for the girls is a proper toy till, it would get so much use. 

The finished scene looked very inviting and I couldn't wait to get playing with it myself!

Poppet started off being the customer, so she watched me curiously as I sat her down at the table and pushed her seat in and gave her a menu. She made sure 'Bobo' also had a seat and a menu to peruse.

After that though her favourite thing was to be waitress, going back and forth from the table to the little kitchen, bringing you things you hadn't ordered, 'tidying up' (she's not a fan of mess) and doing the dishes. Bobo is a regular customer at the cafe and she is always very attentive. This is Bobo and I being treated to an egg dinner. In the background Poppet is putting the toast on.

At some point Poppet came to the conclusion that she needed to be wearing her apron for her cafe duties; this is her doing the dishes and restocking her ingredients cupboard.

It is lovely to be able to play with her in this way as it's the first time we have set up a role play scene. She is desperate for Little to be able to join in but unfortunately Little is more interested in trying to pull the tablecloth off the table and playing with the 'money'. Poppet tries so hard to involve her, asking her to 'make milkshake' and trying to get her to sit in the seat, it will be nice for her when Little is more of a playmate but I don't want to wish their lives away! One thing that didn't get much usage, from Poppet at least, was the money side of the cafe. I think she is too used to real money so the milk bottle lids didn't capture her imagination.

Poppet: 2 yrs 6mos

Little: 9 mos

Flour Play

This was a really simple activity to set up and one that went down really well. 

I put a pile of flour in the middle of the Tuff Spot along with some cars and aeroplanes and by the time I grabbed the camera the girls were already investigating it.

Poppet soon discovered that the wheels made tracks in the flour and she had fun creating roads, then I showed her that you could also trace shapes in the flour with your finger. She loved experimenting with this drawing 'faces' in the flour. Little was just enjoying kicking her feet in the flour and rubbing it in with her hands. Poppet clocked the fun Little was having in her bare feet and really surprised me by deciding to take her socks off too, because Little "got socks off".

Normally, Poppet is reluctant to actually get that messy when engaging in messy play, preferring to use utensils to explore the sensory material on offer, and if she does get anything on her hands or feet is usually pretty quick to ask me to "clean it!". So I don't know if there is something special about the flour that she likes, or if this is a change in her approach to messy play generally. Time will tell!

She really enjoyed the sensation of the flour on her feet and went a little crazy jumping about in it- maybe I have a tap dancer in the making! She has always liked sprinkling it everywhere when we make pastry or anything and it does feel lovely and soft to play with. I'm looking forward to finding more sensory play ingredients that she likes! 

Our Sunshade Den

Although today has been a welcome cooler day, the last couple of days have been scorching hot so we have been camped out in the garden enjoying the rays. We have a parasol and a little tent to help protect the girls from the sun so decided to combine them both with some sheets to create a giant-sunshade-turkish-den-tent type thing. The sheets were just clothes-pegged onto the parasol and then the den kitted out with blankets and pillows.

It was a lot easier to keep the girls confined to the tent when they needed a break from the sun, and we regularly dipped in and out throughout the day. We brought some books with us and it was lovely to escape the sun and sit somewhere cool(er) reading stories together. Poppet displayed some impressive vertical reading skills.

Lots of fun was also had going round and round the pole until it got a bit vigorous and our den was in danger of collapsing.

Poppet was so reluctant to leave the den for her nap time I caved and let her *try* to have her nap outside. Of course this was a complete disaster and I ended up with a teary toddler by teatime. She definitely still needs her naps!

I finally managed to pump up the proper paddling pool too (giving myself blisters in the process, that's love!) and the girls loved splashing about in it, then coming back to our den to dry off and apply more suncream.

Our little shady spot was so handy and so easy and quick to put together, I was pretty proud of myself for having thought of it! I think Little was very appreciative too, even though she kept trying to escape and I had to barricade the doorway with my body.

Notes From A Smaller Island

Grandma and Papa's House

One toddler terrorising a cat,

One teething baby keeping mummy up at night,

Playing 'shops' where everything costs "three pounds fifty",

Welly walks on the beach, collecting shells and stamping in puddles.

Playdates with island friends,

Wide open spaces to crawl around on,

A reunion with old friends of the equine and ovine variety,

Lots of Aunties and Uncles to play with, bake with, hide from, and fall asleep on.

A perfect 'summer' holiday despite the weather!

Poppet: 2yrs 5mos

Little: 9 mos

Green Day (not the band)

Following on from the success of our yellow day I thought a day of green things would be easy but it was a bit of a wash out..........

We started off shopping at the greengrocers and I gave Poppet a free reign of the shopping basket as long as the things she chose were green - she excelled at this task and chose apples, cucumber, mangetout and a green packet of crisps. At home she helped make lunch and was astounded to find the big green watermelon we had was red inside. 

After lunch I set up a small world underwater play scene in a plastic under-bed storage box using green glass beads, green milk carton lids, shells and a couple of boats. To this I added green ice-cubes in the shape of fish. Unfortunately I completely over-estimated how long these would take to melt and they were gone in a couple of minutes before I had a chance to take a photo. Poppet spent the rest of the afternoon asking "where fish gone?" over and over and over. So at least she learnt an important lesson in the properties of ice and it's tendency to melt.

Once she got over the sudden unexplainable disappearance of the fish she spent a while filling the boat up with beads (she loves these glass beads) and emptying it and filling it again. This was the first time she had played with a play scene like this and it really captured her attention.

To round our green day off, we sat down to watch Shrek (what?, that totally counts as a green activity).

Poppet: 2yrs 5mos

Little: 9mos