The Potting Shed Playdough

My gardening bug has extended into playdough play. Behold, the worst playdough I have ever made. It was supposed to be 'soil' playdough, but I couldn't for the life of me make brown. I ended up with a khaki green colour and because of all the food colouring I added to try and make brown it was too watery so I had to add extra flour but then it was too crumbly. Not that the girls complained!

To the 'soil' playdough play I added some clean plant pots, lollipop sticks, glass beads, pea seeds and a pen. Poppet set about filling up the pots and putting the 'seeds' in and even labelling the sticks - she was giving me the finished pots and telling me who they were for - one was for daddy, one for her little sister and the others were for little friends she has made at playgroup. 

They've been playing with it for a few weeks now. It's dried out a bit and has quite a lot of peas and pen ink in it. Little was a bit too fond of putting the glass beads into her mouth so these have been taken away now to remove the temptation.

For a change I gave her the playdough with magnetic numbers and she really enjoyed pressing all of the numbers into the playdough and then carefully removing them all again and putting them back into the tub. Very methodical. When she was done she went into the cupboard to retrieve the much-loved glass beads and a cocktail umbrella and stuck them in too. She was concentrating so hard with her tongue poking out! Unfortunately after a while the glass beads went into the mouth again and had to be removed from the play. I'm amazed at how much use this terrible coloured and textured playdough has gotten! Hopefully the next batch will be a lot nicer.

Poppet: 3yrs

Little: 20 mos

Cress Heads

My sister recently sent me a picture of some cress heads she found online so we rose to the challenge and attempted some ourselves;

I was a bit confused with the concept initially but my sister was very understanding and helpfully pointed me in the right direction.

So with our eggs hard boiled and the insides carefully scooped out (and used to make sandwiches - we'll call those the control group sandwiches), we were ready to start work on our cress heads. First Poppet very gently stuffed the empty eggshells with cotton wool. She was very gentle indeed. Then she had to make their faces. The first egg got goggly eyes but the other two she only wanted to use pen on. She carefully drew on eyes, a nose, a mouth, eyebrows and ears. She also requested "sparkly bits" (sequins) so one cress head got some extra embellishment.

Now her favourite part - water spraying. She sprayed the cotton wool to make it damp and sprinkled cress seeds on to it.

Then we left them on a sunny windowsill and she sprayed water on them everyday, waiting for 'their hair' to grow.

Poppet was very excited to see the shoots start to appear!

She obviously took the hair thing to heart as we found the cress like this one day ..................

After a week it was time to give them a haircut. By this point the goggly eyes had fallen off and Poppet's excuberant spraying had washed off their pen faces so they were just egg shells with cress growing in them. Next time we will use permanent markers!

Poppet was in charge of the cress cutting, Little was a surprisingly accomplished egg peeler.

Our egg and cress sandwiches went down a treat! Poppet polished off her whole plate, which was amazing considering she just nibbled at the 'control group' cressless sandwiches the week before. It goes to show you that when little ones have helped make something they are far more likely to eat it. Little however was not a fan of the cress. 

Poppet: 3 years 

Little: 1 year

Decorating a Card Egg for Easter

We had lots of fun one afternoon making some simple Easter Eggs from card.

I made one too which I don't do normally, but I will definitely be taking a more active role in crafting from now on as we both enjoyed it more when I was taking part rather than just watching from the sidelines. It gave us an opportunity to talk about what we were doing, our design ideas and colours we chose and felt more like a natural conversation rather than me quizzing her while she made something. 

Initially I just intended for Poppet to decorate an egg so I drew a big egg shape on some card and cut it out for her, but, not to be outdone, Poppet drew her own egg on a sheet of card and proceeded to cut it out. She did really well on the cutting and managed to do a very raggedy line around a quarter of the way round before asking me to finish it for her. So, we ended up with two eggs, one each, and we started to decorate them together.

Poppet looking very pleased with her self-drawn egg

I put out a jar of glue, some lengths of ribbons, some sequins and some crayons to decorate them with.

Poppet was drawn to the pink ribbons and stuck those onto her egg; she watched me arrange my ribbons in stripes so copied me and did the same. We added some sparkly sequins and finally some more stripes with the crayons until we had two beautiful Easter eggs. 

I enjoyed the activity far more when I was crafting alongside Poppet rather than just supervising. I don't know why I didn't think to do it before. And she definitely found it a lot more fun.

When Little woke from her nap Poppet insisted she have an egg as well so I gave her a little cardboard egg shape with some foam Easter stickers and some crayons. Little, still dazed and confused from her nap and clutching her penguin was in need of some assistance so Poppet helpfully peeled all her stickers for her and helped to stick them down. Little added some crayon scribbles helped once again by Poppet and soon her masterpiece was finished.

Poppet really liked her egg and proudly showed it to daddy when he got home. The next day she even drew a picture of it so it really stuck in her mind!

Poppet: 3yrs 3mos

Little: 18 mos