Rainy Day Mum

Baby Play – Spaghetti Sensory

Cerys @ Rainy Day Mum — Fri, 18 May 2012 06:00:00 +0000

I have seen Spaghetti play all over the internet and pinterest – but apart from when T has dinner I haven’t played with it with her. So I took the challenge and cooked up the spaghetti, because I wanted it to be a visual as well as touch so I used some food colouring.

Cooked Spaghetti has a unique feel to it – when J saw what T was playing with he announced it was slimy worms so I cooked up some Spaghetti and the split the quantity in half and dyed half with blue food colouring and a little oil and the other half with green food colouring and a little oil (the reason I have done this is for a few more activities that I have planned that those colours would form a great combination for). Putting them into a Tupperware container I put this on a tray and on the floor in front of T.

T exploring the spaghetti

The first thing that T did was get all of the spaghetti out of the box and cover her legs in it (yes she’s a strange baby) she then kept lifting it up and letting it run through her hands.

T exploring physics!

She played for ages with the spaghetti (it wasn’t allowed to go back in the box though this caused a mini meltdown!) and while she was there she discovered some physics, centrifugal force as she spun it around in front of her face – although she didn’t know that she was doing it of course it was just fun to get it to spin.

Being T though the sensory exploration wasn’t limited to her hands and eyes – she had to taste it. This is the great thing of the spaghetti as a sensory play it’s edible.

Small Hands Creating Hope – Butterflies

Cerys @ Rainy Day Mum — Thu, 17 May 2012 06:00:00 +0000

One of the things that I never realised when I started blogging last June was the amazing support network behind the scenes of the blogs and the virtual friendships and collaborations that you can make. When MaryAnne from Mama Smiles told us about her wish to help raise funds for cancer research in celebration of her 32 years since being diagnosed with cancer as a child it was something that I wanted to be involved in.

With an amazing selection of bloggers from around the world our children have been creating projects to help raise funds for the American Cancer Society (ACS) by putting the projects together in a book many with tutorials which with a donation is available for download and also to buy as a hard copy.

I really wanted us to be involved – J and T will never know two of their great grandparents due to cancer. My Nana and my grandad both died from cancer when I was in my teens. I remember learning about it as a child as my Nana had had skin cancer removed from above her lip and me asking why that was. For a long while as a child I just thought it was a disease of the old.

More recently it has really hit home how cancer is indiscriminate when a friend that I had made whilst pregnant with J on a parenting forum posted about her little girl Amber being diagnosed with a brain tumor and undergoing chemotherapy. Because of this it made me realise how important it is to raise money for research and hopefully one day no one will ever be touched by cancer.

As I have included a full tutorial in the book I am not going to replicate it here. I have included some pictures of J, his friend A producing our Butterflies of hope.

The ACS appreciates any donation but if you would like to receive the e-book we are asking for a minimum donation of $15 towards ACS after which point you will receive an e-mail telling you how to go about getting the e-book and a link to where you can buy the hardback book from.

If you donate but do not receive this email for any reason, or if they have trouble with the download, they can email smallhandsproject at gmail dot com.

Each of the bloggers will be featuring their involvement in the project over the next month and bit you can find out when each blog will showcase their work and I will be back featuring T’s contribution to the book in June.

14 May Mama Smiles
15 May Artsy Craftsy Mom and Rainbows Within Reach
16 May B. Inspired, Mama!
17 May Rainy Day Mum and Imagination Soup
18 May Inspiration Laboratories
19 May Experimenting Mom
20 May Outlaw Mom
21 May NurtureStore
22 May Living Montessori Now
23 May Mess for Less
24 May Having Fun at Home and CraftoArt
25 May Mama Mia’s Heart2Heart
26 May Angelique Felix and Sense of Wonder
27 May Sun Hats & Wellie Boots
28 May Duck Duck Octopus
29 May Smiling like Sunshine
30 May Mommy with Selective Memory
31 May One Perfect Day
1 June The Educators’ Spin On It
2 June Kids Stuff World
3 June Rainy Day Mum
4 June Teach Preschool
5 June Dirt and Boogers
6 June Creative Connections for Kids and The Golden Gleam
7 June Montessori Tidbits
8 June Mom to 2 Posh Lil Divas
9 June The Iowa Farmer’s Wife
10 June Scribble Doodle and Draw
11 June Learn with Play
12 June Kitchen Counter Chronicles
13 June CRAYON Freckles
14 June Glittering Muffins
15 June Wise Owl Factory
16 June Crafty Maa
18 June Lessons Learnt Journal
20 June Growing a Jeweled Rose
21 June Growing Play
23 June JDaniel4?s Mom

See you again on the 3rd of June and I hope you enjoy the book after making a donation to the ACS. I will be back with an update of our fundraising in the future.

Toddler Art Exploration – Mondrian

Cerys @ Rainy Day Mum — Wed, 16 May 2012 19:23:50 +0000

I have been very excited to hear about this series from Red Ted Art. J loves art and craft and likes looking at the painting and pictures that we have around the house but we haven’t really spoken about art in any detail so this was a perfect opportunity to focus on his love of art and crafts and his interest in looking at pictures. We have chosen Mondrian as our starting point – J is very into shapes and colours and instead of focusing on techniques I was able to use Mondrian’s cubism style to our advantage.

Looking and talking about Mondrian

I don’t have any art books, and our library doesn’t appear to have any suitable for a toddler so instead I searched the Internet for images that we could look at and talk about, I did a bit of research about where he lived and worked as well. The use of red, blue and yellow in the images was a great way to introduce primary colours to J and we had some great fun doing some colour mixing to see what other colours could be made from those colours and proving that we couldn’t make them from any other colours as well (I will put a post up about our colour mixing within the next few weeks as we are still exploring it in different ways).

We also looked at the shapes that were in Mondrian paintings – the fact that we had rectangles and squares that we could see some BIG and others LITTLE (we’re very into opposites at the moment). Looking at one of the sheets that I had printed out we identified squares, little rectangles and big rectangles on the painting as well as the colours involved. It was interesting to see that he decided that little rectangles were those that had short top edge and big ones had a big top edge it didn’t matter how long they were or the area that they covered.

At school I did some work on Mondrian in Technology lessons and we made wooden blocks with perspex outlines and wood dyes as one of the projects and although I thought it would be great to use paint as Mondrian did I wanted to first create something similar that J could do on his own and form a focus for more Art exploration of Mondrian. So looking at some of our recent art works stained glass window art was something that J had really enjoyed and it would be a great way to produce some Mondrian inspired art that he could do.

What you need for creating a Mondrian inspired stained glass window

Sticky Back Plastic (Contact Paper)
Tissue paper in red, white, blue and yellow
Black construction paper or card (we used card as it produces a stronger colour)
Sticky Tape

How we made our Mondrian inspired stained glass window

Prior to getting J down to creating the art I planned ahead and cut up tissue paper into small squares and some strips of black card to create the grid with. I also stuck down a piece of sticky back plastic with sticky tape onto the table in front of his seat. I find it’s easier to plan ahead with J when it comes to doing projects that need some concentration and discussion as we create.

With the computer in front of us we looked at one of Mondrian’s paintings and talked about the black lines on them. J then started to form a grid with the black card laying long pieces first and then adding short pieces at different points. He would hand me a strip and ask me to make it small to go across the gap and then place it on. He kept saying about making it like Ondran’s painting!

As J added the tissue paper to each of the rectangles we talked about the colours and how on the computer the colours weren’t the same in two rectangles next to each other. He loves colouring in pictures at the moment so explaining that we were colouring in the squares with tissue paper instead of crayons was a great way to get him to understand what we were doing and how to go about it.

When he had “finished” we stuck another piece of sticky back plastic on top of the picture and smoothed it out. Then using sticky tape I stuck it on our dinning room window (our dinning room is our craft area) as this is where we do a lot of craft projects inside and the window has a great view to the garden as well.

Mary had a Little Lamb craft

Cerys @ Rainy Day Mum — Wed, 16 May 2012 06:00:00 +0000

With our farm themed books over the last couple of weeks and farm visits J is very into farm animals. We have also been singing some Animal rhymes to go along with these and the one that seems to have caught his imagination is “Mary had a little Lamb”. He will sing along with me, so when cousin Z visited I got out our craft supplies (and my beauty supplies) and we got making some little lambs.

What you need to create our Little Lamb

Some cardboard (our was from a box that was going to be recycled)
PVA (white) glue
Black paper
Googley Eyes
Cotton wool

How you make the Little Lamb

Z gluing his lamb cloud cutout

I cut out some basic “cloud” shapes – it was quick and really not precise, well sheep aren’t very neat really either. I also cut out some small rectangles for the legs and a sheep head shape from black paper to add to the decorated clouds to turn them into sheep.

J using our new glue sticks

One of the things that I have recently purchased is some proper glue sticks – as you will have seen in most of our activities when we glue we have been using a paint brush but as J will hopefully be going to a pre-school in September I wanted to get him use to using glue sticks as well as they are more common for gluing that paint brushes. He loved gluing and liked the way that the glue sticks spread the glue compared to how he was painting it before.

J making our lamb fluffy

To create a fluffy lamb we used cotton wool balls. J had great fun sticking them onto the cutout trying to cover all the available space as did Z adding the balls to his lamb as well.

To finish off the lambs we added a head to each lamb, some googly eyes and some legs and then let them dry.

Tuesday Tots – some playdough fun

Cerys @ Rainy Day Mum — Tue, 15 May 2012 06:00:00 +0000

It’s Tuesday again and that means Tuesday Tots time. This week I’m featuring some play dough fun from last week.

Some great exploration from Learn with play @ Home and their play dough this week.

We love glitter and play dough so this wonderful post from Making boys men is just right for us.

With some original and inventive play dough recipes this post from Familylicious is brilliant.

After spending yesterday cutting up mint and freezing it I wish I had saved some for this fun play dough play from The Fairy and The Frog.

If you have been featured please grab the badge from our sidebar and add to your blog or post to show that you have been featured.

Now for this week linky as normal is for any post about under 5?s – whether it’s a craft, activity, play idea, recipe, proud moment or advice you’re welcome to link up. Growing a Jeweled Rose are co-hosting and we would love for you to link up 1 or many posts this week.

Here are a few guidelines

Please don’t link giveaways.

Once you have linked up, we ask that you visit a couple of the other posts that have linked up and leave a comment – we all love reading comments.

I also ask that you grab the Tuesday Tots badge from the side bar, and either add it to your blog or include it in your post through a text link back to Rainy Day Mum (or Growing a Jeweled Rose if you are linking from there).

If you are featured please grab the “Featured at” badge from the side bar.

Also, just a reminder. Linking up gives Growing A Jeweled Rose and Rainy Day Mum permission to feature and share your post via several social medias, including Pinterest. If being featured, we may also grab a photo from your blog for use in the post but of course will link back to your site.

Cooking with kids – Wheels on the bus sweet and savoury

Cerys @ Rainy Day Mum — Mon, 14 May 2012 06:00:00 +0000

I’m really going to try and make an effort and have a go at cooking with J and possibly T on a weekly basis. This is the food that we cooked as part of the 30 days to hands on play (day 18 of the challenge). They are Wheels on the Bus – we made savoury and sweet versions and they are VERY easy to make.

What you need to make the wheels on the bus

Some ready rolled puff pastry
Tomato Puree
Grated Cheese
Selection of Herbs
Jam or other sweet filling that can be cooked

How you make the wheels on the bus

J sprinkling on herbs onto the wheel base

I used read rolled puff pastry as I don’t have the patience to make my own puff pastry and this is quick and easy for use with a toddler. I cut the roll into half – with one half for the savoury wheels and the other half for the sweet wheels. Into some none breakable balls I put some tomato puree, herbs and grated some cheese (our grater is lethal so I did this for J) then I showed him how to spread the tomato puree onto the pastry using a spoon. He loved spreading and kept telling me he was painting the pastry with tomatoes. He then sprinkled the herbs on top sprinkling them as we had with glitter previously.

J adding cheese to the wheel base

One of the things that I love about this recipe is that it has so much independence to it. J was able to put the cheese onto the pastry wheel base himself and then together we rolled up the wheels. Because I haven’t got any knives suitable for J to use yet I cut up the pastry roll into 4 wheels and put them on a baking sheet with some grease proof paper.

Our savoury wheels waiting to go into the oven

I pre-heated our oven to 180 degrees C (sorry no idea what that is in F or gas mark – this was an on my toes recipe) and put them in for 18 minutes to cook.

J making our sweet wheels on the bus

As Rainy Day Dad doesn’t like cheese I knew we had to make some sweet wheels on the bus as well. For this we used some strawberry jam, J loved mixing it up in his bowl to make it easier to spread and then adding it to the pastry. He was really good as well waited till we had done all of the rolling of the wheels and cutting them into their 4 separate wheels before asking if he could have some jam. I then put these in the oven at the same temperature and for the same amount of time.

Our sweet and savoury wheels on the bus

They say the proof is in the eating – and for the first time ever J wanted to eat what we had made. He happily devoured one of the sweet ones and tried one of the savoury ones as well. T as normal ate all of her Sweet Wheel on the bus and then ate the other half of J’s savoury one that he didn’t finish.