Craft with babyfood jars

Whenever I look at a baby food jar I think 'I could make something out of that'. I think it's the miniature appeal that makes them cute. Check out this collection of ideas for using baby food jars.

Want to teach kids about being thankful, how about this gratitude turkey from Toddler Approved.

When I saw this post by The Imagination Tree about how to make a glass lantern, I knew instantly that we should use one of many baby food jars in our craft cupboard to make a mini version.

Feeling Christmasy, check out these very friendly snow men from Inspired by Family.

Red Ted Art used baby food jars to make some very easy snow globes.

These lanterns also by Inspired by Family would make a great table centre piece.

Or how about some salt art?

Been visited from outer space - Train up a child used baby food jars to make these glow in the dark aliens.

We also love to use jars for sorting and storing.

Do you upcycle jars? What do you do?

Crafting NatWest Pigs

Remember the Natwest piggy banks? Well in order to encourage saving NatWest are relaunching the famous piggy banks. They are running a competition to design a new one. Let your budding artists get creative as they create a new piggy. Check out what we did.

Cutting air dry clay

Cutting ears(from felt)

Sorting pink sparkly bits (you can never have too many pink sparkly bits you realize!)

Painting the clay

Drum roll..... the finished pig.

If you want to take part hop over to natwest.com/pigsbykids to join in. 

The following rules apply to the competition.

• The competition is open to children up to 13 years old.
• The winning design will become the NatWest pig.
• The closing date for entries is 12pm on 11th November.
• Terms and conditions apply- see website for details (natwest.com/pigsbykids)

This is an advertising promotion for NatWest

6 ways to use Dear Zoo to develop speech and language skills

You may remember in the summer we attended the 30th birthday party of the book Dear Zoo.  It's a book I love and use frequently in my job as a speech and language therapist. So I thought I'd share how I use it to develop speech, language and communication skills. If you don't already have a copy of Dear Zoo and want to buy one you can find it on Amazon by clicking on this link Dear Zoo (this is an affiliate link which means I get a small commission if you end up buying the book at no extra cost to you).

1) Reading reading reading...
Loads of research points towards how important reading books is - it's never to early (or too late) to start to share books with your child. You don't need to do anything special, just to read. 

Loads of libraries have free activities for kids (ours even has coffee for the parents too - total bonus!) so you can borrow books and have an afternoons entertainment thrown in (and they don't mind if your child uses the books as a teething toy).

2) Reading the book 'where the child is at'. 
Don't get me wrong, I love the words in their original format (especially as they include a repeated phrase- great for developing language).  However some children benefit from a 'less is more' approach when learning to talk. Cutting extra words helps them focus on learning new vocabulary. When reading I try and match my language level to theirs.

For children who are just starting out with words I tend to use just the animal names as I read... 'elephant...giraffe etc.'

For children at the combining words stage I model at their level, sometimes adding an extra word e.g.

'bye bye elephant...too heavy...what's next?...hello giraffe... too tall... bye giraffe... what's next?...'

3) To develop listening and attention skills.
This game is great for engaging children with shorter attention spans. Give each child a toy animal that features in the book (e.g. one an elephant, one a giraffe etc). They have to listen carefully for their animal and hold it up when they hear it's name being read out.

4) To develop phonological awareness skills.
For older kids I like to develop speech sound awareness (phonological awareness) by playing games with the names of the animals. I have all the animals in a bag or box and they take turns to take one. Depending on what skill we are working on we work out 'How many bits (syllables) has it got' or 'What sound does it start with?' As an extension activity we sometimes see if we can think of anything else that starts with that sound.

4) To develop reasoning skills.
Again for older children I like to ask (after reading the book) 'Which is their favourite animal and why?', 'Do they think it would make a good pet?' I also like to ask 'What was their best present and who sent it?'. As 'wh' questions are abstract they can be harder to learn and can benefit from more practice.

6) To develop categorisation skills.
Having good categorisation skills helps you to remember and retrieve new vocabulary. The animals in Dear Zoo are all Zoo animals (apart from the puppy of course). The book provides a good basis for talking about different types of animals - wild/ pet/farm, animals that live on land/ water, animals that live in hot countries /cold countries. This activity works well if you have two defined areas (e.g. hoops or circles made form wool) and talk through the two groups first  and then give the children turns to select and animal and say where it belongs. For older children you can use a world map and get them to place the animals where they live.

Salt dough advent calender

One of the things I love about the kids getting older is being able to do things with them I enjoyed as a kid (fortunately so far they seem to enjoy them too!) Salt dough featured highly in our childhood so it's not surprising that when thinking about how I could make an advent calender salt dough sprung to mind.

I made the dough with The Fairy (you just add the ingredients then mix).

We then cut out the numbers/ stars, great counting practice.

You need to cook salt dough on a very low temp (gas mark 1/4) - the idea is to dry the shapes out, not bake them. Some people recommend to leave the shapes to air dry for a couple of days - I've never had very much luck with that and always end up finishing them in the oven (perhaps because I always make thick shapes or possibly as I'm not always very patient). Once dry you can then paint.

You maybe wondering why there is a dolls house at the start of this post, well the Fairy is totally in love with her dolls house - assembled and painted for her recent birthday by my lovely Dad (Thanks Dad!) The house inspired the purple and silver colour scheme we used to decorate the finished stars.

So the plan is each night of advent for myself or The Papa to hide a star in the dolls house. In the morning The Fairy can hunt for it and we can add it to our advent string.Where's the star hiding today?

This is a blog hop - check out the other blog hop co hosts to see what they have created.

Rainy Day Mum ~ Mummy Mummy Mum! ~ Life at the Zoo ~ Here Come the Girls

The Fairy and The Frog ~ Jennifer's Little World ~ Playful Learners

Making Boys Men and The Boy and Me

Do you have an Advent post? Link up your ideas below,

Light Play

As I've already posted we don't celebrate halloween but instead we have a 'light party'. One of our favourite light games is playing with glow sticks in a loose parts kind of way (I don't let The Frog play with them yet as I don't like the idea of him chewing them).

We made circles

and triangles

and rainbows 

and flowers

Pumpkin lanterns

I'm rather fond of pumpkins (I think its partly their colour - I love autumnal colours). We don't celebrate halloween as a family, so we don't have a traditional 'jack 'o' lantern . However we often have a light party at our church - an alternative to halloween without all the witches and ghosts, but with lots of fun and games based on light. So I thought, why not have an alternative lantern. Here's this years lantern, partly inspired by this really cool Montessori style pumpkin by Taming the Goblin.

I had originally planned  to do a floral design but my patience (and the size of the pumpkin) meant I went for something more stylized. I used an apple corer to make the big holes and a kebab stick to do the smaller ones. It was great for talking about shapes (circles) with 'The Fairy'.

Cutting (thanks Papa!)

Scooping (perfect job for small hands)

The finished lantern. 'The Frog' was fascinated by the light and kept pointing at it. It would make a great centre piece for a harvest festival or bonfire party. Please remember not to leave any naked flames unattended as they pose a fire risk.

Now we have a cupful of pumpkin seeds to do something with.... what do you do with pumpkin seeds?

Autumn {Fall} Discovery bottle

I adore conkers, I love how they feel and how shiny they are when they first pop out of their case. So when we were in the park the other weekend I picked some up and put them in my pocket. The Fairy loves to play with them too. I do get a bit nervous about The Frog playing with them as they are 'choking size'.

As I was thinking about how he could play with them when I remember his love of discovery bottles- an Autumn (or Fall) bottle seemed a perfect solution. If you've not come across these before they are basically bottles with things in to discover! Older children can observe it and predict, younger ones can use it in a similar way to a rattle (or eat it). You can put anything that takes your fancy in them, the first one I eve made was for the Fairy when she was little (10 months)- its got glitter and coloured water in and still gets used today (and she's 4!). The Frog has one he adores with plastic beads (think he likes to make noise to compete with his big sis' chatting). I seal the top with a hot glue gun just to make sure it isn't going to get opened (I also make sure they are not played with unsupervised just in case they do).

To our base of conkers I added a small leaf, a fir cone and a cork (I know that's not strictly autumnal but it's a good colour and we had it in the kitchen).

As you can see from the photos The Frog loves waving it around. The Fairy likes to borrow it too.