Making Valentine's Day Cards With Freddy

Today Freddy was off nursery as he has a nasty cough.  Having his company meant that we could do some craft activities together for Valentine's Day. As a family, we enjoy any excuse to have a themed day with food and activities planned around the occasion, and Valentine's Day is no exception.  You don't find me and Ian having a romantic meal for two, instead it's family fun for five!

 I dug out all the crafty bits and bobs that were even vaguely heart shaped and let him go wild with a glue stick and some cardboard.  I love the idea of making homemade cards for special occasions.  Shop bought cards are so expensive and I end up binning them, but homemade ones cost nothing and are kept forever.  They are a wonderful record of your child's artistic development, showcasing their creativity.  I have over 20 year's worth of my children's drawings, paintings and cards packaged up in my garage!! (No wonder I have an issue with clutter!)

Freddy is a very active child who runs around, dances, kicks things, throws things and plays hard.  He also has a fabulous vocabulary and a sharp sense of humour and is amazing with technology.  Although he loves educational games on the computer and can recognise many of his letters and numbers by sight, he is extremely reluctant to pick up a pencil or crayon.  He does not like to draw or colour in and makes no effort towards the early mark making that becomes emergent writing.  In fact he can't even hold a pen. He just doesn't get it!  I don't know if it is because he is a confused left-hander (his dad is a leftie) or if his eyes are the problem or whether there is something else going on...or whether it is just a 'boy thing'.  I'm sure once he is at school he'll get into  the swing of writing and drawing, and if not we will be able to work out what the problem is.  But for now, rather than pressuring him into doing something he really does not want to do, I think that doing craft activities is a good way for him to develop the necessary fine motor skills required.  He enjoys it too, so everyone is happy.

Freddy loved sticking the foam shapes, material hearts, paper hearts  beads, sequins and googly eyes onto his design in a display of carefully considered and precisely positioned randomness!

I loved that he made the top heart into a face.  That is a very Freddy thing to do!  So although he wasn't impressed with the idea of signing his name inside the card, which is for his daddy, he stamped his personality all over it and it will be much treasured!

Shake It Up with Magic Moves

Young children love playing pretend games and I'll often find Freddy pretending he is a dinosaur, a lion or a dog in the throes of some imaginary game he is playing!  They also love to move about: dancing, crawling, wriggling and jumping.  Magic Moves is an electronic light-up wand that combines these two activities to provide a toy that encourages exercise, creativity and listening skills.

With 90 fun creative movements and 26 musical tunes, the Magic Moves wand gets little ones up and moving as they follow the spoken commands and pretend to be an assortment of animals and objects and move around and interact  in special ways.  Being a wand, children can imagine themselves being magically transformed into a hopping frog or a stomping dinosaur as they enjoy this high energy, creatively expressive game.  To add to the magic, the wand has a light up bulb on both ends which play twenty-six different colourful, twinkling light shows.

I have been sent a Magic Moves wand for Freddy to try out.  The wand is easy for a little one to operate with a play button and a repeat button as controls.  Pressing play gives the child one of 90 different commands along with its music and light show.  Pressing repeat allows the child to hear the last command again.  Surprise commands enliven the game as children are told to Freeze, March or Dance along to one of three different style tunes (in Techno, Afro-Pop and Latin Salsa styles).  When the command is heard, children can imagine that they are a bouncing kangaroo or a spinning top and move around the room whilst the music plays.  It is a great way for them to get up and get active, whilst having some fun structure to their play.

Freddy, assisted by 10 year old big sister Kizzy really enjoyed playing with the Magic Moves wand and embarked on a session which entertained them (and me!)  The wand engages them in a play session that uses their imagination, exercises their bodies and encourages creative performance.  The lights, sounds and special commands add a real element of fun to playtime. It enhances listening skills, direction following, develops gross motor skills and also teaches some great vocabulary with verbs such as swooping, stomping and soaring allowing children to explore language and come up with their own ideas for movements. Freddy absolutely loves it.

The Magic Moves is an excellent educational resource for home or at school or nursery for children aged 3-7.  I think it is excellent and am really impressed with how engaged Freddy is when he plays with it.  It is also nice to have older kids and parents joining in, which is something little ones really enjoy.

The Magic Moves electronic wand can be bought from Learning Resources for £17.94 (VAT incl.)

We Made Muddy Puddles!

A Fun Activity for Pre-Schoolers

Freddy loves getting messy in the kitchen!  He also loves eating yummy things.  At his nursery, Freddy had made pirate coins using melted chocolate and was so enthusiastic telling me all about it that we adapted the activity to make our own choccy treats.

So we got busy and made Muddy Puddles!  The mud is made of molten chocolate with dried fruit as the rocks and stones.  This is a super easy activity for pre-schoolers who will be able to decorate the Muddy Puddles all on their own.

You need:

1 bar of milk chocolate
An assortment of dried fruit (we used raisins, sultanas and chopped apricots.)

What you do:

Melt the chocolate in the microwave and pour puddles onto a silicone baking tray or onto greaseproof paper. (This is obviously a job for the grown-ups, but after this little ones can take over!)
Use a spoon to swirl the melted chocolate to the required shapes.
Then decorate with dried fruit. (You could also use cake sprinkles or cereals like Rice Krispies too.)
Pop in the fridge to set, them remove from the silicone to enjoy.

This is such a quick and easy activity to do with your children.  It gives you the opportunity to talk about the science of melting the chocolate, changing its state from solid to liquid when heated.  It's never too young to learn about science!

Freddy loved arranging his dried fruit on top of his Muddy Puddles.  We used a healthy topping to offset the fact that it was on a chocolate base!

Freddy loved eating a Muddy Puddle after his lunch and said it was 'delicious'!  He also had a lot of fun getting busy in the kitchen with me.