We Play: Tea Party

Not for the first time, my younger two have spent a lot of time this week taking tea with their soft toys, enjoying the new tea set the 6 year old was given for her birthday.


This post is part of the weekly We Play meme at the wonderful Childhood 101. Check out the main page over there for lots of fantastic play ideas.

We Play: International Postcard Swap

This week we've been busy preparing our letters, cards and pictures for Playing By the Book's wonderful International Postcard Swap for Families.

The big girls have written letters and drawn pictures for the families we have been given (one in the UK, one in the US, one in India, one in Japan and one in NSW - very exciting!) We have also composed a family letter together to go with each package that tells a little about our family and a lot about our reading habits (this being, in fact, a literary-themed swap!)

The toddler got involved too, helping me select the photos for a picture-page that we also put into the package. She was insistent that we had to include lots of a'muls - hence the emu, wombats and koala pictured in this post!

Writing letters and postcards is a brilliant and fun way to encourage literacy in children, and I have known this for a while, but there is an added dimension to writing to people overseas that I hadn't quite anticipated.

The girls are waiting with great anticipation for their own international mail to start trickling in, and they are really thrilling to the idea of reading books recommended by people in faraway places.

A, my almost 8 year old, is hoping that we get some recommendations of things that are "not books we'd normally know about", and I couldn't agree more.

We Play - Cake decorating

E, my second-born girl, turned 6 on Saturday, as I wrote here. She's having a party at a local playcentre this coming Saturday with her sisters and 20 of her friends (yes, yes, it's a big party, but it's her first year of school, so I want her to enjoy it).

She is, naturally, very excited about the whole birthday business, but possibly the single greatest impetus to her excitement was the promise made by our friend K, she of the drool-worthy food blog Inspired by Wolfe, that she would come and help decorate a birthday cake for E. K is no stranger to either cake decorating in general (check out her mahvellous efforts here) or indeed to cake decorating in our house in particular, as she was our partner in crime in the marathon that was the creation of 118 inscribed cupcakes for my eldest girl's Periodic Table of Elements cake last year.

So, yesterday after school, the kids were thrilled to see K arrive with her toolbox of cake decorating gear to help us decorate the two love-heart shaped butter cakes E and I had baked for the purpose.


My, but the girls had a wonderful time. They chattered away excitedly as K and I took it in turns to mix up a large quantity of buttercream icing, and watched as K carefully coated the two cakes with it.

Next, they donned plastic gloves to help K knead the colour gels through the fondant icing. They both thought this was excellent fun, as did the toddler, who hung around their legs in the hopeful (and satisfied) expectation of grabbing a few bits of dropped icing to eat.

E had decided on a pink base for the cake, decorated with pretty things, so K had obliged by bringing sweet little butterfly and love heart cutters. The girls worked hard to create their decorative objects for the cake top.

K had also pre-made several beautiful yellow roses to go on the cake. When my elder girl saw them, she was fascinated and wanted to have a go herself, so K very patiently and kindly instructed her in the art of rose-making. The pink roses on the cake were made by A, my almost 8-year-old, with K's help.

The girls often bake with me, but in baking as in cooking, I am generally a Taste Not Appearance person; I lack the knack (and patience!) to make food beautiful as well as nutritious and delicious. I think I often lack the confidence, too, thinking that I could not possibly produce something elegant or pretty or "proper" looking.

Seeing E and A's enjoyment of the decorating process, though, and realising that with pre-bought fondant icing, it's not terrifically complicated, inspires me to think that the girls and I might give cake decorating a whirl again soon, maybe as a winter holidays activity. After all, it looks pretty awesome (if I do say so!) and much of it was put together by my girls under K's expert tutelage. I reckon it could be great fun to do in a wet, wintry day.

This post is part of the weekly We Play meme at the wonderful Childhood 101. Check out the main page over there for lots of fantastic play ideas.

We Play - Dressing Up

When I imagined my life with children, the things we'd do, the games we'd play, one of the images that burned mostly strongly in my mind was a picture of a big, chaotic box full of silks and feathers and old bridesmaids' dresses, angel wings and fairy dresses, parasols and fireman hats and bonnets and masks, overalls and bunny-rabbit suits and raincoats and long, winding scarves. Dressing up is such an integral part of my own memories of carefree childhood play, and it was a high priority for me to make sure that my children would have access to their own glorious mess of a dress-up box.



Well, true to my instincts, my three girls have always loved dressing up. This week in particular, there has been a lot of fun with dress-ups in my house; feather boas, ladybug suits and Dorothy the Dinosaur tails being employed to good effect. The toddler has been wearing her fairy dress over all outfits, every day. My two elder children even decided to come grocery shopping on the weekend in full dress-up regalia, one wearing a Dalmatian dog costume, the other dressed as a pink rabbit. They were entirely unselfconscious about the amused looks and smiles they attracted ;-) Sadly, there are no photos of this event, as neither big girl wanted the moment recorded for posterity. Ah well.

I took my second daughter, E, out to the movies the weekend before Easter for her one-on-one Mummy-and-daughter treat. She chose a viewing of Rio, preceded by video games at the Intencity game parlour next to the cinema. We had a wonderful time - 4 hours just together, which she revelled in and so did I. Being of a creative turn of mind (and still in the dressing-up groove), E came home and set to work to make a mask inspired by the movie. She ended up making something that I think was a recognisable representation of Jewel - and then wore it the rest of the day with great pride ;-)


I love dressing-up play for the kids because it is creative, self-driven, open-ended, and often feeds into complex narrative-style games. It releases the inner child in me, too, as I prance around the house draped in whatever the girls select for me!

This post is part of the weekly We Play meme at the wonderful Childhood 101. Check out the main page over there for lots of fantastic play ideas.

We Play - Coloured Icypole Sticks

Ages ago, someone gave one of my kids a pack of miscellaneous crafty objects for a birthday. That pack included a bundle of multi-coloured icypole sticks, I assume intended to be used as part of montages or pasting crafts.

Well, they've never been used that way, but last week, they were put to another use in play!

The kids made pictures with them



and patterns


and then decided to lay out a trail for their littlest sister to follow to find her "treasure" (a storybook and a chocolate frog) at the end.


Much hilarity, and a half-day in the school holidays, done and dusted!

We Play - S Day

Belatedly (thanks to an Internet outage that lasted 40 long hours) here is our contribution to this week's We Play - our "S" Day.

Last September school holidays, we decided to refine our long-standing pyjama day tradition into a letter-themed day full of activities and food related, however tangentially, to one letter of the alphabet. Naturally, we started with P for Pyjamas, and had a great time with it.

Picking up the same idea for the first weekday of this term 1 break, we spent Monday this week having ... "S" day. Monday coincided with my worst day with a heavy cold / throat infection and husband working at home to enable me to get to the doctors and (theoretically) rest, so it had the potential to be a fairly challenging day, and in many ways it was; but following our "S" day plan kept things mostly in the positive despite the challenges, and the girls really loved it.

My 7 and 5 year olds mostly wrote the following poem about our day. OK, so it won't win any awards for style - no budding Sylvia Plaths as yet! - but it captures the spirit of it all quite nicely ;-)

S is for sleepwear, in which we stayed all day;

S is for snakes and snails, fun craft games to play;

S is for soup and sushi, and smoked salmon too;

S is for our favourite TV show, that is Scooby Doo.

S is for sorting socks, a job we did for Mum;

S is for sick Mummy, with sore throat and head and tum;

S is for scooting, all along the street;

S is for stories with Daddy, that is very sweet.



This post is part of the weekly We Play meme at the wonderful Childhood 101. Check out the main page over there for lots of fantastic play ideas.

We Play - Easter bonnets

Back after a hiatus - during which we have been playing, but I have not been taking many photos! - here is this week's We Play from us. The big girls have been making Easter bonnets for the school Hat Parade this Wednesday coming.


They decided they wanted to decorate hats at home, so we trekked off to the $2 shop to buy some hard plastic hats for the base. Then the girls just had fun with our assortment of whatnots from the craft cupboard - cotton wool, glitter pens, textas, sparkles, stickers, and ribbons.


Great fun was had by all!



This post is part of the weekly We Play meme at the wonderful Childhood 101. Check out the main page over there for lots of fantastic play ideas.

We Play - Mud Puddles in the Summertime

When you come home from swimming lessons on a warm Saturday,


and your Dad makes you chocolate milkshakes with extra ice-cream,


and you discover a lovely muddy puddle from the night before's heavy rains,


and Mum says to have fun in your bathers,


well, that's pretty much a perfect morning.


This post is part of the weekly We Play meme at the wonderful Childhood 101. Check out the main page over there for lots of fantastic play ideas.

We Play - Stained Glass Hearts

This week I am rostered on to provide the craft activity for the community playgroup that I attend my almost-2-year-old on Wednesday mornings.

Planning a craft for this playgroup can be a little challenging, as the children range in age from 12 months to 5 years, have a range of languages, abilities and needs, and there is a wide variability in the parental expectations about the level of structure the playgroup should provide. (I'm also on the playgroup committee, and that question poses endless grounds for both reflection and angst, probably more than any other issue we discuss).

So in planning the craft, which falls to me once a month, I try to find something that is inclusive, that can appeal to different age levels, that doesn't require or invite parental direction, and that loosely ties into the same theme that the person doing the story / songs has selected. The craft is entirely optional - kids can wander up and do or not do as they choose - but I like to make it appealing, fun, and bright.

This week, riffing on Valentine's Day, the story theme is Love, so I thought we might make stained glass hearts.

"Stained glass" windows are one of the easiest and prettiest of all the age-adaptable crafts. My kids have made square and arch windows in this design at other playgroups, at kinder, and even at school. I saw no reason why the concept couldn't be parlayed into heart-shaped designs, so that's what we'll be making tomorrow.

The concept of stained glass craft is simple.

1. Create a "frame" of stiff cardboard (in whatever shape you desire). It needs to look like a picture frame - hollow in the centre.

2. Cut a piece of clear Contact to fit over the outside of the frame but not overlapping the edges (I usually aim for halfway along the frame itself).

3. Stick the Contact over the frame WITH THE STICKY SIDE UP.

4. Cut up several colours of cellophane into random but fairly small shapes.

5. Stick the coloured cello to the sticky Contact in a pattern, or randomly, as you like.

6. Cut and place a second piece of Contact over the finished cello surface, sticky side DOWN, so that the two pieces of Contact stick together and form a coated smooth surface for the cello.

7. Hang or place next to a source of natural light and watch the pretty colours!


My toddler road-tested it for me and had a really good time sticking her collage together, and we think the results are nice. So the 3 hours I've spent perfecting the shape, cutting the 25 frames, the 50 pieces of Contact and the bucket of cello may yet pay off ;-)


Best of all, I've saved the small inner hearts (that were cut out to make the frames) to use as play or crafting pieces another time. Waste not, want not...

We Play - Playdoh

An oldie but a goodie!

The 23 month old is deeply enamoured of playdoh right now and her older sisters are enjoying rediscovering the fun of doh with her.

This post is part of the weekly We Play meme at the wonderful Childhood 101. Check out the main page over there for lots of fantastic play ideas.

We Play - Painting

The kids have been steadily working through the various craft kits they were given for Christmas - tile mosaics, a painted clock, trinket boxes and decorated diaries among them - but on Sunday morning, with an extremely hot day looming (it got to a little over 40 celsius here), they just wanted to do some free painting.

The eldest went abstract and fluorescent


while the 5 year old painted a scene for her big sister


and the 23 month old wanted to paint only in greens and blues. When asked what she was painting, she replied firmly, "Deep, deep inna sea. Cool kwi-ut fish, that me!" (She was referencing her favorite Dr Seuss book, My Many Coloured Days, which represents moods as colours / animals. The green-day "cool and quiet fish" is one of C's favorites).


This post is part of the weekly We Play meme at the wonderful Childhood 101. Check out the main page over there for lots of fantastic play ideas.

We Play - Gold mining

We've been playing a lot of science-themed games this week (I'm intending to post on Thursday about some of our experiments!), so, in the mood, the big girls decided to spend their some of their saved pocket money today in the Australian Geographic shop on these gold mining kits.

We agreed to go halvies and they happily ponied up their share to get them.

They are quite nifty - mimicking a mixed-soil surface, they require the kids to scrape away several layers of plaster and stone with patience and efficiency to extract the little nuggets of pyrite (Fool's Gold). As they are working on them (they've been going about an hour and a half now, with a break for drinks), I've read them extracts from the encyclopedia about fool's gold, mining, and geology.



These kits aren't all that cheap, retailing for $24.95 each, but they are certainly getting good fun out of them and will have a cloth bag of pyrite each at the end, which will doubtless be added to their geology collections.


I'm going to keep these kits (and the several other similar ones) in mind for potential birthday presents this year. It's something a bit different and it is certainly easily an afternoon of fun, if not more.

This post is part of the weekly We Play meme at the wonderful Childhood 101. Check out the main page over there for lots of fantastic play ideas.