Festive salt dough decorations

 Making salt dough decorations is a firm favourite of a tradition in many families.  I came across it for the first time last year watching 'Kirstie's Homemade Christmas' on TV and we had great fun, if not the most attractive results.  This year we've refined our technique somewhat and have ended up with some prettier and less soggy decorations.  This is a lovely activity to be done in ten minute bursts, which suits small children's attention spans. It encourages creative play, basic maths skills in measuring, and makes children feel good in contributing to the family's preparations for Christmas.  If you don't celebrate Christmas, the activity is just as good for making fun decorations for any other festivity.


The basic recipe is really simple.  This year I used a recipe provided by my local children's center, but I halved the quantities as we ran out of table salt.  The children's center recipe: 2 cups plain flour. 1 cup salt. 1 cup water.  Mix to form a dough (adjust quantities of water or flour to get right texture).  Model into shapes (not too thick) and cook on a very low heat for several hours.  The models can then be painted.

 The boys helped with measuring out the ingredients, which is really simple in this recipe as you use cups rather than weights.  Don't panic if you don't have a standardised measuring cup (this is a more common measuring technique in America, here in the UK recipes usually give weights in grams, or ounces if it's an old recipe).  Getting it right is about ratios, so as long as you use the same sized container as your 'cup' it doesn't matter - e.g. a 'cup' could be a half filled mug, or a plastic drinking cup, or a small bowl so long as you use the same thing for each measurement.

From our experience last year, getting the dough rolled out fairly thin helps in the drying process later on.  This needed surprisingly little intervention from me as both boys are becoming dab hands with the rolling pin.  Sharing the rolling pin is something they were initially not keen on, but it all builds social skills.  We then shared a star shaped cookie cutter to make the shapes, but any shape you have would work fine.  I'd avoid anything with details that are too fiddly and liable to break off like the thin legs on reindeer shapes.  I then put the shapes on a sheet of baking paper on a metal baking tray into a low temperature oven (about 80 centigrade).  Before you put them in the oven don't forget to make a hole in each one if you intend to string them up - a skewer wiggled around to make a hole worked well, making the hole a bit bigger than you want as they tend to close up a bit in the oven.

To make cleaning up the table more fun, we rolled straight into another messy play activity - rolling toy cars and trains through shaving foam.  If you haven't read about this before, the 'value' cheap shaving foam has the least perfumes and is just soap, so even if your little ones ingest some it is pretty harmless - obviously avoid eyes and use your judgement about when your child is old enough to enjoy this.  I find it helpful to have a clean damp flannel on hand for when one of them does get some in their eye.

The next stage of the 'clean up' tends to cause even more mess, but the laughter is worth it.  The boys get a cloth each to help wipe the table, and then a bowl of warm water on the floor to wash the foam off their toys.  This usually ends up with the boys and the floor soaking wet, so to avoid slipping I try to be prepared with old towels and also supervise closely by getting down on the floor and splashing their toys with them.  In this picture the we had floor was ideal for messy wet play.   It was the old stick-on floor tiles that were underneath the floor we had to remove following our washing machine leak.  I put down new laminate tiles yesterday, which I don't think will take so kindly to being really soaked so this phase of the activity will have to move upstairs to the bath in the future.  The bath is where we end up anyway to make sure the last of the soap foam is removed and everyone is warmed up and dressed in dry clothes.

I baked the shapes for 5 hours, then left them to dry outside the oven, then put them in again for another couple of hours.  It has to be a really low heat as you are just drying them, not cooking them.  We found last year that a higher heat just burns them in patches.  This is the big reason for getting your shapes thin - uneven or thick shapes don't dry well.

When the shapes were dry and cool we painted them with poster paint.  This made the shapes a little soggy and cracked when it dried, so I'm sure someone will have a better alternative, but poster paint is child safe so I'm not worried about an imperfect finish.  Besides which, the following day we then put so much glitter on the shapes it's hard to tell they were painted in the first place.  The final stage (tomorrow) will be stringing them up on very thin ribbon, interspersed with some silvery metal charms we kept from some Christmas crackers.  Another lesson from last year though - if you want to keep the shapes, put them in an airtight container with a desiccant added, for example a plastic tub with salt in it, or sachets of silica gel.  We did not do this and stored them in a cardboard box in the loft with the other baubles.  When we got the decorations down we had a lot of mushy dough shapes sticking the baubles together, oops!

Halloween carrots, science and art

 This year our local supermarket was stocking purple carrots called 'Witches Noses'.  This might sound like some kind of GM Frankenfood, but actually orange carrots are the more recent type (17th Century) prior to which they were purple.  The purple carrots we bought were a modern breed, but it's nice to support a greater variety of vegetables than we have been used to seeing.  The purple colour is caused by anthocyanins which you may have heard of because they are a group of antioxidants also present in fruit such as blueberries and credited with all sorts of health enhancing properties.

The colour was so strong it bled and made soup look a bit unappetising , and when we ate them raw we ended up with stained fingers I cooked the last batch of them on their
own by simply boiling in water.  This produced a deep purple liquid and made me wonder if it would make a good indicator solution in the way that red cabbage water
does.  A quick shake of vinegar in a sample on a spoon later and my hopes were confirmed, so I saved the juice for some after dinner fun.

I started by pouring a couple of tablespoons of the carrot water onto a plate and giving the kids vinegar and bicarbonate of soda to add to the liquid.  It's better to start by letting children experiment and make observations by themselves without telling them what to expect at first.  You can draw out their observations with comments and questions 'wow, look at that, what colour did it go when you added the vinegar? Now what happens if you add bicarb?'

Once they've had a few goes turning the solution to red, blue, back to red you can start to introduce some of the correct terminology.  Here's roughly how I explained things as we went along:  The liquid is an indicator solution. Indicator solutions change colour if you add an acid or an alkali.  They
'indicate' which means they show you whether you have added and acid or an alkali.  Our indicator solution goes pinky red when you add an acid and blue when you an an alkali.  Vinegar makes the solution go red, so do you
think it is an acid or an alkali?  Taste the vinegar, what does it make your

mouth feel like?  What else makes your mouth feel like that? Lemons? Brilliant, lets see what happens when we add lemon juice.  The bicarb made the solution go blue, so do you think it's an acid or an alkali? Alkalis sometimes feel soapy, what else can we test that feels soapy? ...

After the boys were in bed, I dipped some strips of paper in the remaining solution, then added some salt as a mordant (something that fixes a dye) and boiled some cotton rag in it for a few minutes, cold rinsed it and then hung it to dry.  I wanted to make indicator strips, and thought it might work to make 'permanent' indicator fabric which we could play with, rinse out and use again another day since purple carrots are a rarity in the shops if we wanted to repeat the experiment.  I found the paper I had cut up from an old envelope must have been a bit posh - acid free -as it went blue.  The cotton dyed beautifully, so we were all set for the next day.



 This time I lined up some safe, everyday household items to test, including milk, washing up liquid, more bicarb mixed with water, vinegar and some carbolic soap scrapings mixed with water.  Ollie added most of them himself to glass ramekins and then dipped a strip of indicator fabric into each one, laying the dipped strip in front of the relevant ramekin.  At the end, we talked about what colours they had gone, how light or dark a change and what the colours meant.  Getting it right whether the colour indicates it is an acid or an alkali is very hit and miss for Ollie, but even for him I would have been surprised if he remembered all of it first time.  This activity is just about enjoying making things change colour and introducing the words for young children, as they get older you can focus more on the science of what is going on.  You can even baffle older kids with the irritating statement that all alkalis are bases, but not all bases are alkalis (alkalis are just bases that can be dissolved in water, and not all bases can be dissolved in water).  Even little ones Toby's age enjoy seeing the effect they have on the colours by dipping them into different liquids, and will likely at some point start mixing the liquids together in experiments of their own design.  With Ollie we also keep a little science experiments log book because he likes to look
back on the experiments he's done before.  Sometimes he'll add drawings of the experiment, today he
was happy to supply reminders about what colours things had turned, what that meant, and to chose some
different coloured strips to stick in.

 When we had suitably covered the dining table in multicoloured gloop, I had a quick wipe down and gave each of the boys a square of the indicator fabric, a ramekin of vinegar and another of bicarb in water.  They had free reign then to create whatever took their fancy - at first dipping chopsticks daintily into the liquids and onto the fabric, then using their fingers, and finally pouring the liquids out completely.  They were really pleased with their finished artworks and I think they're so pretty I'm going to pop them into frames so we can see their science and art up on the wall.  I don't know how well the colours will keep, but then, that's just another experiment.

If you can't find purple carrots (which is fairly likely) then this works well with the liquid saved from boiling red cabbage.  Letting kids choose what the want to test really gets them involved in the whole activity, but make sure you stress that they don't try out the things that lurk under the kitchen sink for example if you use things like bleach in your home.  I'm working on the assumption with kids of the age of mine are that telling them not to put thing in their mouth is not fail safe, so I opt for things which are either edible, or at least won't do them any harm if ingested in small amounts, such as soap. If you make up just liquid indicator it will keep in the fridge for a couple of days, the paper strips and fabric for a lot longer so long as they're kept dry.

Bug palace

You've probably heard of a bug hotel.  These are often the shabby chic kind of boutique bug hotels made from a stack of logs or some pallets and sticks.  They provide a useful refuge for all sorts of minibeasts which are useful in your garden, such as spiders which eat all kinds of flies depending on their size and species, including nomming on aphids.  Spiders not your favourite?  Then maybe you'd prefer to thing of the gorgeous glossy groundbeetles which dine on the age old gardener's nemesis, the slug.  Useful as the bug hotel is, I wonder how many would be described as attractive garden features?

Today we found the answer while wandering around Merriments Garden in East Sussex - I can't resist calling it Bugginham Palace, I'm very sorry.  Here is a sculptural take on the bug hotel that I think would not just look good, but would also be fantastic fun to build with Lego obsessed children.

The structure was constructed from reclaimed materials (modern jargon for 'rubbish') including concrete blocks, paving slabs, clay drainage pipes and chopped up bamboo canes, plus a couple of purpose built wooden bug boxes.  The actual effectiveness of this design is probably not as helpful to bugs as the more familiar rough stack due to the large gaps between and within the elements - any minibeast trying to shelter in some of the more open tubes would get cold, dry out or find itself snaffled up by a bird or mouse (although web building spider would appreciate the gaps).  It could however be easily improved by adding more packing materials such as twigs and leaves and perhaps being used as an attractive fascia to a more traditional log pile which would also help to reduce drafts blowing through the structure.

If you have a little (or a large) space that you want to turn into a bug hotel (or palace) you can produce a really fun and informative series of activities.

1) Go on a bug hunt and try to get your children to describe what the places they found the bugs were like - it's a good activity to build on children's observational skills and use of descriptive language, and will help to inform the next step.  You could also start to discuss why the creatures like the places they were found in - for example woodlice and pillbugs are the only land dwelling form of their kind - all the other arthropods live in water (e.g. sea slaters) - woodlice have very poor ability to retain water and regulate body temperature, and therefore tend to shelter together in damp places such as under piles of rotting leaves.

2) Design your bug hotel.  Get your kids to do this verbally, or through drawings, or a collage.  You can guide them with ideas about what materials you can use - what will you be able to forage or find?  How are you going to put them together?  You may want to add in a foraging/gleaning step before this if you're not sure what materials you'll be able to get hold of.  If you're kids are small, plan small too - the last thing you want is a tall 5 pallet bug house collapsing on them when they inevitable pull it to pieces to see who has taken up residence.  This is a good opportunity to talk about food chains - who are your intended guests going to be hiding from or eating?

3) Gather your materials.  Wood that is treated will be useful for building the structure (e.g. pallets, old fence posts and panels) but since it is likely to have been pressure treated with cyanide it will rot slowly and not be as useful a food source as untreated wood.  Likewise for stone, clay pots and pipes, flagstones etc...  Pack these materials will items that will provide small hidey holes, such as sections of bamboo canes which will provide homes for overwintering lacewings (useful for munching aphids) and all year round for solitary bees.  Other useful packing materials include leaves that will rot fairly slowly (a year or so to turn into leafmould depending on how damp they are) and will provide food and shelter for woodlice and millipedes, and their predators.  Sticks of all sorts are a useful addition, but especially those from deciduous species (those that drop their leaves in the Autumn) since evergreens such as pines have a different carbon to nitrogen ratio that means they rot slower and they may also contain resins that slow decay and make them unappealing foodstuffs (think how a pine forest floor is covered in pine needles, while an oak woodland is crumbly brown earth).

4)  Build your bug hotel.  Where you put it is going to depend on your available space and how prominent a feature you want it to be, but as a rule of thumb damp, shady areas will attract a different mixture of species to dry, sunny spots.  For example, siting your hotel near a pond may result in a fat crop of slugs, their predators and possibly even a toad (also a slug predator).  A warm, sunny spot may be attractive to solitary bees, spiders and overwintering butterflies.

Cautions:
Make sure you instill handwashing as a routine after bug hunting since there are parasites and pathogens associated with some minibeasts, such as lungworm in slugs. I find it worth thoroughly checking over our intended area for cat mess before we start digging around.  Avoid any areas that are obviously soiled by bird droppings.

If you live in a region with potentially risky species such as vipers which may take up residence, follow the guidelines issued by your local wildlife authorities.  Even here in the UK there are areas with populations of Adders which have a painful bite that requires immediate medical treatment.  I personally avoid handling centipedes too as they have a hefty bite, even if UK species are not life threatening.  Several beetles can bite, as can ants and some spiders, so I find a little plastic scoop and a small bucket or ice cream tub are useful for bug hunting.

If you build a log pile, don't let your kids walk or climb over it as logs can roll suddenly, trapping fingers or worse.

Be aware that some species are protected, so if you find them living in your hotel you mustn't handle them.  Slow worms were my favourite species to find when minibeast hunting while I worked as a Fieldstudies Instructor, but these harmless legless lizards are protected and you should avoid handling them.  Again, follow whatever your local wildlife authority's advice is on this.