Plate monsters

 I haven't been posting recently as I've had my head down at night studying subduction zone geology, but we've still been doing plenty of fun activities during the day.

I intersperse the kids writing and maths work with craft activities, so the crafts we do at these times need to be quick, easy to set up and easy to clear away.

Here's one from a couple of weeks ago.  All you need are paper plates and a selection of bits from your junk box.  If you haven't got a junk box, it's definitely worth starting one.  I save interesting cartons, small boxes, old birthday cards, shiny wrappers, fruit nets and the like.  Even the paper plates aren't really essential as you could use card cut from a cereal packet.

The boys used PVA (white) glue and clear tape to attach the bits and pieces, and added stickers and googly eyes to finish their monsters off.

When finished the boys had great fun stomping around chasing each other with the monsters, which are now blue tacked to the kitchen wall to peer down and make sure everyone eats their dinner.

If you have a go at this with your little monsters, I'd love to see the results, so why not come and join us over at The Maz Shack on Facebook and add your pic.

Home made spray paint art

 Today I finished a bottle of spray cleaner, and it gave me an idea of an activity.  I cleaned it carefully, then added some watered down ready-mix poster paint (the end of a bottle with water shaken into it, I guess about two tablespoons of paint and two cups of water shaken up in the bottle).  The boys were sent off with instructions to find toys that were interesting shapes and easy to wash.  They came back with mostly dinosaurs and farm animals, which they laid out on some paper from a roll (we used an Ikea drawing paper roll, but any big paper will do so long as it's not shiny).
 When the boys were happy with their arrangement they sprayed over their shapes.  The spraying itself was fun, but when they removed the toys to reveal the white outlines they were amazed.

The activity was really quick to set up, and they loved it so much they kept going until we had used up all spaces available for drying large pieces of paper.  I then explained how many examples of cave art exist around the world where our ancestors would spray colours made from ochre, chalk and soot over their hands to produce beautiful handprints.  We made our own cave art hand prints on a piece of A4 card.

Once we'd finished being artists, the toys all enjoyed several bubble baths in the washing up bowl.  It didn't take much to get the paint off as we didn't leave it long enough to dry on, but the bathing seemed almost as much fun as the painting so I was happy to let them have a few water changes.

The boys love the book we took out from the library 'Cave Baby' and have enjoyed looking at examples of cave art from around the world on the computer, so as well as a fun art play activity it links nicely with other things to find out about.

The technique could also be easily adapted to make seasonal displays, for example using autumn leaves as shapes to spray over.  I think my favourite thing was how big an impact it had on the kids - they could very quickly arrange a scene and spray it to make a story with their animals in a way that they find slower and harder when drawing and painting, so as a way of capturing their role playing with the plastic animals it was fantastic.




Note: I thoroughly cleaned the spray bottle before use, but it only had an eco cleaner in it beforehand, I wouldn't use something that had hazardous things such as bleach in it previously.  A regular plant mister will work, but I'm happier with recycling a bottle for this as I won't worry if the paint clogs it up.  As a way of using up that last bit of paint in the ready mix bottle it was good, but I found red paint looked a bit like something off a crime scene show while we were using it.  I suggest not leaving kids unsupervised with this one either, and guiding the hands of little ones, to avoid paint sprayed over the walls and each other.
 

How to make an eggcellent pirate treasure box toy

 With Pirate Day coming up soon in Hastings our minds have been on Pirate themed activities this week.  I noticed that Tesco's have started selling craft kits to turn items saved from the recycling box into toys so I decided to do what I do when I see ready meals - pinch the idea but make it from scratch myself.  The kits do look cool and would make nice gifts - perhaps something to do at a grandparent's house if they have long ago cleared away all the paint and glue from when they raised you - but since we're regular junk modellers we have stacks of crafty bits put by already.

Today we decided to make egg box treasure chests.  All we used were two cardboard egg boxes - ours were already brown so we didn't need to paint them (If all you have are plastic ones, then you can either mix poster paint half and half with PVA (white) glue to make it stick to the plastic, or use brown tissue paper with a half and half water and PVA glue mix to make paper mache to cover the box).

Next we glued strips of thin yellow card to the lid of the box to look like metal bands.  The boys coloured in the fastening of the box

 with a black felt tip pen to make it look like a lock and drew lines on the lid to show the wooden planks the chest would be made from.

The final stage was to make some treasure - you can be really imaginative here with making bead necklaces, foil rings, plastic gem stones etc...  We went with the simpler option of scrunching aluminium foil into coin shapes.

Toby has also coloured his on the inside with wax crayons, then used the treasure chest to store the crayons, the aluminium 'coins' and a Thomas the Tank Engine train.

If you're looking for a super quick 10 minute filler activity that takes almost no time to set up or pack away and doesn't cause a lot of mess, this is ideal.  It's not the most impressively realistic treasure box you will ever see, but the kids don't seem to care about that and have been 'burying' their treasure in the sofa cushions and under the raspberry bushes in the garden all afternoon.