A garden of their own

After being inspired by the wonderful community garden down the road, the kids and I spent a weekend in our own veggie patch. Planting, weeding, looking for worms and making 'compost soup'.

Finn had a great idea to make a scarecrow, so I found some fallen branches, an old work uniform and some winter gloves to make the body for our scarecrow. If I had stockings around the house I would have used that for making the head, but instead I cut and machine stitched a head shape out of skin coloured fabric, stuffed it with polyfil and drew a face on it.  The whole scarecrow making process took about 15 minutes, and Finn is very proud of his new garden friend.

Play Dough

I was reading about the importance of  play dough in a fantastic book called "Rapunzel's Supermarket', by Ursula Kolbe. 


On page 22: " Give children ample time to get the feel of dough and clay without cookie cutters or rolling pins. Toddlers love to make forms they can squeeze, roll, bend, twist and flatten. If they are not distracted by tools, they quickly acquire skills- a language of hands". 

A good reminder for me, as I tend to let finn go crazy with his box of play dough tools. 

This is the recipe I use for play dough which works every time. If you use 'cream of tartar' it helps preserve the dough for up to 6 months. 

Dough can be used for many children's activities. We borrowed this idea from Play School the other day, and made a little garden using the dough as the ground (on Play school they made a fragrant garden with cinnamon sticks, and herbs like rosemary). For our interpretation Finn added sticks, leaves and rocks that he found on a walk. 

We have also had fun making bridges across two dough islands, and adding little plastic animals to make jungles, and paddle pop sticks to make animal zoos.