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Garden Week

June 5th 2009 04:20
Spring is here in the form of Garden Week this week inspired by her Little Golden Book entitled Dorothy's Garden. Dorothy is the dinosaur from Wiggles and while she has outgrown the television program, she still enjoys catching clips of them and dancing along from time to time. My guess is this is where the Wiggles website will come in handy.


Handprint flowers seem to be the common theme on children's craft websites. We are also going to try our hand at pressing and drying flowers as well as doing leaf rubbings.

We found some easy instructions for how to make fingerprint butterflies and fingerprint flowers.

As we live in an apartment 4 floors up we don't have access to a garden although we are going to repot our pumpkin seeds from our giant week efforts and continue to grow them on the balcony for a while.

We are going to learn the flowers for the month of April - my daughter's birthday - as well as learn a variety of other flowers using these handy flashcards.


And no paper garden is complete without this cool paper watering can.
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Ugly Duckling Week

May 31st 2009 07:02
This may sound like some poor joke but it is the book to which my daughter has chosen to base all of her crafts and activities this week. Again being a popular story like The Three Liltte Pigs, there is no shortage for either crafts or activities we can do together.

We have various Ugly Duckling and Swan pictures to cut out and glue together, although my favourite is this 3D duck. We are unable to source the plastic eggs although are going to amend it slightly by using small paper cups which should do the trick just nicely!

Paper plate crafts are so easy to create, especially for the little ones, so we are going to do this fun duck paper plate craft with handprint tail. For variety on a similar theme, Dannielle's Place also features a similar paper plate craft.

These cotton ball ducks are just adorable and the ducks in a pond craft from Crayola includes both painting and gluing.

We are going to try our hand at origami - the swan for beginners - is a great place to start and the black and white sock craft is a great way to show the transition from ugly duckling to beautiful swan.

There are a myriad of duck pictures to colour in and the Scholastic site features a printout whereby the children can create their own animal tale.
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Send In The Clowns

May 24th 2009 02:59
Admittedly I am not a fan of clowns, preferring to see them at children's parties rather than adorned all over my wall. So the inclusion of Clown Week into our schedule took me a little by surprise to say the least.

Loonette and Molly from the Canadian Series, The Big Comfy Couch, are a particular favourite in our house so at least I had a starting point on which to base our activities. And in particular I love the concept of a 10-second tidy which we are going to incorporate with a clown based cleaning chart.

Craft wise - cardboard megaphones, bow ties and clown hats will be a feature and face painting and juggling will no doubt be a daily occurrence this week.

Focussing on expressions and feelings this week, this blank faced clown drawing is a great place to start as well as the easy paint activity of just drawing simple faces onto paper plates.

First School again came to our aid with numerous clown pictures, simple clown crafts and a number of easy clown related jigsaw puzzles. And we found a number of sites which provided us with counting, addition and pattern activities to build on our number skills.

The Dr Seuss story, If I Ran The Circus, will be introduced this week and the online children's library comes to our aid with The CIrcus Procession and The First Circus. For the younger readers, Cbeebies features an easy story for children entitled Where's My Hat? and a song entitled The Funniest Clown.



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The Three Little Pigs

May 12th 2009 04:39
From one classic fairytale to another, this week's activities surround the ever popular children's tale, The Three Little Pigs.

Being such a popular story, it seems that there is no shortage for inspiration on the web covering all kinds of activities, colouring pages and ideas to complement the story.

This week we are going to attempt our first ever home made papier-mache piggy bank and from the look of it, it is going to be a very messy but fun experience.

DLTK Kids also provided us with some great ideas including a fun paper plate pig, an easy toilet paper pig and wolf and a paper craft pig.

During last week's activities my daughter had a lot of fun with the shadow puppet theatre we made and this week we are going to reenact the Three Little Pig story using these handy templates.

My personal favourite however is this cute activity where the children get to create their own version of the pig's houses using spaghetti, toothpicks and paper bricks.

Tra la la la la la!
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Jack And The Beanstalk

May 3rd 2009 10:22
My daughter was very excited that today marked the first day of Giant Week aka Jack And The Beanstalk Week. Having changed her mind at the last minute from her original choice of The Ugly Duckling, she had me do some last minute website searching in order to come up with some creative ideas.

Thankfully the BBC had an online adapted story about Jack and The Beanstalk which she enjoyed watching which led us into a discussion about Real or Make Believe. Tina's fun little online game came to our aid just to refamiliarise her with our discussion.

Breastfeeding.com had some fun Jack and The Beanstalk Mazes and colouring in pages which will come in handy as the week progresses.

As a craft we are going to attempt to grow a shoot or two from our pumpkin seeds as well as make this paper beanstalk.

Sparklebox provided us with templates for some masks and the sequencing sheet will help as a great discussion point once we have reread the story a number of times.

Squidoo gave us much inspiration to attempt our very own shadow puppet theatre and we discovered some puppet templates online which we could use to bring this to life.

Scholastic UK had a number of resources which we could put to the test including a fun online game for us to play.

Another busy week in our household - what are you doing?
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The Golden Egg Book

April 24th 2009 09:21
Whilst we may be a little late for Easter, next week's topic is "bunny week" as my daughter now constantly refers. We are basing our activities on or around The Golden Egg Book originally published in 1947, written by Margaret Wise Brown.

The story tells of a little bunny who stumbles upon an egg. The bunny becomes curious as he can hear something moving inside the egg. His imagination runs wild and the impatient bunny tries to shake, push, and even jump on the egg in his attempts to break it. But all his efforts go in vain as the stubborn egg refuses to budge. The mystery unravels when the egg begins to hatch and much to the bunny's surprise, a little duck comes out. The bunny and the duck then become friends


[ Click here to read more ]
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Little Mermaid Week

April 9th 2009 02:07
We are taking a theme from one of my daughter's books and are basing activities and stories throughout the week on the theme of her choice. Her choice this week - The Little Mermaid - apt for someone who currently wants to be a mermaid when she grows up!

Doing a quick search on the internet so far we have uncovered sheet music and lyrics for a number of the tracks including Part of Your World and Under The Sea
[ Click here to read more ]
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