With our Easter holidays starting today I have been trying to come up with activities to do with the children. There are times when you need to think on your feet and come up with ideas using household items that don’t take ages to get together.
Coming up with ideas is not always easy either but now Flora has developed a ‘Funspiration’ activity guide with the help of Tanith Carey who is a award winning parenting author. The ‘Funspiration’ guide has 15 fun activities to help inspire busy parents. The activities are perfect for when you have 15 minutes or so to fill.
Over the last couple of days we tried out two of the fun ideas from the guide and had lots of fun in the process. Here’s how we got on.
Egg Cartoon Crocodile
You will need :
egg boxes – ideally 1 dozen box(large box) and 2 half dozen boxes(small box) (we only had half dozen boxes so improvised)
felt tip pens
glue
scissors
card – we used white and green.
method –
- We stuck two boxes together to form the body, if you’ve a dozen box you can skip this stage.
- cut one small egg box in half and glue the bottom of the box to the top of the large egg box, bumpy side up to make the scales.
- take another small egg box and glue on the top of the other end of the large egg box, this will be your crocodile’s head.
- I then cut a long tail out from the green card but if you have another small egg box cut in half and use that.
- Then using white card the boys cut out teeth and stuck them along the front of our crocodiles head.
- using the other half of the egg box you cut up to form the tail, cut two sections off and glue onto the head to make your crocodile’s eyes. We used the two dividing bits from inside one of the boxes.
- Using the felt tip pens draw pupils onto the eyes and nostrils above the teeth.
- You could paint your egg box crocodile if you want but we choose not too.
The boys had great fun making the egg box crocodile and Erin happily watched. Afterwards our crocodile joined in the fun with some Lego duplo play too. The activity kept the children entertained for a good twenty minutes and you can get as creative as you like.
Keen to try another activity the boys wanted to build a Secret Den, always a favourite activity here.
Secret Den, you will need:
Trystan took the led in building the secret den but Erin wanted to help and once the sheet was up she quickly out the cushions in.
We tend to use the children’s chairs and a variety of things around the playroom to hold the dens the children build. On this occasion we used the toy kitchen to help give some height.
All the children joined in the den building fun and spent a good hour or two yesterday evening playing in it afterwards. It took me about five minutes to grab a sheet and clothes pegs for the children to use and another five minutes to build the den. But it provided lots of fun and laughter.
Why not take a look at the ‘Funspiration’ guide and see what fun activities you can do. You can find the guide http://www.mumsnet.com/microsites/flora and remember fun just needs a little imagination.