Gardening with kids

My kids and I spend a lot of time in our garden. It is a lovely place to be thanks to Chris who puts in the hard yards composting, mulching and more. Every few months we visit our local garden centre and buy a few pots of flowers – our favourites are pansies, violets, petunias, marigolds and snapdragons.

Both my girls love gardening but I actually adore working in the garden with my youngest (17 months). Boo loves to slowly dig her fingers into the dirt and splash in the water. When Cakey is involved she tends to take over with all her wonderful 3 year old enthusiasm.

Getting ready to garden – Boo is happy to use Cakey's socks as gardening gloves.

This particular planting project included all three of us. We have a special planter pot for our flowers – Cakey painted it in rainbow colours a while back. First up, we dig out the old plants that have passed their prime. Then we prepare the planter pot by adding in some new soil from our worm farm. The kids love watching the worms wriggling around in the soil. Next is Cakey's favourite bit – adding water and making 'dirt soup'.

Mixing in the new soil and making 'dirt soup'

Once all the water has soaked into the soil, we gently tap the new plants out of their containers and place them into their prepared holes in the planter pot. To finish off, we give them another drink of water mixed with worm tailings and put a little bit of mulch around the plants to keep the moisture in. The end result always looks good and the girls get a kick out of picking the flowers (which just makes them produce more and more flowers).

Giving our new flowers a drink of water and worm tailings

This time around I learnt something new. When we dug out the old plants there were little bugs crawling around – I have always called these bugs earwigs... but they are not earwigs. After our planting was complete, Cakey and I looked up earwigs on the computer and found photos of an entirely different bug. With a little bit of searching we discovered that the bugs in our planter pot are actually slaters. Silly me! According to our search, slaters aren't even insects, they are crustaceans and are related to crabs and lobsters – strange but true! We also found out that slaters feed on decaying vegetable matter and are good for the garden as they return nutrients to the soil.

A frightened slater and some wriggly worms

Shared on Outdoor Play, The Magic Onions, For the Kids Fridays and Red Ted Art

Santa sleigh imaginary play

Cakey won't stop talking about Santa. Santa has now made an appearance in her imaginary play and she wanted to turn a large box left over from Christmas into his sleigh. We painted the box pink, purple and yellow because she refuses to toe the line about the traditional red and green Christmas colours (check out When Christmas craft goes wrong).

Once dry, I found the largest toy animal in the house and tied a ribbon around him to make the reins. Cakey added the deer antler headband to turn our toy dog 'Dingo' into a reindeer. I cut two vertical slits in the cardboard box to hold the ribbon in place. Lots of fun was had riding around in the sleigh delivering presents. Cakey was a little disappointed that she had to make the sleigh move in her imagination only as I refused to pull them around the yard.

You can find all our Christmas craft ideas here.

If this is your first visit to At home with Ali – welcome. If you like it, you can follow along via email, RSS or facebook. You can also find me on Pinterest and Instagram. Cheers Ali



Linked to Tuesday Tots

Here's a robot we built together

I have been dithering around the computer keyboard for the last couple of nights not really sure what to post. It has been a long year and I am tired, like a lot of people out there I'm sure. My procrastination paid off though, because I came across a half drafted post from October that was never published. Perfect for my tired mind, a few tweaks and here it is...

As part of lilla a's  Build a Robot exhibition Cakey and I built a robot, who Cakey named Juper. To make Juper we first went on a trip to Reverse Garbage (only useful if you live in Sydney) and came back with some fabulous (and cheap) materials to build our robot... in particular some large rubber pipes (that made robot arms) and pieces of thick foam that were perfect for poking pipe-cleaners in to create our robot's electrical wires.

Using loads of pva glue we stuck on the foam, bottle tops for buttons and knobs, some aluminium foil balls for eyes (completely covered in sticky tape of course) and a homemade clock.

 Adding on 'tummy' pipecleaners

Making our robot's head

and on goes the head

We did discover to our annoyance that the foam would not stick with pva glue, it kept falling off as soon as anyone slightly knocked it. So I pulled out my dusty hot glue gun which I had to buy at graphic design school to be used throughout my course, but not once in my working life.

My hot glue gun is great – it sticks just about anything. It is one dangerous little device though, as it gets seriously hot (I still have the scars to prove it). Cakey stood back (she was a little scared of the hot glue gun) while I finally got those foam pieces to stay where we wanted them to. By this point I was totally sick of this project but Cakey wanted to make more and more robots so she made 'baby robot' out of an old plant pot, pipe-cleaners and a permanent marker.

Making baby robot

And the next day Cakey painted Juper the 'mummy robot' in rainbow colours.

Painting Juper the mummy robot

The beautiful thing about a robot is that it can look like anything. This is not a project that anyone can replicate. We were lucky to have the supplies from Reverse Garbage but you could use anything really which the exhibition at lilla a proves – what a wonderful array of different robots.

Also, have a look at this fabulous post from NurtureStore about making a junk model robot.

Linked to play academy and the sunday showcase

Making a sparkly Christmas tree

I specialise in taking up hobbies, buying all the equipment, doing it for a bit, losing interest and then storing it all away to collect dust. One of those hobbies was beading. Cakey wanted to make a sparkly Christmas tree for her room so I decided all the unused beads could be sacrificed.

I cut out the shape of a Christmas tree from thick cardboard (I used the back of an A3 pad) and placed it on a tray lined with baking paper. I gathered the beads into little containers and handed over the glue to Cakey. Cakey loved slathering the cardboard Christmas tree with glue and sprinkling/pouring the beads on.

Cardboard Christmas tree on a tray to contain the beads

On goes the glue

Sprinkling the beads

To cover up the lakes of pva glue I gave Cakey some small cups of pink and yellow food colouring and a dropper (my inspiration for this came from a lovely post on the fabulous blog Teach Preschool). It produced a great effect and Cakey loved watching the food colouring dye shift and change when it mixed with the glue.

Adding drops of food colouring

Food colouring mixing with the glue

When it was partly dry I peeled it off the baking paper and placed it on a clean sheet of paper. We actually did this activity on the day we left for our big trip so our tree is still sitting on the kitchen bench waiting for us to get home and pin up.

This was a fun activity, but I did have to wait until Boo was asleep - beads and babies don't mix. In hindsight, I would have made the cardboard christmas tree a bit smaller as we went through a huge amount of beads to cover it. But let's get real – it's going to be a while before I ever find the time to sit down and bead again.

For another Christmas craft using beads and glue have a look at this and for more Christmas craft ideas check out my Christmas Pinterest Board.

If this is your first visit to At home with Ali – welcome. If you like it, you can follow along via email, RSS or facebook. You can also find me on Pinterest and Instagram. Cheers Ali

Coconut tea party

I normally stick to art and craft posts on this blog because that is the stuff I like best. Imaginary play and I don't really get along. I do my bit and pretend to be a lion or whatever is demanded but I know I am lacking in the enthusiasm department. Since being away from home, Cakey and I have been doing a lot less craft than normal. Our craft supplies from home have all been used up and we are not set up for anything too messy. This has meant I have been forced to participate in loads of imaginary play. Our coconut tea party has been my favourite to date.

We are fortunate to have rented a holiday house with a coconut tree. This tree has heaps of coconuts on it and heaps on the ground too. The coconuts are just perfect for rolling into a circle and setting up a tea party for all of Cakey's animals. For Cakey, I think the best bit is when we cut up some oreos for all her animals to share... she always kindly helps them polish them off.

Christmas angel table lights

Warning: This activity involves glitter. If you hate glitter and get sick of walking around all day with sparkly bits on your bottom then swap the glitter for glitter glue, paint or crayons. 

Cakey wanted to make some Christmas angels and she specified that they should stand up. So I thought we could make some paper angels and then stick them to tall glasses. This also meant I could pop a candle in the glass and light up our angels.

To get started I drew a simple angel template (without wings) on the computer and printed them out.  We then got busy decorating the angel outlines with Cakey's favourite thing – glitter. You can download the template here. If you don't want to make the wings separately I have also made an angel template with wings – download it here.

Once all the decorations were complete, we cut them out and glued on paddle pop sticks to make the wings. I cut out wing-like shapes from tissue paper and Cakey glued them on with vast quantities of pva glue. Due to the amount of glue used drying was a bit of an issue. I ended up delicately spreading them out on our clothes rack to stop them gluing themselves to the table.

Cutting out our angels

Gluing on sticks to make the wings

Adding the tissue paper wings to the paddle pop stick

When our angels were dry we stuck them onto the highball glasses with sticky tape. I placed a lighted candle in each and we watched them glow. They are going to make excellent table decorations for Christmas. Fire and paper don't mix so please keep an eye on them or use a battery operated light instead.

You can see all our Christmas craft here and for more Christmas ideas have a look at my Christmas Pinterest board.

If this is your first visit to At home with Ali – welcome. If you like it, you can follow along via email, RSS or facebook. You can also find me on Pinterest and Instagram. Cheers Ali

Fun, simple and inaccurate snowflakes

Hey this might sound stupid but I forgot how to make a paper snowflake. I know, I know, so easy right, well it took a little lesson on a kids television program (I have no idea what it was called, I have never seen it before) to remind me.

Cakey and I are watching a lot of television at the moment as we are stuck in the hotel (we are on hols) when Boo has her nap. It can be a bit boring so this little lesson was very timely. We made snowflake after snowflake after snowflake, so fun!

I made a diagram in case there is somebody else out there, who like me, has forgotten how to make a snowflake. Start with an A4 sheet of paper, fold to form a triangle (1) and cut off the excess so you have a square folded into a triangle (2) and then fold again (3). Now for the fun bit - cut any sort of shapes you want (4) and unfold to reveal your unique snowflake.

Once I got the hang of this, we tried making small snowflakes too. I did all the folding and Cakey cut out most of the shapes and patterns. Using her glue stick she then created snowflake pictures by laying snowflake upon snowflake.

These snowflakes would make great Christmas decorations particularly if you use silver or blue paper rather  than the fluorescent paper that we had on hand.

NOTE: Ha ha I am having a good laugh at myself because my mother in law has just emailed to say that all snowflakes have six sides so I actually needed to fold my paper one more time. Whoops! Anyway as she rightly pointed out, little fingers would not be able to cut through the paper folded three times – it would be too thick.

If this is your first visit to At home with Ali – welcome. If you like it, you can follow along via email, RSS or facebook. You can also find me on Pinterest and Instagram. Cheers Ali