World War II Diorama

(Goblin is 4 years old)

The other day Goblin announced that he wanted to make a model of the D-Day landings. I thought he just meant he wanted to play with his WWII planes and soldiers but when I suggested it he 'tut-tutted' me and explained that he wanted to stick the 'model's onto a scene so we couldn't use his toys as that would be "a waste". 

Fortunately we had quite a lot of cardboard kicking about, so following Goblin's instructions I set to work making an array of WWII vehicles. Over the years of working with my son and cardboard, I have come to realise that less is more. He has a great imagination so I don't need to spend ages painting and decorating and making things look accurate. So I did the minimum to depict the vehicles requested. 

To my surprise Goblin took on the decoration himself. He started by drawing Rondells on the Spitfires and used a double pen hold to scribble camouflage on the tanks. Then he asked me to show him how to draw Swastikas for the Messerschmitts. For a child who doesn't like colouring and feels pressured if you ask him to try and write his name, he sure can draw detail when its something that interests him. I experienced a strange mixture of pride and discomfort when I saw how accurately he'd managed them. Lets just hope he doesn't start drawing them at nursery or we'll have some explaining to do.

We even got him to draw soldiers. The one above I'm told is Goblin - he wanted to feature in his own diorama.

 We put all the models together in a big beach and sea scenario with the planes attached to kebab sticks. And Goblin even added some extra detail of planes on fire (on the "baddies" side obviously).

While playing with his diorama he may have reinvented history, in Goblin's version the Allies had a bit of help with their invasion, in the form of birds of prey!

Further reading:
Goblin's fascination with World War II originally stemmed from visiting Duxford Imperial War Museum. Find out more here
We have been building on his interest through further visits, reading books and imaginary play, you can find an example here
Two excellent WWII resources are the Usborne WWII flap book and Second World War Cards
(The two Usborne links above are affiliate links which take you to Amazon. If you purchase products I receive a financial benefit)

Black and white mobile

(Goblin is 4 years old)

Recently Goblin has acquired two new cousins. When we went to visit I wanted him to be able to give them something that he had made himself. We decided to make a simple black and white mobile. Really little babies see contrasting colours better so black and white is the easiest option for babies to focus on. 

 We used air dry clay to make spheres that we then flattened and I put a hole in. When I say we I really mean, Goblin did one and I did the rest. I wanted him to do them all and I'd even got out his rolling pin and shape cutters thinking he could make a bunch of different shapes. But he wasn't interested, so I did this bit myself.

 Once the discs were dry (24 hours later) he painted them white and the following day I gave him a squirt bottle with black paint and he went to town.

Finally I strung the discs up with fishing line. I attached them to a colander, the reflection on the inside of the colander will provide some added interest for baby, however if you want to make yours look a little more attractive you can use an embroidery rind and cover the wood in a ribbon.

Easy Peasy Puppet show

(Goblin is 4 years old)

The other day Goblin came down in the morning and said he wanted to put on a puppet show. 

"Hmm! OK" said I and we set to work creating some puppets. He is currently mildly obsessed with the Octonauts so our puppet theme was easily settled on. 

Fortunately we have an Octonauts sticker book so I was able to use that as a reference to copy the characters. I nearly fell off my chair in surprise when Goblin agreed to colour them. Goblin flat out refuses to do colouring in usually. I have never insisted he 'stays in the lines' when colouring, but its obviously something he has picked up, and because he feels this is too tricky he normally just won't give it a go. He actually only agreed because I explained that we would cut them out afterwards so he didn't need to even attempt to stay in the lines. 

We attached kebab sticks to the back of each character and then hid under a chest to perform our show for Hublet. Below is our re-enactment of the Octonauts and the whale shark - one of Goblin's favourite episodes. 

You can watch clips of the actual Octonauts on the cbeebies website.

Diffuser art

 (Goblin is 4 years old)
(This post contains an Amazon affiliate link)

Recently my mum gave me a bunch of art supplies that had been sitting in her cupboard since my sister and I were kids. Amongst these treasures were our diffusers. I've been meaning to try them with Goblin and today I finally did. 

For anyone who hasn't seen these before they are basically just two metal straws that meet at a right angle. You put one end in a bottle of indian ink and you blow hard down the other. The air passes over the top of the tube that is in the ink and it pulls the ink up the tube and sprays it across the area you are pointing at. You can make a diffuser using a straw and a piece of cardboard to create a 90 degree angle, but they are also very cheap to buy. Here is an Amazon link to a Spray Diffuser for Paints and Inks. 

If you place a solid object, or in our case a cardboard cut out, in front of the area you are spraying you create a void. As Goblin is obsessed with vehicles, our cardboard cut outs were planes and helicopters. You don't have to have any great artistic skill to create a template because you can just trace a picture.  

This activity can be done with any child who can blow hard down a straw. But be warned. The spray goes wide and the ink will stain. To avoid this we turned a large cardboard box on its side and pinned the A3 paper to the bottom (which was now the vertical side). The edges of the card board box served as protection keeping the ink contained in the box. We used tiny bits of double sided tape to attach the cardboard template to the paper, then Goblin blew hard and I helped him turn the diffuser so we covered the whole area needed. We waited until the ink was dry to remove the template. I love our results. This activity also works really well using leaves for the void, and more than one colour ink to build layers. 

Make your own Octopod

(Goblin is 4 years old)

Goblin loves the Octonauts, and I am happy with his obsession because the cartoon is very educational. Goblin has learnt loads about marine life from watching these short episodes and it has reinforced his existing fascination with sea creatures. So I wasn't surprised when he asked if we could build an octopod.

We used bowls from the kitchen covered in clingfilm (to stop the paper mache sticking to the bowls). I used a mix of PVA and glue (50:50) to stick the strips down, and used about three layers on each bowl. Then I left them to dry for a week (yes it takes a long time).

After I liberated the bowls from the paper mache, Goblin painted them while I made cardboard bases. I attached the bases to the bowl tops with paper fasteners (because the double sided tape was useless). I used duct tape on the bigger pod.

Meanwhile Hublet bent wire coat hangers into shape for the legs - yep this was a whole family project. We used an exciting cardboard tube that we got a door mat in at Christmas, but you could fashion a tube from cardboard if you don't have a convenient tube to hand.

Goblin helped me make a mural for the inside of the octopod depicting the windows and internal contents. And then we stuck it all together with more duct tape ('when in doubt add more duct tape' - our family moto). And there we have it, one octopod ready to play with.

Salt dough coil pots

(Goblin is 4 years)

I had been racking my brains trying to think of something Goblin could make to give to his Aunties and Uncles for Christmas. He isn't into crafts at the moment so getting him to do any painting or pictures wasn't going to happen. But he does like construction, so I thought I'd show him how to build a coil pot. 

2 cups salt 

2 cups flour 

1 cup water

I whipped up a batch of salt dough and rolled it into long snakes for Goblin. I did a first pot to show him how to wind the snake round in a spiral and then build up the sides. Then he had a go himself. His first two were flat versions, but then he braved the walls and did a really great job of it. After a few pots he got bored and made a family of baby snakes and big snakes to give to his Daddy. 

I popped them in the oven at a really low 150C/300F/gas 2 for three hours - yes I am not kidding they take for ever. Rainy Day Mum has a microwave version that takes only minutes but I like to do it old school. The next day I left them out for Goblin to paint. He wasn't particularly interested. In fact it took him three days to paint them so I could wrap them for his relatives. But at least he liked making them, I think we will do that again.

Number Ladybirds

(Goblin is 4)

This post contains amazon affiliate links. If you click through and purchase using the link I get some pennies, which is always nice. 

Goblin is still a little unsure about his number symbols. He also has trouble counting past 13. He tends to jump around a lot in the teens. To help him with both I have been trying to expose him to numbers a bit more. 

One morning after we read Eric Carle's book The Bad-tempered Ladybird I left the above invitation to play for Goblin. I asked him what the numbers said and then we stuck the corresponding numbers on the wings. 

This is the pattern I used in case you want to do similar - one big black oval, and a same sized red oval with the top one third cut off and the bottom sliced down the middle - simples!

I decided to do odd numbers as leaves and even numbers as ladybirds. When I first hung them I tried to do it on a cane, but as you can see it doesn't work great as a number line because the numbers are a nit all over the place. So I took it down and hung it as bunting instead.

This works much better and it hangs over our dinner table so we get a chance to chat about numbers at breakfast.

Simple activities to replace screen time

(Goblin is nearly 4)

If you have read some of my earlier posts you will know that we are trying to cut back on screen time and reconnect with Goblin through play in an attempt to rid our lives of tantrums. There are periods in the day where we'd normally fall back on TV, and these are the times that for both him and me it helps to have something planned, an idea for an activity to replace TV. Because these are normally the times when Goblin is most tired the activities need to be simple. Here are a few of our more successful ones. 

Sensory play

This little invitation combined shells from our recent beach holiday with dried seed heads from the garden: poppies; honest; something that looks like cornflowers when its in flower. I also put out some military vehicles because for Goblin no play is complete without them. And finally I made some nice smelly playdough: orange (because I didn't have lemon scent to match the yellow) and rosemary. I used the ever reliable Nurturestore recipe. 

Goblin had great fun emptying the poppy seeds into the playdough and mashing it all up so the yellow dough became poppy seed dough. Its not what I had intended from my set up, but its one of the things I love about leaving something for your child to explore. They will take their own direction and sometimes it will surprise you. 

And talking of surprises I didn't expect Goblin to play with the coffee grounds the way he did. I'd taken the idea from TheBoyandMe's blog.  I loved the way her son had put the coffee grounds on the mirror and made patterns with them using a Q-tip. But my little Goblin had other ideas and he got all his construction and farm vehicles and played at moving "mud". He meticulously filled his truck using a tiny digger. I loved how much fine motor practice he was getting unintentionally.

And when he'd done with playing in the baking tray he asked to empty it into the mat and added some cloud dough. Then he called it snow and asked me to help him make a snow plough. Somewhere behind the cardboard is a miniature A-team van covered in tape.

I got this play dough idea from a lovely blog called Play Trains. I couldn't resist the idea of it smelling so great with the cinnamon stick logs and the clove ties in the chocolate playdough. So I invested in 4 jars of cinnamon sticks - Not the cheapest activity ever. I also made a bit of a mistake using drinking chocolate rather than cocoa in the playdough. The sugar made the dough quite sticky. In addition I tried to replace some of the flour with the drinking chocolate - let me tell you now, this doesn't work. However, when my playdough disaster had been averted this was a seriously popular activity with Goblin. He played with it on and off for two days. He even got all the component parts out on his own during some independent play time.

Art 

 We collected some lovely big stones from the beach on our holiday, and one of our activities was simply painting them.

I painted half a picture, an autumn tree. I invited Goblin to paint the other half. He did a great job painting what he called "the wind". But I think I made it too complicated and he got nervous about trying to replicate the rest of the tree. Next time I will make a simpler picture.

 This was a fun activity. I left out some solar system stickers. Goblin started by sticking them on the black paper I'd provided, but Hublet was a much more attractive canvas.

Numeracy and Literacy

I've been trying to provide Goblin with some simple number recognition games. This one was initiated by him playing "shop" with Hublet, using his toy till. I simply added some prices to the items on sale and showed Goblin how to use the calculator - not so much to add up, but more to match the numbers to the numbers on the key pad. We aren't at addition yet.

This was a letter matching game that I laid out with his afternoon snack. He named the objects and then decided if they were T or D words. He was surprisingly good at it. I've done a few other number and letter activities that I will share in later posts.

I'm sharing this at

Kids Coop - butterfly art

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Its Kids Coop, please link up your child orientated posts and check out what others are up to. This week I'm linking up the following:

*****

(Goblin is 43 months)

We have been raising butterflies with Goblin. This year he has taken a lot of interest, asking every day to see the caterpillars. We let our butterflies go a few days after they hatched from their chrysalis.  Goblin watched as they flew away. The next morning I left him an invitation to paint, to discover when he woke up. 

I showed Goblin how to paint on one side of the of the butterfly and fold it over to make the same pattern on the other side. But as with many of out painting activities Goblin took his art in his own direction. Can you tell which is his?

And now to the linky

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