Easy Halloween Crafts for Toddlers

I LOVE Halloween. It is slowly getting more and more popular (or maybe just commercialized?) every year here in the UK which makes me happy. We are going to be in the USA for Halloween (yay!) but I still wanted to do some fun Halloween crafts with Blondie Boy before we left. It didn't make sense to carve a pumpkin since we'd be leaving and also since he's a toddler I don't exactly trust him with sharp knives. So we painted a Jack O Lantern.

The hardest part was my portion which was taping on the Jack O Lantern's face. I just took some masking tape, overlapped strips and made giant squares to then cut out the shapes I wanted. The eyes and nose were easy but the mouth was a little bit more fiddly.

Then I just let Blondie Boy go to town with some poster paints and he painted all over the pumpkin. Once it was dry I peeled off the tape to reveal the "carved" Jack O Lantern face. 

Blondie Boy is a boy after his Mom's heart and had me add some glitter to the eyes, nose and mouth. It actually kind of mimics the flicker of a candle so I think it turned out pretty cool.

He is so proud of it and always talks about "his pumpkin" when we pull in the driveway.

Since the pumpkin went so well we decided to make some hand Spiders that I saw on Kismet's Fate's Instagram. Again super easy but possibly messy--what craft involving paint isn't messy with a toddler? 

Paint one of your toddler's hands and have them make handprints on a bit of card stock or poster board. Then paint their other hand and make another handprint next to it making sure the thumbs over lap.

Let the hand prints dry and then cut around the hand spiders. It is quite curvy so depending on how good your child is with scissors they could do this themselves or you can do it. 

Then glue on googly eyes. I found it was a lot easier for Blondie Boy to glue on the larger eyes so we used them so he could do it himself.

We stuck them all over Blondie Boy's bedroom door to make it extra spooky and he took one to his Grandma's house for her bulletin board. Have you being doing any Halloween crafts?

Messy Play: Shaving Cream Painting

NotBlondeHusband has been working Sunday days so I've been trying to do something fun with Blondie Boy while he's at work. We've gone to to the park, made donut muffins and I decided to maybe try something artsy-craftsy and do some messy play painting.

I can't remember where I saw it but I saw someone do painting by mixing shaving cream and food colouring. I was a bit worried that food colouring would stain Blondie Boy's hands and my bathroom so I use washable paint  for our shaving cream paint instead. I used a muffin tin as a palette which worked really well; you won't need as much shaving cream as you think as it will expand and poof up as you mix the paint in with it.

I tend to do all painting and other messy play activities in the bathroom for easier clean-up but in this case Blondie Boy used the tub as his canvas, too. We started out with some paper but he had more fun painting the tiles which was fine with me. 

 I told him he could paint anything he wanted except his hair. Guess what he did 2.5 seconds after I said that. Not a big deal really, just meant I had to wash his hair.

He had a great time making hand-prints on the wall and writing his name (it wasn't legible but he said the correct letters so it counts) and kept telling me how much fun he was having and how the shaving cream paint felt like ketchup. The only downside was that the tub got VERY slippy the more covered in paint he got so eventually we had to end so he didn't get hurt. I think he could have spent the rest of the evening painting if he hand't been slipping and sliding all over.

Clean up was as easy as spraying down the tub so can't complain there. We'll definitely be doing this one again since it was cheap, easy and fun. Do you have a favourite easy and cheap activity you like to do with toddlers?

Guest Post: Natural, child-led play with babies and toddlers

This post on Natural, child-led play is from Anna at The Imagination Tree. She beat me out for Blogger of the Year at the MADs and a more lovely and deserving person couldn't have won! Her blog has loads of creative play ideas and she's sharing four of her favourite toddler activities here.

Treasure Baskets: Open-ended thinking and learning can be encouraged from a really young age and doesn't require any expensive toys or take up loads of space! It's really easy to make your own treasure basket for a baby to play with as all of the items can be found around the home and are better for baby to play with than brightly coloured, noisy plastic which offers only a couple of different stimuli. Treasure baskets encourage investigation and exploration using the senses of touch, sight and taste. They also help to promote thinking skills and curiosity by challenging the baby to wonder "what should I do with it?" or "what happens if I combine these two materials?" etc. 

Discovery Boxes: These are the term I've given to a toddler version of the baby treasure baskets. Every now and then I collect some simple materials such as cardboard tubes and beans, sellotape and scoops and put them into a large box for the girls to get stuck into! As with the treasure baskets, the idea is to step back and watch them play without interfering or suggesting what they should do, only joining in if asked. I find they can stay engaged with these simple items for so much longer than with their usual toys and they spend a lot of time thinking, collaborating, experimenting and having great fun! I've got a collection of the different items we have put into our Discovery Boxes on my site, if you need some more ideas! 

Musical Instruments:  Following along the same principles as the treasure baskets and discovery boxes, it is so easy to put together some makeshift musical instruments for plenty of hands-on experimenting with noises and sounds! Music making is crucial for building listening skills, distinction and perception and investigating cause and effect. It's also one of the vital building blocks for pre-reading so that one day they will be able to hear and distinguish sounds in words, pick up rhythm and hear intonation. Making "music" is as simple as opening the kitchen cupboards to pull out the pans, wooden spoons and metal utensils! Then have a great bash-a-long to some nursery rhymes or chants! If you want something more "sophisticated" you can make shakers easily using dry rice or pasta in a plastic bottle, stretching a balloon over a tin can for a drum or even make your own rain sticks! 

Messy Play: Last (but probably BEST!) comes the delightful messy, sensory play! Again, no money is really needed for this apart from a few essentials from the kitchen cupboard. Make your own play dough and keep it for 6 months or more, using it to strengthen hand muscles and as a tool for learning letters, numbers and more. Making Goop like Blondie did is cheap and easy, too.  Create sensory tubs filled with dry rice, pasta, lentils, pom poms and allow your little one to investigate with hands, scoops and spoons. (Watch smaller toddlers so that they don't put anything in their mouths.) Other ideas for investigating in deep table trays are water, sand, shaving cream, jelly, wood shavings, beads and lego! Whatever you have on hand will be of interest!

Fruity Freaks and Vegetable Monsters

The fab people at Innocent, who's smoothies are yumtastic by the way, sent us over a fruity freak and vegetable monster making kit so Blondie Boy could enter a creation in  their new Halloween competition.

Blondie Boy is a bit young for carving but he love art projects so we broke out some permanent markers and let him make his very own monster!

An abstract masterpiece right? He had so much fun making it and in case you were wondering his monster is made up, according to him, of stars, hearts, ovals and eyes. You can create your own fruity freak or vegetable monster, too!

Here are the instructions for the competition:

1) Make your fruity freak or vegetable monster from the spookiest looking fruit or veg you can find

2) Give it a name and use your innocent magnets to spell it out (how about 'Terry Able' or 'Aaaaaaaaaalan')

3) Take a picture of your spooky creation and post it in our scary Halloween gallery www.innocentdrinks.co.uk/fruityfreaks and email myfruitandvegmonster@innocentdrinks.co.uk with your flickr name and a postal address.

4) The first 1,000 entries win a set of limited edition glow-in-the-dark Halloween 0-9 number magnets (the perfect addition to our alphabet set)

5) When you're done with your monster why not use any leftover veg to make a soup or whizz any fruit up into a smoothie?

We were sent a box with fruit and veg to take part in this challenge but all opinions are our own!

How to make Goop (Toddler Arts & Crafts Fun)

Today was a miserable and rainy day; not really uncommon in Glasgow but still not nice. NotBlondeHusband had very kindly volunteered to tidy up the living room but that meant Blondie Boy and I needed to find something to do. While BB loves putting things away he also loves pulling things out so not really conducive for a proper tidy up. So arts and crafts it was for us!

I decided to attempt some craftiness and make some Goop. The Goop I'm talking about has nothing to do with Fishsticks Paltrow and is more a slimy, slippery concoction that can be both semi-solid and liquid--basically it's really cool to kids and really messy.

I found a few different recipes online but basically it's just corn starch (corn flour in the UK) and water. A few recipes said equal parts and a few said 2:1 so I just threw in all the corn starch I had and them started with 1/2 that amount of water and added more. I also threw in some flour and baking soda as I didn't have a lot of cornstarch and some purple food colouring to make it fun.

You can see it's liquid but also holds it's shape and basically that means it's fun to play with and a good textural experience for toddlers or something like that. You grab a handful and it immediately turns to liquid and drips down your hands!

Since NBH was already cleaning downstairs I didn't want another mess to clean so we played with our Goop in the tub. In all honesty it's not hard to clean up as when it dries it turns into a chalky powder but playing in the tub meant Blondie Boy had a large canvas to paint and splatter and I could hose him and it down afterwards. I'm glad I added the food colouring as that meant he could also use it like finger paints, too.

It all washed off of both him and the tub with just the power of the hand-held shower head and because I used food colouring it didn't stain him or our tub. It was cheap, easy, messy and fun--everything you need to please a toddler and parent.

What's your favourite cheap and easy toddler craft/art activity?

GOMA a Go Go

This past Friday I decided to go into town and I took Blondie Boy to one of my favourite places in Glasgow, The Gallery of Modern Art or GOMA as it's more colloquially known. I'm a big fan of modern art in general and like all the public museums in Glasgow it is FREE! The building was originally the home of a wealthy tobacco merchant but has had many incarnations before becoming the museum which is the most visited modern art gallery in Scotland! It's also locally infamous for equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington which 9 times out of ten will have a traffic cone on its head.

The ground floor is where Gallery 1, which is a large space with a full wall of windows and massive ceilings, resides and it's normally the main exhibition. I have to say I was a bit disappointed because right now it's "Hertie Querty: Playful and Mischievous Works from the Collection" so sort of a best of if you will. The title is from old Scots. 'Hertie' means persons fond of fun, and merry. 'Querty ' means in good spirits, full of fun and mischief. A lot of the works on display were works that normally reside in other Galleries in the museum so I'd seen most of them before.

Blondie Boy seemed to like Roderick Buchanan's "Gobstopper" which is a film of children being driven through Glasgow's Clyde Tunnel, which is a road tunnel underneath the Clyde River. The children was mostly all trying to hold their breath the length of the drive which is about a minute. Blondie Boy loves watching other children so this didn't surprise me. The film was previously in Gallery 2 so I'd seen it before.

Blondie Boy wasn't sure what he thought of Jim Lambie's "Seven is Seven or Sunshine Bathed in Golden Glow" but Lambie was nominated for the Turner Prize and I'm a fan in general of anything with mirrored mosaic so it gets a mention. I also wasn't sure if I was allowed to take photos or not so this is one of the few pieces I thought I could get away with snapping a picture!

We went up to Gallery Two next but the film showing was in a really dark room and Blondie Boy didn't seem too keen so we went around the corner to the far back of the Gallery and I found what has to be one of the best kept secrets for children in Glasgow.

There was a wee nook full of children's creations and a shelf full of books, crayons, pencils, paper, projects, foam blocks and those beads on wire things if you know what I mean. Blondie Boy loved sitting in the just his size purple chair and colouring a picture for his Daddy.

I don't know about other children, but Blondie Boy loves exploring and speed-crawling (he's crazy fast) around new spaces he's never been before. So he really enjoyed just being able to crawl around and play with the blocks as well.

The strangest thing had to be when he pulled a book off the shelf, as he likes to do and I thought it looked strangely familiar. Umm, yes it looked familiar for a reason: it was part of a series of art books I modelled for when I was much younger.

I've seen the books in the States and I knew there were international versions since my Mom has Russian and Japanese versions but I'd never seen them in Scotland before. So here I am in all my glory telling children to put out a tablecloth and put on an old shirt before you work and for goodness sake's don't eat paint it's yucky!

I'm just like Gisele Bündchen, right? We had a really fun time together and I'm looking forward to taking him back again and exploring some of the other galleries. The museum has programs/classes for children during the school holidays and also every Saturday but they say they are geared for ages 3-11 so I'm not sure if it would be appropriate for Blondie Boy just yet.

GOMA is very child friendly and has two baby-change stations on the top and basement floors. There are high-chairs in the cafe in the basement and quiet breastfeeding spaces are available upon request. GOMA is a short walk (under 2 minutes) from Queen Street Station or a five minute walk from Glasgow Central Station.