Ice

The  kids in our street were fascinated by a puddle that had turned to ice. My daughter and her friend tried to think of some icy games.

I have a star shaped ice cube maker and I let them fill it with orange juice. When it was set they both popped the orange ice cubes in their mouths and said, ‘Eurgh.’ Unfortunately they’d used undiluted orange squash.

They tried to make icicles outside too, pouring water from a tree branch, and leaving bottles of water outside to see if they’d freeze in the night. It’s warmer today so it didn’t work but it was a good try!

Another thing you can do with ice is to make a frozen hand. I do this when we have a Halloween party. Fill a rubber glove with water and put it in the freezer. You can use food colouring too if you like. When you unwrap the ice-glove you have a hand made of ice. The fingers sometimes fall off as you unwrap it, but I just say it’s a zombie’s hand. That can happen with zombies.

Another thing we do sometimes is make a board game with ice cubes as the playing pieces. We’ll draw a board with different sections showing what will happen to the ice if it lands there.  We can have the hot water dunk, the salt sprinkle, the re-freeze, the hold-in-your-hand. You can use your imagination to come up with squares showing what will happen to  the ice.  One of the squares is usually the ‘down your back’  and no one wants to land there! The little ice cubes will circle the board, just throw a dice to move them, the last ice cube standing after all this ice cube torture will be the winner.

There’s lots of fun to be had with ice. Unless you land on a ‘down your back’ square, that’s no fun at all!

Pebble People

We’re lucky enough to live near a beach. Last Sunday we headed to the sea in the rain to look for pebble body parts. I was looking for dog’s head shaped pebbles and my daughter was looking for penguin wings and feet. We found a lot of pebbles we liked. When we got home and coloured in our pebbles with pens, then I glued our pebble creatures together with a glue gun. Glue guns are great, I got mine from Woolworths and it was just £3!

In the end my daughter made a penguin and a fox and I made a monster. I was going to make a man but we’d run out of leg shaped pebbles. With no legs available I had to improvise. I made a man trapped under a pebble rock fall. He had no legs but a flat pebble painted red worked well for his blood.

Advent Calendar in your head

Last December my boyfriend emailed me every day until Christma,  to tell me what was in ‘the advent calendar that exists only in his head’. It was a funny, sweet, idea and the Christmas things in his head could always make me smile. ‘Grandpa asleep in front of the TV’ or ‘A boy saying ‘No’ to another helping of turkey’ – that kind of thing.

This year we’re living together, so he doesn’t need to email, I just ask him what’s in his advent calendar that exists only in his head. My daughter loves joining in with this game too. She has a Lego City advent calendar, but an advent calendar in her head too.

Whats in your advent calendar?

Food you can karate chop

I was giving my daughter her snack after school, and somehow got to wondering which foods you could eat after they’d been hit with a karate chop.

My daughter thought it would work with pizza,.I disagree, the dough wouldn’t be brittle enough to shatter. You’d just get a cheese and tomato flavour hand.

Chocolate possibly? If suspended between two bricks.

Poppadoms are an obvious choice for karate chop food. The crispy, crunchy things need shattering into pieces, and a swift chop with the side of a hand will do the job nicely.

Interestingly you can’t karate chop a chop. We’re still thinking of more karate chop food here…

Very crispy bacon?

Pretend Puke

You need: Food like cereals, flour, bread, frozen peas, carrot, tomato ketchup, food colouring, coffee granules, dried herbs and liquid like water, orange juice, milk - pretty much anything will do!

Instructions: Give your kids a bowl each and put a mixture of food and drinks on the table. They mix up whatever they like to make their own home-made pretend vomit. Chopped up carrots and peas help to make it lok authentic. If you’re feeling adventurous you can pour it on the pavement and watch people react to the yucky stuff.

Alternatively you can make ‘witches potion’, this is a similar game and involves mixing up anything you find to make a mixture that makes you go ‘eurgh’. Washing up liquid is a good addition for a potion.

Countries made of peas

When you have peas for tea spread them out and try to make your pile of peas into the shape of a country. See if anyone can guess which country it’s supposed to be.

If you’re rubbish at geography and find this hard make any old shape and claim it’s Azerbaijan. No one will argue.

Toys Zip Wire

 

Tie a long piece of string from the top of your banisters, then fasten the other end to something heavy at the bottom of the stairs. Make a ring with a smaller bit of string making sure that it’s loose enough to  go up and down the longer piece. You’ll need to fix an elastic band into this circle.

Assemble some brave teddy bears and other soft toys. Put the elastic band around your toy’s neck, and take them to the top of your zip-wire. Let go and watch them speed down the death slide!

Stickering

You can buy A4 sheets of adhesive backed paper from larger stationary shops. Drawing designs on this sticker paper and then cutting around these is a very easy way to create home-made stickers.

If you’re going to stick your stickers in public it’s nice to have a theme. You could make your stickers of a specific design and them whenever you see a certain image stick your sticker there. Perhaps you could draw some cheese stickers and stick this whenever you saw a mouse? That’s probably not a great example - how many mice do you see in posters? But you get the idea!

I can’t really approve of random street stickering as that’s messy and graffiti-ish, but thoughtful stickering is cool - it’s street art! How about checking out posters or  likely stickering places near you and then designing a sticker that fits specifically to that place? Maybe a speech or thought bubble with witty words, or perhaps you could draw some clothes to help cover up a lady in a picture who isn’t wearing much? Look around and think what you could do.

Whether you want to make stickers just to decorate your home or friends, or as street art,  stickering is fun – and as easy as sketching a picture on a bit of adhesive paper.

If you get into Stickering this is a useful site, and for Street Art inspiration you can’t beat the Wooster Collective or Streetsy.

Tough Books Challenge

This is a game for older kids.

Parents usually have classic novels on their bookshelves. They’re likely to be a bit dusty and only there to impress the neighbours. Or maybe there’s some classic literary work that Dad remembers reading at school, and keeps because he got a B+ for writing an essay on it? You know the kind of book I mean. Anything written over a hundred years ago is fine. So find a couple of these books – you’ll need one for each participant in the game – then the Tough Books Challenge can commence.

If you don’t find books like these at home you can print them out from websites like as this one. You probably won’t need more than a chapter each.

OK, let the challenge begin! Each person takes his dusty old work of literature, and then reads it. For as long as possible. Fall asleep on the job and you’re out.

No breaks are allowed, not to get snacks, or to check emails, or to watch the telly, or to wee, or Wii. 

That’s it. It’s a simple game really. Stop reading and you lose. It’s a ‘last longest’ challenge.

Sniggering is allowed, especially when you find  sentences like, ‘The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar.’ Sniggering at these classic books silly old-ness is an important part of the game. As is arguing over which book is the most boring. Or ‘the most boringest’ .  Using improper English whilst reading classics of English Literature is to be encouraged during the challenge.

In fact rewriting classics into nowadays English could be a whole new game. (I just thought of it!)

‘The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar.’

Or: ‘Some foggy afternoon he went down that  muddy old Temple Bar.’

I know which line I like best.

You can also do this challenge with the Bible.

More Silly Fun Stuff ideas for the Bible to follow…

Painting with cheese

I just liked that title. I’m not sure whether it is actually possible to paint with cheese? Cheddar cheese would leave a greasy smear. Cheese spread perhaps? A bit too sticky. And blue cheese isn’t even blue..!

This did remind me of the day my daughter was bored and whiney in the garden. I was trying to read and didn’t want to play with her. So I suggested she painted with the leaves and flowers that she could find. So she got some paper and made green smears with grass and leaves, and then she painted pink smudges with some flower petals. It wasn’t much of a picture (I didn’t tell her that) but it kept her busy while I read my book.

So, painting with cheese – no. Painting with leaves – yes!

Hmm, I suppose you could try Brie on black paper…?