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…?

Making the weather

I was taking my daughter to school this morning and it was frosty and the grass was white. It looked like all the grass had been painted. Which gave me an idea…

It might be fun to try to make the weather. So get some grass and paint it white to make frost. You could make rain by painting some cotton wool grey (to be the clouds) or else you could drip some water through something…

Snow could be fun. You could make that with breadcrumbs perhaps? Or perhaps polystyrene? Or you could even screw up loads and loads of little balls of paper. I don’t know really. This is supposed to be a test of your imagination.

Sunshine is the trickiest one to make. I could only think of setting fire to things. Not a good plan if you have a toddler helping you. Maybe you can come up  a better plan? Hmm, still thinking…  It’s quite nice thinking about sunshine on a frosty day.

Ebay for Kids

Even very young kids can use Ebay with a little help from their parents. I let my 7 year old use my Ebay account and she was soon bidding on Pokemon cards with her pocket money. She enjoyed the excitement of waiting to see if she’d won or lost in those final few moments, and I think it was a good way for her to learn maths and money. She cried just once when she was outbid by 3p on a Rare Legendary Zapdos. I think that was a useful lesson too. She soon realised she needed to bid the maximum price she was prepared to go to, and that it was best to bid in the closing few minutes of any auction.

I only started to discourage her from her Ebay shopping when it was costing me a fortune in post and packing. This was my fault, I’d gone so far in explaining how the auctions worked and wimped out of describing these complicated added costs of Ebay.  ’Ebay Tax’ as I like to call P&P. She knew she had just £2 pocket money,  but every time she spent £2 on various cheap auctions I’d end up paying a fiver or more on post to get the stuff to her.  Although I can say that all her 30p card purchases did wonders for my Ebay rating..!

If you don’t want to spend money on Ebay with your kids it’s a lot of fun to sell stuff on there. Of course your children won’t get excited when you list a pair of jeans that don’t fit right, but for the small cost of a listing fee you can sell all kinds of fun stuff on Ebay.

One day we decided to go to the beach to find a pebble to sell. It was interesting photographing our little pebble, then checking out the bids. In the end it sold for 86p. Ebay have a charity auction feature that’s very easy to use, so our pebble raised a little bit for a good cause too.

Have a think and I’m sure you and you kids could find something silly to list on Ebay too.

I’m selling a jar of Bovril at the moment. Though actually that’s nothing to do with the kids at all… I just like Ebay and I was in a kind of ‘what the heck’ mood.

Oooh, I’ve had a bid!

Click here if you want to buy a rare jar of Vegetarian Bovril.

Toast Buildings

You need: Toast, spreads (eg. jam, butter, peanut butter, cheese spread)

Instructions: Toast some bread. This works better if the bread is sliced thickly from an uncut loaf, but ordinary medium sliced stuff will do.

Cut the toast into lots of small pieces. Brick shaped rectangles are best. Use butter, jam or other sticky stuff to build walls. See if you can make a house or a bridge with your toast-bricks.

Eat it.