An Invitation to draw

Most children LOVE to draw but i do find Tara will 9/10 draw a bird or a house and Mason will draw a face or a digger but how do i encourage variety?

I left an invitation to draw on the table on morning and they jumped at completing them!

I flicked through magazines to find some interesting pictures, then cut them out leaving out half of the picture. Tara had half a butterfly and Mason had half a duck.

They then had to use their imagination to complete the picture and surrounding environment. These would be great to keep up your sleeve for long car rides, plane trips or when you just need that five minutes to make a phone call!

Upcycle toy chest to dino world

Our toy chest was great for storing blankets when the kids were small but lets face it, all those stuffed toys are just dust collectors so we handed down our teds and i placed a custom sized peice of astroturf (fake grass) on the lid with Mason's dinsoaurs, trees and rocks on it. Inside the chest are other toys that are suited for play on top of the chest like Tara's my little pony collection, some horses and farm animals. These can be swapped by whoever is playing at the chest. I left a small chair next to the chest to make it easier to play although cushions would do nicely too!

Fish Tank Artwork

How do you display your child's artwork? If your house is like mine we seem to find it hard to find the fridge handle among all the glittery colourful pieces Tara has made especially for us.
One unique way to display a lovely picture is by laminating it in plastic and adding it to your fish tank as a background. We put ours in our actual fish tank so that is why we laminated it first but if you wanted to secure it to the outside of a clear tank with blu tak it would also look just as good
Tara was very proud of her fish picture and seeing it in her own fish tank made her smile. The fish even enjoyed the new decor :p

Spring quails

Our property is certainly showing signs of spring time! We have had 5 baby quails hatch recently and they are Tara's favourite pass time. Catching those quick quails is a challenge but she has now mastered it and loves giving them a pat
Good practice for being gentle when her baby brother comes along!

National Geographic matching

I bought these gorgeous Austrailian marsupials and birds from the National Geographic shop

http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/shop/aussie-birds-figurines-set.htm

They are beautifully handcrafted and very realistic. To make a matching game i googled images of the animal in its habitat and wrote its proper name underneath.



Tara matches them to the correct card

At the age of 30 months she is now really enjoying pretend play and making up little voices for all her animals which is really lovely