Fishing Game Tutorial

Jacob frequently asks to play fishing.  This involves sitting on the edge of the decking, waving bamboo sticks around and proclaiming that we've caught Stuff (Stuff doesn't have to be limited to fish.  We've caught bears, spiders, sharks, flowers, vegetables ... pretty much anything he can imagine or see).  Still, I thought it would be nice if he had a proper fishing game, and having some felt in various colours, I decided to make a rainbow of fish.

I'm sure I must have seen this fishing game somewhere, but I don't recall where so I can't add credit where it's due.  Still, I'm sure it's different enough that I can claim intellectual property ;)  I should really have done pictures for a tutorial as I was making them, but it's pretty simple really, so I'll just make it up.

1. Get some felt.  Tesco do a nice set of multi-coloured felt, which I've used for tons of craft projects where I needed little bits.  Otherwise, I buy individual sheets as I need them.

2. Imagine a fish shape.  Better yet, draw a fish shape on a piece of paper.  Copy/trace this onto your felt (fold it first, so you get both sides).  Cut them out (at the same time.  Pin them together to aid this).

3. This tutorial doesn't sound much like a proper tutorial.  Sorry.

4.  Sew on buttons for eyes, or bits of felt, or fabric, or whatever you like.  I did some with buttons, some with bits of white felt sewn on with black French knots for pupils.  I don't know if fish have pupils.

5.  Sew on fins, if you want them.  I embroidered some, used some sticky felt shapes I had in my Box for others.  If you haven't got a Box, I can't help you here.

6.  Sew the sides of the fish together, using blanket stitch, because it looks nice.  Look on youtube for blanket stitch tutorials, it's very easy.  I used a nice contrasting thread.  When I ran out of patience, I sewed straight lines on the back finny bit, so I didn't have to stuff it.

7.  Before you get to the end, stuff using fibrefill or whatever floats your boat.

8.  Close it off at the mouth area, adding a washer to your last stitch and finishing off under the washer.  After I spent a week searching for (and finding!) individual washers in car parks, I found that you can buy a box of about a million of the fuckers, for about 99p from Poundstretcher.  If your consumerist sensibilities don't allow you to shop in Poundstretcher, I can't help you.

9.  Spent fricking ages trying to find cheap magnets-with-holes-in-them to tie onto string for a fishing rod.  Give up, and buy these cool extendable picker-upper things from the cheap yellow-box section of Tesco.  They have a super-strong magnet on one end, collapse into a pen shape, are good for picking up things that have fallen into tiny gaps, and work nicely as fishing rods in a magnetic fishing game.

10.  Make a nice drawstring pondy thing, to keep it all in and use as a pond to fish in.  I haven't done this yet.

11.  Ta-dah!  Marvel at your incredible crafting skills.  I do, on a daily basis.

Jacob LOVES this game, he makes his own rules up, but he mostly likes waving the stick around and doing the colours of the fish in English and Welsh.  See, it's totally educational.

Enjoy ;)

Here Comes Science

Over the last couple of weeks, Jacob has developed a burning passion for Science.  I'm struggling to recall exactly how it came about, but each and every day I have around twenty-billion requests of "Can we do some more Science please Mummy?".

So far, we've done lots of bubble blowing (experimenting with different-sized and shaped wands), colour mixing, gravity (with a slinky on the stairs - didn't really work as the slinky was a cheap plastic one.  The real ones are surprisingly pricey) and water (pouring and measuring and bubbles and more pouring and splashing and pouring).  We also have 'science baths', where we hypothesise what kind of objects will sink or float, and then try them out.  Again and again and again.

I've been researching science materials and activities online, and it seems pretty much anything with an element of discovery can fall into this category for preschoolers.  There's a great resource of activities here at Productive Parenting, where you can choose your child's age and the learning category and get a list of activities from their library.  Pre-kinders has a load of great ideas and some printable materials.  I've started pinning some bits and bobs to my Preschool Science pinboard but haven't found much yet.

Of course, the best resource of all is the They Might Be Giants CD and DVD 'Here Comes Science'.  I could happily watch this all day.

Mostly, we're just having fun, and it's great having a focus to fill our days.  We try and get out for a nature walk in the woods that surround our house most days, where we can look at the weather, the seasons, learn about plants, and chuck stuff in the river to see if it floats or sinks (this is a very popular activity).  On Thursday, we set off into a slightly damp day, one of us sensibly bringing an umbrella along.  By the time we'd walked for 45 minutes and got a good couple of miles away from the house, the heavens opened and it POURED down.  Jacob looked down at my jeans, which were soaked from the knees down, and said "Mummy, I think we need to go to a waterproof shop and get you some waterproof trousers when we get home".  In his wellies and full waterproofs, he was happy to skip along in the ditches beside the path, splish-splash-splosh-splishing to his heart's content.

When we got home, we stripped off, wrapped ourselves in towels, and had some hot chocolate.  I've just found out that my over-the-road neighbour is going to be homeschooling her daughter.  Right now, I'm pretty jealous of them.  I could get used to this.