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 ;)

Octonauts and the Great Ice Capade

(I was undecided as to whether 'Ice Capade' should be one word or two.  I feel it should be one, but The Ice Capades, are two, as I found when googling.  I also found this video from 1988, showing an unfeasibly-young Jason Bateman and Alyssa Milano presenting Super Mario Bros at the Ice Capades.  It's worth it, even if just for Jason Bateman's awesome hair-and-jumper combination.)

Before Jacob was even a twinkle in anyone's eye, we stumbled across an original Octonauts book in Borders and as the style appealed to our kawaii-sensibilities, we bought it.  We subsequently had a child, and when he became old enough to enjoy use CBeebies as a babysitter, we were very excited to find that they were in the process of making it into an animated series.

Of course, because Jacob is a sensible child, he loves the Octonauts with a passion second to none, and we are overjoyed that we can indulge our whims with him, rather than having to put up with interminable games of things we don't care tuppence about (like ... I'm struggling to think of another CBeebies show with a comparible amount of merchandise that we actually dislike.  We do like our children's TV shows.  We used to record Charlie and Lola to watch before bed ... again, pre-Jacob).

Anyway, today marked our fourth consecutive nappy-free day, so we decided to get Jacob something to say well done.  By chance, Tesco had the Peso playset which is usually impossible to find (and which is why we have several Barnacles and Kwaziis from various playsets, but no Peso), so we snapped it up.  Jacob was practically shaking with excitement when we told him what it was for :D

And by pure coincidence, I spent much of yesterday evening progressively freezing layers of Octonauts toys into a tupperware container, ready for a Science experiment on liquids and solids today.  When we got home, I presented Jacob with his very own Octonauts iceberg (Peso even came with an iceberg, we really could not have planned this better) to investigate.

He also had a bowl of warm water, a sponge, a pipette, a blunt knife and a salt-shaker.  Peso oversaw all the ice-breaking action.

Jacob had a whale (ha) of a time, scrubbing the iceblock, sprinkling it with salt and hearing it crack, and biting it with the shark-like teeth of the Gup-B.

As he rescued each Octonaut/Creature from the ice, they were lined up and attended to by medic Peso, who wrapped them warmly in the towel so they could recover from their iceventure.

We ended up with a bowl of freezing cold water, a soaking wet carpet, and a very happy child who understands the properties of ice, the differences between liquid and solid, and why things float or sink.  Perhaps an activity better suited to the garden on a hot day, but a winner nonetheless.


Disclaimer: post not sponsored by Mattel.  But if they would like to send me a shed-load of free Octonauts toys as a thank you, they would be most welcome :D

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.

Brown bear, brown bear...

Jacob's current favourite game is getting all his people and animals out, and lining them up, or standing them in a circle so they can play the 'hokey-cokey' (which is just too cute for words).

But when he's had enough of that, he gets bored and grumpy and sad pretty quickly.  I feel like I should be 'doing' more varied things with him, although if he wants to spend an hour constructing a precarious line of figures across the living room floor, all trying to pull a camel out of the mud, then who am I to suggest he should be doing something more productive?

We're getting right into the questioning stage, and his thirst for knowledge is already testing our intelligence.  This week's gems have included:

"Mummy, who knows what happened to toast?"
"Mummy, who knows what's in Quorn pieces?"
"Daddy, what's a website?"

Today he set up his own activity of matching animals: he got out a set of animal magnets, went and got out his tray of animals, lay out the magnets, and began searching through the animals for matching ones to lay down on top.  All unprompted.  As it turned out, we only had a few animals which matched the ones on the magnets, so it was a short-lived game, and he wanted to do more matching.

Casting around for inspiration, I grabbed our 'Brown bear, brown bear' book, and challenged him to find five Things of the same colour for each animal.  Results as follows:

Brown bear 

 Red bird

 Yellow duck

 Blue horse

 Green frog

 Purple cat

 White dog

Black sheep

(He ran out of steam when we got to Goldfish, so we'll have to save that for another day)

He had a great time, he was so inventive with the objects he found for each colour, and it killed half an hour of a freezing cold, rainy day.  It made me think that I should have some Montessori-type activities or similar out and available for Jacob to work with, when the mood strikes him.

A while ago, I bought the Toddler's Busy Book, which I really need to unearth for days like this.  I'll be back to report more on what takes his fancy, any suggestions for similar activities will be gratefully received ;)