Cardboard Tube Car

Recently we came across some things called 'cable clips' at our local dollar shop and I knew exactly what I was going to use them for - making cars out of toilet rolls of course! This was really easy to do and the girls enjoyed playing with the finished product, if you cant find cable clips you could also use plastic wire or split head pins to hold your wheels on.

WE USED:

* cable clips (from the Dollar Shop)
* toilet roll tube
* scissors
* paint
* marker/texta
* 4 x soft plastic bottle lids
* sharp pointed craft knife/safety pin/thick needle/nail

First cut a flap in the side of your toilet roll. This will be where your dolls will sit so make it to size. Leave one end uncut and fold the cut section up so you have a little windshield.

Using your craft knife or needle pierce a hole in the centre of your bottle lids.

These are the 'cable clips' we used to attach our wheels to our cardboard tube car, you could also use pipe cleaners threaded through and folded over, plastic coated wire (the type used for gardening) or split head pins.

Our finished product - so cute!

Princess doll going for a ride in her new wheels.

Squeak got to play with this first while Bubble was at Kindy and enjoyed herself immensely. She was too little to be left unsupervised though in case she worked out how to remove the cable clips!

I love where the knight ended up...

Hehe :-D Luckily our car has a roomy boot.

Straw and Pipe Cleaner Candles

My girls LOVE singing Happy Birthday, for the past few months it's practically been our family anthem. They both invent all sorts of things to be our 'cakes' and they think the part where we pretend to blow the candles out is utterly the best thing ever. Lately Bubble has been asking me over and over for 'real candles' to blow out, so today we did a bit of experimenting and came up with these. Suffice to say they were popular :-)

WE USED:

* drinking straws
* scissors
* pipecleaner (we used yellow)
* playdough or similar

First I cut the straws in half then cut slits in the sides about three quarters of the way down. Cut through about half of the straw but no more than that.

Push a cut pipecleaner through the slit in the side of the straw, it should slide in easily.

Push the pipecleaner all the way through the straw until you have enough of it sticking out the top to fold over. Bend and secure the other end into a loop so that it is secure and the pipecleaner cant be pulled out of the straw by accident.

You can then pull the 'flame' of the candle up and down using the looped end.

We made a playdough cake with our Christmas Playdough for our candles to go in.

As the girls blew out each candle we pulled the loops to make the flames disappear.

One candle blown out.

All gone! The flames pop back up easily when you push the pipecleaner up again. Be prepared for a LOT of singing ;-D

“Come over to play at the Childhood 101 We Play link up”

'C' Wall

We are on to the letter 'C' for our wall this week and started it off with some sponge painting.

Bubble making letter C's by cupping her hand.

'C' is for Cookie

My Grandad is going to heavily disapprove of our use of the word 'cookie' instead of 'biscuit', but hey it's 'C' week :-) Today we made these cardboard cookies for the C wall and Bubble had a stack of fun doing it.

WE USED:

* cardboard
* scissors
* child safe glue
* things to decorate your cookies (we used wood shavings, felt shapes, small pompoms and foam shapes. You could also use buttons, sequins, beads, coloured salt or sand, glitter - just about anything really!)

Cookies cut from cardboard ready to be 'iced'.

Our wood shaving 'chocolate'.

Circles cut from felt made great icing, paper would work just as well.

Yum! A whole plate full of cookies! :-)

'C' is for Carrot

Our second 'C' wall project was a wet string picture of, what else, a carrot :-)

WE USED:

* cardboard
* textas and pencils
* coloured paper
* tape
* wool/thick thread/twine
* childrens glue (we used Clag)
* something to mix glue in (we used a paper plate)

I drew a carrot onto some card, adding a few paper leaves taped on just to add interest, then drew an outline around the edge of the picture.

We put the wool onto our paper plate and covered it with glue until it was all goopy and thoroughly coated.

Then Bubble carefully laid her wet string around the outline.

Racing tubes

Today we made some simple 'racing tubes' for the matchbox cars. I just cut the ends of some paper towel tubes so they could be taped flat to the side of a shoebox (the photos better show how it was done) and we were off and racing. Both girls played with this for hours throughout the day!

WE USED:

* two shoeboxes
* strong tape (we used electrical)
* paper towel tubes
* scissors
* toy cars small enough to fit the tubes

Cut two slits in the end of the tubes so one section can be folded over.

Then tape flat to the side of a shoebox.

Squeak really enjoyed putting cars (and anything else she could fit) down the tubes.