Outdoor play-camping and kitchen

Follow this link for the Play accademy to see more outdoor play ideas...http://nurturestore.co.uk/tag/the-play-academy-2
So the last week or so we have had some semi decent weather-not paddling pool weather but certainly outdoor weather. The good thing with outdoor play is it means the house stays tidy :-) and I can get on with a bit of gardenning while the children play.
Anyway, firstly I decided it would be quite a nice idea to make a home made tent. I bought 5 long bamboo sticks from a DIY store and me and the kids tied them into a basic tent shape. Unfortunately I didn't have an ideal blanket to cover it with as all my spare ones have been used as floor cloths for painting so we used a fitted sheet.


If we do this activity again, then I am going to buy a special 'thing' which can be used to make a tipee! These can be bought from the DIY store as they are designed for making a tipee to grown creeping plants on!

In addition to the tent I decided to bring the children's kitchen accessories out which we bought in Ikea. They don't use them much in the house but I saw many ideas on blogs about setting up outdoor kitchens so thought they would be ideal for this. Added to that I brought out a mini oven which I purchased for £3 at a local car boot sale.

Oh no rain again...

It may be July but the last few days we have had nothing but rain. I must admit I really do struggle to keep the kids entertained and also to keep my patience when stuck in all day. Here are a few things we have been doing any way. Sensory tubThe latest sensory tub for this month (except I am never organised enough to actually present the kids with it at the start of the calender month) is a kind of sweet shop/ice cream shop theme. I added pompoms, plastic reuseable ice cubs, scoups, bowls and tongs and then I added some beeds to empty gumball machines. The kids have used this to play sweet shops as well as making sequencing patterns with the coloured pom poms and ice cubes using the ice cube trays. In the Pond I came across some wonderful pre school packs on a site called homeschool creations which I have been printing off to put aside for rainy days. Each one of them fits in with a theme and I have that many books that I should be able to find a related book for each one so I thought on rainy days we could focus on a different pre school pack. I am the kind of person who if I don't have a plan, I will just tend to leave the kids messing around and spend far too much time online browsing Facebook etc.. Anyway the first one I chose was the Pond theme as we have a book called In the Pond which fits in well with this! Also, on a site called Sparklebox.co.uk I found some wonderful 'life cycle of a frog' cut and paste activities! Again these fitted perfectly with the book! and finally here is a video of Melissa singing a song she learnt at ballet which cheered us all up in this gawd awful weather!!!