I was just asked, by a very lovely lady on twitter, how do I get my blog name over my photos. This is something I struggled with in the beginning but then along came Picmonkey and made the whole thing beautifully simple. I was about to reply by e-mail but then figured there are probably others wondering the same thing, so, here is a super-quick Picmonkey tutorial on how to add text to images or watermark your photos. First go to www.picmonkey.com. Click on 'Edit a photo' Upload your chosen image and make sure you resize to a suitable size for your blog. I am going to resize ...
Archives for April 2013
Pom Pom Painting!
I have been trying to help the boy to get over his fear of painting and we had some success last week using toilet rolls to do some printing. After posting this I received a lovely comment from Shaunna on Google Plus who has the most wonderful blog, Fantastic Fun and Learning. Her site is full of fantastic ideas for children ranging in age from babies right through to kindergarten kids. If you are ever stuck for inspiration I highly recommend that you pop over and have a look. She suggested, since W does not like to get his hands dirty, to try painting with clothes pegs and pom poms as ...
Toilet Roll Craft: Printing Fun!
W is not a fan of messy play. I fear this may be my fault, perhaps being a little over zealous with the hand-wiping when he was smaller, as now he really does not like to get his hands dirty. Because of this he has not been a huge fan of painting at home as at nursery finger-painting is very much encouraged and he hates it. I am trying to get him over this gradually so this week we had some fun with paints but used empty toilet rolls instead of fingers or brushes. It actually worked really well. We just took an empty roll, squished it a bit, dipped in a tray of paints and stamped ...
Apple Care? What a joke.
This morning has not been a great morning due entirely to the sheer lack of customer care shown by Apple. I recently purchased an i-phone 5, one feature of which is Apples i-cloud. I had hoped to use this in conjunction with my macbook in order to back-up all my photos, and free up some space on the laptop, only to find that the software on my macbook was not compatible. Fair enough. We have had it a long time. Time for an upgrade. Having travelled out to the Apple store in Cribbs Causeway Bristol I was informed by a staff member last month that they couldn't help. I needed to ...
Calm before bedtime? Not in this house.
You can picture the scene. It has been a long day. We have played, bounced, cooked, crafted, run about like loons and now it is nearly bedtime for the boy. We sit down and watch a bit of C-Beebies with some milk....quietly...a little bit of peace so we are all ready for bed. And then.... ...Daddy gets home... ...and these are the moments I know he, and we, will treasure the most. ...
Cooking With Your Toddler: Tasty Tuna Fishcakes
As W is getting bigger he is enjoying helping out in the kitchen more and more and is becoming more confident the more we make things together. This week we had fun making these quick and simple tasty tuna fishcakes. For this you will need: One tin of tuna. One spring onion One slice of bread. Few sprigs of parsley Black pepper One tbsp ketchup Half tbsp mayonnaise Olive oil First place your tuna in a mixing bowl. W had great fun spooning it from a smaller bowl into the larger mixing bowl which is good gross motor practice and gave me time to trim and chop up the ...
Simple Summer Sun-Catchers
Hooray, it appears that spring may have finally sprung. At last we have some sunshine. In celebration of this the boy and I decided to make some sun-catchers. This came about from an amalgamation of ideas combining simple collage techniques inspired by A Mummy Too and some beautiful milk container sun-catchers made by My Little 3 and Me. For this however we used shapes cut from those thin plastic sheets that you find separating slices of some cheese, ours was Bavarian smoked applewood slices from Aldi, but any clear plastic would do. You will also need: Scissors Mod Podge ...
Teach Your Toddler Numbers With Beads and Pipe-Cleaners
I came across this wonderful post by Anna over at The Imagination Tree a few weeks ago. The nexy day the boy woke up at some truly ungodly hour and after breakfast we had a great time playing this until the rest of the world woke up. It was so quick to set up and there are hardly any supplies required. The Imagination Tree is chock-a-block full of great play-based learning posts so if you are ever stuck for inspiration I strongly advise you to pay this blog a visit. For this activity this was all we needed: Five small pieces of card, folded. Five different coloured ...
Silent Sunday: 14/04/2013
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Teach Your Toddler Numbers With The Hungry Caterpillar!
Following the success of learning shapes using peg monsters, I devised a very similar game for learning numbers with the boy. Although he seems pretty good at counting I am not sure how much he recognises actual numerals yet so I think this might help. This time however we made a very hungry caterpillar. This we constructed in exactly the same way as the peg monster. Here is how to do it. First paint a wooden clothes peg green and allow to dry. Stick two googley eyes to a red pom pom to form the head. When the peg is dry coat one side with glue and stick on your head and some smaller ...