Rebecca's guitar

These half termly projects a definatly keeping up on our toes!

The brief this time was to create an instrument using 100% recycled materials.

Lighting the matches then blowing them out was stretching the recycled theme a tad, but the elastic bands were courtesy of the Royal Mail, the decor an old paper and the shell a comfort bottle so it really was our only cheat!
Rebecca enjoyed making it, not so sure I'm going to enjoy the ermmm music it plays on it's return!

Party preperation underway for June!

Any guesses?

Puppy Party

Sophie is a frustrated dog owner due to the fact that neither of her parents have any desire to own a dog! So her wanting a puppy party came as no surprise!

Pinterest was full of ideas and though I drew lots of ideas from there, the general idea was based on the ds game nintendogs.

First the girls chose, named and adopted a puppy - the certificates were then laminated for them. This done they moved through to the hall where there were activities set out for them to do as they wished.

The shop was a big hit, each girl was given an envelope of puppy pounds with their dog which they were able to spend at the shop on leads, accesories, toys, blanket and puppy food ( - cereal served in new, clean dog bowls.)

The shop was not quite set up when we took the pictures - but at least we remembered to take some!

Boutique, here they were able to give their dogs a wash and brush up!

Comberton vets, here the girls made sure their dog was healthy using a checklist.

The girls made tags to put on their collars using Hama beads, why I had imagined they would make circles I don't know they were far more creative! S shapes, squares, bones and hearts to name a few.

They decorated a white party box as their dogs pet carrier

We set up an agility course in the garden and the girls took part in time trials with a certificate for the fastest.

And of course a puppy cake which was inspired by a piece of art Sophie had created for a school project.

The best part of the party for me came after the initial excitement calmed down and the girls were just playing with their puppies, making up games with them. It was encouraging that at 8 and 9 they were still able to simply play.

Puppy power!

Sophie's birthday comes hot on the heels of Annie's and so it's a quick turn around as we head from frozen to puppies! Toy ones obviously! Right now I'm in the middle of sewing accessories! But the invites are done and delivered!

What all the best dressed pups are wearing this year!

Let it gooooo.....

Frozen is still a favourite with our youngest daughter, so there wasn't really any question as to what her party would be!

Pinterest is full of great ideas for parties especially frozen parties - the mistake is to let your 5 year old get involved! As often is the case I forgot till after the event to take photos! At most of the girls parties the camera makes it's appearance with the cake! This party was no exception, but most of the ideas are to be found on Pinterest posted by people who remember to take pictures!
Annie's party consisted of a mixture of jumping around games, quiet games, individual and team games.
Each of the children was given a named plastic cup placed on a window ledge and any prizes they collected went in the cup!
We started with some old favourites played with a frozen twist!
Musical statues - when the music stops you freeze like Anna!
Musical bumps - when the music stops act like a troll and roll (roll into a ball rather than doing a forward roll!)
We then put the children into teams for some of the games:
The Snowball Game
Teams of children got to throw white pom-poms into numbered buckets, scoring the number of points on the bucket.

Snowball Skittles
Polystyrene cups were decorated to look like snowmen, stacked into a pyramid, the teams then took turns to throw snowball Pom poms at them scoring 1 point for every cup knocked down.
We played these at the same time, two teams on each then swopped over so that the time spent waiting was limited.
Pin the Nose on Olaf
Each team had a picture of Olaf and a carrot nose each which they attempted to blu tack in the right place.
Do You Want to Build a Snowman?

These were printed from Pinterest then laminated for durability and were a good quieter game, each team had a set and a dice and the teams raced each other.
Pairs

Each team had a set of frozen pairs, printed from Disneys activity pack, they took turns to play pairs with the first team to find all the pairs winning
We then moved to Some individual games :
Each corner of the room had a character, Elsa, Anna, Svenn and Christoff, when instructed the children had to choose a character, a card was then drawn from a set if cards containing the four characters if your character was chosen you were out.
Frozen heart

Basically hot potato with a heart!
Pass the parcel
This was regular pass the parcel, but at the end while sitting in their circle each child was given one of the Pom Pom snowballs from the earlier games, a felt nose attatched to an elastic band, two adhesive google eyes and a mouth cut from sticky felt. With help the children transformed their snowball into a snowman.

The goody bags were the take home present in themselves, exercising my sewing machine skills somewhat!

Inside was a roll of frozen activity sheets, a deconstructed Olaf and only because mr Tesco reduced them to 10p a pack of frozen stickers!
It was fun to organise and run and she loved it!

Sophie's art project

For Sophie's school project she had to choose a material and create a piece of art.

Sophie chose paper.

She spent weeks quilling her circles, and ignored my suggestion that she try to make them the same size.
It was only when she glued them on I could see that she was using the different sizes to create her design and it worked really well. She finished it the morning that it was due in which is so Sophie but was thrilled with the result.

Sweet Potato Casserole ..... With a twist!

Well quite a big twist!
We first made Sweet potato casserole as our contribution to an American thanksgiving meal and it was ....well sweet, really sweet which was kind of ok but slightly odd for a savoury dish!

Left with surplus mini marshmallows and pecans I toyed with making it again but to be fair there are better uses for sweet potato, but what if I switched the potato for Apple, nice tart cooking apples?

So stew cooking apples and place in a casserole dish with no extra sugar

- there is plenty of that on top! I used about 6 for this dish.

Then mix 1 1/2 cups of crushed cornflakes with 1/2 cup of chopped pecans and 1tablespoon of brown sugar.
Melt 50g of butter and mix into cornflake mixture.
Place the cornflake mixture on the apple in diagonal lines with approximately 4cm gap in between.
Place in a preheated oven, 180c for about 15 min, till cornflakes are browned but not burnt ( you need to watch it they turn quickly!)
Allow to cool for 5 min then fill the gaps with marshmallows and bake until mallows are golden brown.

Delicious wth ice cream!