It was my daughter's birthday party last Friday night and we invited her friends to come over for some "brinner" (breakfast at dinner). But they had to wear their pyjamas!

Everything revolved around breakfast.  

Sweets made from cereals

Juice!

Cereal (of course!)

And a little bit of fruit.

Here's the whole smorgasbord before we added sausages, hash browns and pancakes.  My wonderful niece Ella helped style the table.  She's soooo great.

While I had fun making little signs for all of the food I realised that, with twelve year olds, all that food would last about sixty seconds.  What to do with the other hour and fifty nine minutes?

Ella and Annie kept the girls busy with a pancake toss; Frootloop® necklace creations and a breakfast quiz.  But I needed more....

I knew I had some remnants of  lovely, bright fabric....  

And some letter stencils from another project.

In two sizes, with flowers, hearts and other accesories.  An idea was forming.

I attached some Vliesofix (iron-on fusible webbing) to the squares of fabric.

 Each of the girls used the stencils to cut out their name or other patterns.

They then queued and myself and my sister ironed them onto pillow cases. 

But who was to go first in choosing the colour of their pillow case?  

I wrote numbers onto lots of small balloons and the girls pulled them out of the fish bowl.

We filled some other balloons with helium and attached them with ribbons to small boxes of cereal to take home (along with their finished pillow case).  No photos of them today, sorry.

Farm Fun

Our finished scarecrow!

A couple of weeks ago we finished making our scarecrow at school and entered him in a competition at our local garden show. We decided to do something really different for our scarecrow and put him on an old bike. Another teacher worked with me and we began constructing our scarecrow from recycled materials.

Firstly we spayed the whole bike white and cut up old plastic table cloths to weave around the spokes of the bike. This was a great project alone and would make a fabulous garden ornament.

We found an old basket and the children painted it in pastel colours.

Farms @ the playdough table 

We have been talking about farms and farm animals at school. This week I cut up some old bamboo blinds that had been given to me into a variety of different lengths. These were used at our playdough table as fences for the farm, paddocks and hurdles for the horses. The green playdough was used to secure the fences. It was food for the animals and also grass and foliage for our farm. This was a very popular activity today.

Farms @ the wonder table 

Learning to Crochet

We have just finished two beautiful weeks of school holidays and amongst other things I learnt how to crochet. My daughter and I had seen some lovely baskets on the blog "My Poppet" and we were determined to master crocheting. My daughter is 11 and got the gist of it straight away.  I took a lot longer...

Back at school today, I put our crocheted baskets on the wonder table with a variety of flowers and foliage for the children to sort. They are lovely and sturdy but soft all at the same time!

Mother's Day

It is Mother's Day here in Australia on May the 12th so we have been enjoying talking about just how wonderful our Mums are. I find, when asking three year olds about their Mothers I get soo many beautiful, funny and interesting comments - and I love writing them on their paintings for the Mums to read.

We have made some gorgeous bags for our Mums, beautiful wrapping paper, cards, paintings of our Mums and hearts.

Today I thought I would feature our painted hearts and our beautiful wrapping paper.

I took some paper towels and cut them into heart shapes. The children then used eye-droppers to drop ink all over the heart. This took them a little while to grasp the concept of the eye-dropper but  it was a great fine motor activity and wonderful for discovering colour mixing.

When dry I pegged them to our classroom tree to be admired from inside and out!

Mothers Day wrapping paper:

I love brown paper, so I use it whenever I can. With the pastel colours I mixed up I thought it looked just delightful.

I made the printing stamps by cutting out hearts of kitchen sponges and glued them onto recycled containers.

I also used my hot-glue gun to make some hearts on wooden blocks. 

I think the result is lovely!

Some of the paintings of our Mums. Don't you just love them!

Funky Frames

FRAMES AT HOME:

Making funky frames at home.

Today we scrounged around the house to find some wooden frames that we could paint and display some of our artwork and photos.

These are two of the frames that were in desperate need of some creative intervention.

We started by painting the frames black.

This was a mini canvas that was needing to be painted over. I found a great drawing that my son had done of a pirate ship. I first painted a rough black boarder and let it dry. I traced the picture using carbon paper.

And voila!

I love using just black and white because it is soo striking and together the frames have a bold presence. 

I love the result and only for a few hours work!

FRAMES AT SCHOOL:

Making funky frames at school.

I filled old sauce bottle with equal amounts of paint and PVA glue.

Mix them up thoroughly.

And squeeze...

And squeeze...

And squeeze...

When these are dry they have a fabulous shiny finish. I took photos of all the children in my class and displayed on a wall which attracts a lot of attention and stimulates plenty of conversation.

Drag out some old photo frames or make some out of cardboard and enjoy displaying your children's photos and artwork.