A new Easter hunt challenge

I know this is a little late to be of use to anyone for this year, but given that I have the template files to hand from making these on Friday night, I should post them before I either loose them to the depths of my hard drive file structure, or just forget to blog about them altogether when Easter comes around next year. If I'm still around and posting this time next year then I'll try and remember to link to this again to remind folk that it's here.

I've written about how we do egg hunts here before, and we did that again this year, but we added another game into the mix at the last minute. My friend Jennifer had got all the kids a chocolate Peter Rabbit each, so the plan was to have them "earn it". I wanted to sort out some kind of challenge that they could complete in their own time. I had seven kids doing this that were between six and nine years old and I only had the idea to do it the night before, so had to make the answer sheets and bunny clues rather hurredly.

I've drawn these little bunnies in this specific way since I was a kid, and I used to draw them exploding up into the air as if they were farting themselves off the ground like this...

That's how mature I am, and they made my mum giggle, so of course I kept doing it!

I decided to chunk up my "classic bunny" to give enough space to put the challenge clues on his tummy, and remove his signature propulsion system to make little rabbit markers that could be "hidden" around the garden for the kids to find and collect clues from.

The clues I came up with were to have each rabbit have a "clue letter" that you would have to write down next to the rabbit's number to spell out a password to get your chocolate bunny. To make it a bit tougher for the older kids, so that they couldn't just find a few rabbits and then guess the rest of the letters to complete the password, I also put a different famous rabbit on each marker that they had to make a note of next to that marker's number too.

Being extra fancy like we are around here, I used some little bulldog clips to attach the answer sheets to some hard backed kids books we had on the shelf and then used a bit of yarn to tie a pen to each, so that the kids would find it easier to go around gathering and writing the clues down.

The kids did a grand job on this challenge. Everyone completed it and got their chocolate bunny within about 20 minutes, which worked out really nicely. They had twelve bunny markers to find and the twelve "clue letters" when put together spelled out the prize password: "Hot Cross Buns".

If you wanted to make this easier then you could omit the extra step of having to name each rabbit found, or to make it harder you could have the code letters not be in order and they would have to figure out the password like an anagram puzzle at the end. Lots of ways of tailoring this to fit your crowd.

Leave it to Paul to hide eggs in a tree...

I've put a few printables here for you in case they turn out to be useful for someone next year. The first three are print outs of the markers I made for the hunt (they were cut out and taped to popsicle sticks to stick in the ground). I've removed the clues we used so that you can make your own hunt the way that you want it to be. Just click on the thumbnails to get the larger version to print.

Next is the answer sheet for the kids to fill in. The code letter boxes are coloured the same as the rabbits they go with so that the kids can more easily see which is which when reading across from the numbers. Two of these answer sheets fit on one US letter sized piece of paper.

Lastly, I threw together a page of smaller, plain, uncoloured, and unlabelled bunnies in case anyone wanted to use them as gift tags or use them to cut out and make into a card game somehow, like a matching game or something, or just let your kids colour them. Just thought that might be useful.

We had some seriously nice weather for this, which was lucky timing because it's due to start pouring down again tomorrow. Went on a wander with the family later in the day and found the world's best field of daisies for making head dresses with!

Also, I am happy to report that a couple of years later and they are still happily rocking the superhero ponchos I made them and blogged about way back here.

 

If you've got any of your plastic eggs left over then you might want to make some toadstools with them like these,

Or use them to make R2D2 secret storage boxes, or hang on to them because I have another craft that I want to post about that we did with them too.

Hope you all had a lovely weekend too and that this post might be useful for Easter time next year :)

St David's day and other randomness

So far this year I've been slow on the posting front as far as the blog goes. I think it's partly tiredness what with being pregnant and all, but mostly it's because anything that I put on the blog tends to get written at night after the kids are in bed, and recently I've been making a lot of stuff myself in the evenings and that's kept me away from the computer.

I know it's not something I usually do on Filth Wizardry, but I thought maybe I would put a post together soon to share some of the things that I've been making, not because they are particularly special or unique, but more because I've been making things using patterns or tutorials that other people have been kind enough to provide for free on the web, and thought it'd be nice to point folks to the ones that have worked out well for us, in case you fancy making some of the things yourself. It's mostly sewn, crocheted and knitted items made for children. Are any of you into that?

So anyway, as the title of this post suggested...

St David's Day.

I wanted to pop in before March 1st, to remind anyone with links to Wales that it's St David's Day tomorrow! and to give you the link to the St David's day crafts that we did last year in case you wanted to have a go (leeks, hats and flags). I think this year we're going to try making some bara brith (I'd better remember to put the fruit to soak overnight). And for the first time we will have some daffodils flowering out the front of our house on March 1st, which makes me happy. I might pin one to my jacket tomorrow :)

Falcon cargo math.

Thought this might give you a giggle. Last month I found some of the awesome little wooden hundreds, tens and ones blocks at a thrift store and wanted to find a way that the kids could learn with them without realising they were doing math. We ended up spending part of the afternoon using them as cargo crates on the Millenium Falcon dollhouse that Paul made for our 6 year old's birthday. They wrote out little invoices and delivery confirmations and random messages. It was pretty darn amusing. Love how Luke ordered some Batereets (batteries) for R2D2! I reckon we should use up the remainder of the grey spray paint on them to make them more like cargo crates.

In case you are wondering where on earth you are and if this has somehow started to turn into a homeschooling blog, fear not! This went on later in the afternoon...

Lovely People.

The weekend before last I was lucky enough to be able to meet up with Kami who writes "get Your Mess On" and runs "Austin Tinkering School". She came over from Texas to California for a few days on a mission to tinker and we managed to dash into SF in just enough time to say hi before she had to truck it back to Montara with Gever Tulley's immersive tinkering workshop posse. Although it was a very brief meeting, I was so glad that we managed to say hi. I absolutely love what Kami's been doing with Austin Tinkering School and have great admiration for the energy and enthusiasm she has when it comes to facilitating children's creative dreams. Hopefully we'll get to meet up again and hang out in May when Maker Faire is on.

My six year old was very enamoured with one of the vehicles that had been made during the tinkering workshop that day, so Paul helped her sort out something similar based on her drawings and plans over the weekend. It was very sweet watching her own the project and really only wanting help with things like not being heavy enough to push down with enough force on the electric drill. She still wants to add a seat and build a ramp, but in the mean time she and her mates are just pulling each other around the backyard on it at alarming velocities. See what twenty minutes hanging out with Kami Wilt inspires you to do!

DIY sand art lightbox

This is another thing that I've wanted to sort out for the kids for a while, but it wasn't until recently that the right container came our way. One of our friends had a painting restored, and it came in a nice sturdy wooden crate. He was going to ditch the crate, so we nabbed it (thanks Rich!).

It's been in use in our livingroom for a while as a Lego construction center. It contains all the teensy bits of Lego and stops them spreading all over the livingroom. We used to use a blanket, but this is much better.

I have seen a couple of lightboxes come up on Craigslist, the last one was even free, but it was too big for us to transport, and so I decided to use this crate base to make our own, but make it so that it could be stored away, and used both inside and outside, whilst still being able to be used with the Lego when we wanted.

All I needed to do was a bit of measuring, then jigsaw out a nice big hole from the base, cut some plexiglass to size, and then screw in a couple of lengths of 2x4 to hold the plexiglass down. This also resulted in a couple of nice sized sections on either side of the screen that could hold supplies. I need to say thank you to a lovely reader Liz, who emailed me to tell me about an architectural salvage place near us that might be able to give away some gnarly 2x4 for the kids to hammer at. Thank you Liz! The two bits of 2x4 I used for this were from there!

To use this outside with the sand, I just propped it up on four of our giant wooden blocks, and put a couple of desk lamps under the table with an extension chord. Then I used painters tape to tape a sheet of white paper over the plexiglass, to make a light diffuser that would also protect the plexiglass from scratching in case we want to use it for something else in the future.

I also dug out some little glass nuggets to add interest to the set up.

There are loads of sand art videos you can watch on the web. I showed my kids a few before we went out to play with ours, so they knew what we were making. This sand animation by Kseniya Simonova in my opinion is by far the best one I've seen. It's not the easiest to explain to young children, because it's about the Nazi invasion of the USSR during the second world war, but it's very powerfully done. There are plenty of other examples of sand art/animation on Youtube that are much easier for kids to watch if you think this particular one is a bit too heavy to explain.



The kids were very excited to go out in the dark to play with the sand lightbox. We had to wait until about 9pm for it to be dark enough, but it was worth the late night for the kids because they had so much fun with it!

I gave them a couple of rubber spatulas to work the sand with as well as their hands. The sand we used was right out of our sandbox, so it was quite course. I'd like to try and find a tub of fine grained sand to make more detail possible in our drawings, but there's plenty of time for that. It only took a couple of cups of sand, and all the sand was nicely contained by the box's 4 inch sides.

Gradually I'm hoping that the kids can start to use this as a medium for telling stories and I can video a few. Of course I couldn't resist having a go too. The girls wanted me to draw a lady so that they could use the glass nuggets as her necklace.

I have another post for you coming up on how we used this set up indoors too.

Giant reclaimed wooden blocks

Some of our neighbours down the street have been landscaping, and as part of this somehow they dug up some dirty chunks of wood. I have no idea what they were part of, but they gladly gave them to us rather than take them to the dump. The kids helped us pile them in the car and we drove them up the street and hosed and scrubbed the mud off. Here they are all scrubbed clean.
They are in poor shape, but still really interesting, especially the ring patterns that have kind of weathered to be really prominent and will probably be great for crayon rubbings!
Once they had dried out fully the kids had a go at them with the sander. This was their first time with an electric sander and they really liked it!
I've just noticed that in this picture above it looks like I must be doing some strange contortion to have my other leg around the back of my neck or something. Don't worry, it's just my shoe was sat on the picnic bench ;) (I should have just let you think I was that bendy)

Then the kids had at the blocks with a load of kiddy paint in yoghurt pots and some big brushes. They kept at this for a good long time, especially my four year old.

I'm hoping that the neighbours chuck out more lumber as they keep landscaping, because the bigger the collection of building parts, the more exciting projects the kids can come up with.

I don't really have any set ideas of what to do with these blocks. So far the kids have built towers and stepping stones and bridges with a couple of other bits of wood we have.

Sometimes the free section of craigslist calls out to me. It's a good job we don't have a truck, or I'd be trying to grab all the wooden furniture from the curbsides around here!