The Bath Cafe

Welcome to our bath cafe! Really simple to set up and fun. All that is needed is some kitchen toys, a plastic lid from a box that fits across the bath and Fun foam to make the food.  Little  Boo spent ages in the bath making me sandwiches, soups and ice creams.  The food items stuck to the wall I just cut out of fun foam.  They work really well and stick on top of each other so a sandwich can be made.  This was great for learning numbers as I was asking Little Boo for a certain number of items for my sandwich.  Bubbles make a great pretend ice cream.  Fun foam was also used to create buttons on the pretend oven. This was to try and help Little Boo with her number recognition as I was encouraging her to press the different numbered buttons. 

Making Miss Mouse from Show me Show me- handmade Birthday present

A few weeks ago I started knitting and I am really enjoying it.  After making a few finger Puppets for Little Boo I decided that it was time to do something a little bit more difficult.  Little Boo loves Miss Mouse on the program Show me Show me on Cbeebies. As you can not buy the toys for this program I decided knitting one would be a good idea.  I looked everywhere for the pattern to knit Miss Mouse then eventually I found the pattern on ebay.  I am really pleased with how she has turned out and the pattern was easy to follow (thanks to the lady on ebay and with the help of youtube to look up stitches).  I just hope that Little Boo likes her as I am giving it to her as a Birthday present she is 3 next week!

Have you ever made a Birthday Present or toy? Some great places to start looking for knitted toy patterns are

ebay
Ravelry- A knitting and Crochet pattern website.  Some of the patterns you have to buy but many are also free.
Flutterby Patch- A great blog that has some free patterns and some that are sold at Etsy .  I love the free pencil toppers pattern and the tooth fairy.

I have also found some good books whilst searching.

Knitted Toys

I love the Finger Puppet idea in here for Goldilocks and the three bears.  I am just in the process of finishing these off. 

Nursery Knits 

There is a lovely doll in this one and I like the puppets as well. 

Anyway, I hope that this may be helpful for some of you.  I realise it can seem like a really difficult task but with youtube on my phone I was able to look straight away if I could not understand what I had to do for one of the stitches and this was quite frequently! Hope you like Miss Mouse. 

Find your name in the bath

Little Boo has shown interest in learning how to spell her own name.  I have seen letters and numbers that you can take into the bath.  However, rather than spend a fortune buying these I decided to make some letters out of fun foam so we could play at catching the letters in the bath.  Once Little Boo had caught them I helped her to put then in the correct place to spell her name as the fun foam sticks to the wall once it is wet. She really enjoyed this activity and it was great fun to catch the letters.

Sharing a book- The Paper Dolls

Little Boo had The Paper Dolls book for Christmas.  She really enjoys this book so we decided to make some of our own Paper Dolls.  This is a really easy craft to do and I can not believe I have not done this before with Little Boo.  She wanted to make them the same as in the book so this was a good activity to learn her colours as we copied the colours that were on the paper dolls in the book.  She also decided that she wanted to use the ruler to draw the lines on the stripy top.

The book is written by Julia Donaldson and scored high on Goodreads  with a lot of positive comments.  The story is really touching as the Little Girl makes Paper Dolls with her Mom and grows up and makes them with her daughter.  I love the idea behind the story and the easy craft to accompany the book is a bonus.

New Years resolutions- A photograph a day

New years resolutions for me never work so this year I decided to set myself a fun challenge for the year. This challenge is to take a photograph a day of Little Boo.  This is because I can not believe how quickly she is growing! I have downloaded an app called 365 photo to help me with my challenge.  You are able to download the photographs into a calender and write about the photographs as well.

I am looking forward to seeing how Little Boo grows up this year.

Encouraging mark making using imaginative play

Happy New Year! to all my readers.  Here we start a brand new year in which I hope to bring you all some ideas.  This is the year that Little Boo turns 3 and starts Nursery how scary! time really is going too fast.

Today we have been playing with the dolls.  Little Boo LOVES her dolls at the moment and so wanted to play doctors with them.  Before Christmas I printed off some doctor role play resources which we are using in this activity

doctors surgery from Sparklebox
Hospital Role play from Sparklebox
Baby Clinic from Sparklebox

All the print out packs were available FREE! I had to make our own appointment sheet (could not find one but only took a few minutes) which had to have Dr Ranj from Get Well Soon on as Little Boo loves this programme at the moment. The sheets I placed in plastic wallets so that they could be reused as I gave Little Boo a dry erase marker to use.

It ended up being a Baby Clinic and Little Boo was measuring and weighing the dolls.

 She was then answering the telephone to book patients in.  I did not realise until we started playing the great opportunity this provided for fun mark making.  Little Boo loved writing in the Telephone messages and writing in the heights and weights and writing in the patients names on the appointments.

At one point I asked her to write her own name and she made a very good attempt there is definitely a letter "s" there!

I hope that you enjoy this activity.