Make Your Own Lava Lamp!

Winter is here (for those of us located in the southern hemisphere), and it's chilly outside! With the kids home on the school holiday, making fun crafts is a great way to spend quality time together. Today, we decided to make a simple DIY lava lamp. Chances are, you already have all of these ingredients in your cupboard.

Materials Needed:

• Any cooking oil
• A clean jar with a lid (we used an empty coffee jar)
• Baking soda
• Two empty cups (for mixing)
• Vinegar
• Food colouring
• A tablespoon

Steps:

• Fill three tablespoons of baking soda into an empty cup.

• In a separate cup, fill it with roughly a 1/3 cup of vinegar, then place five drops of food colouring into the vinegar.

• Fill half of your large jar with oil and make sure you have a lid.

• Pour the vinegar and food colouring mixture into the large jar with oil.

• Lastly, pour in the baking soda!

Sweet Gum Tree Ball Craft

Making bumblebees from gum tree balls is a fun and easy craft to do with children!

Supplies:

• a stick
• yellow string
• black string
• sweet gum tree balls
• a rectangular piece of white fabric
• scissors

1.  Wrap the tree ball with yellow yarn twice, front to back, then back to front, starting and meeting at the stem. Tie off the string, then cut off the stem.
2.  Take a rectangular piece of white fabric, fold it in half, then cut out a semi-circle to make wings.
3.  Place the wings on top of the ball, then tie a piece of black string around it, keeping enough string to line the stick.
4.  Tie the excess string from the bumble bee's wings to the stick.

Voilà! Your children now have their very own pet bumblebees. 

DIY Paint

My children are on school break, and our youngest son loves to paint and watch Bob Ross's how-to paint videos. 

Painting can get messy, so I take extra precautions to avoid major accidents. With that said, I don't want to stifle my child's creativity, so I found a DIY paint recipe that's pigmented but also washes off easily.

My son helps me make the paints. It's a fun sensory activity and an opportunity to teach him about measurements and primary, secondary, and tertiary colours.

Three Primary Colors: Red, Yellow, Blue.

Three Secondary Colors: Orange, Green, Violet.

Six Tertiary Colors: Red-Orange, Yellow-Orange, Yellow-Green, Blue-Green, Blue-Violet, Red-Violet 

How to make the paint:

• 1/2 cup of flour
• 1/2 cup of salt
• 1/2 cup of water
• 2 tbs of food colouring

Mix each colour in a bowl, then pour it into a cupcake tray.

The colours are quite pigmented and adhere nicely to the paper. The paint also dries quickly and, as stated previously, is easy to clean up :) with the added perks of being affordable and eco-friendly.

Pasta Jewlery Craft

Pasta jewellery is an easy, creative, and affordable craft that you can do with your children. You probably already have materials in your cupboard and craft kit that you could use.

Step 1: Gather your supplies

• Large penne pasta
• Sandwich baggies
• Food colouring
• 1/2 tablespoon 
• 1 cup
• Cupcake tray
• String, yarn, wire (whatever you want to use to string the pasta with)
• An embroidery needle for older kids
• Wire-cuter if using wire 

  Step 2:

• Measure half of a tablespoon of food colouring and pour it into a baggie, do this for each colour

Step 3: 

• Fill the baggie with one cup of dried pasta and shake it up, ensuring that the pasta is fully saturated with food colouring.

Step 4:

• Pour the pasta from the baggies into a cupcake tray.

Step 5:

• Have fun threading the pasta :)

DIY Salt Dough Pendants

DIY Salt Dough Pendants are an easy activity that requires a few ingredients:

1. Two cups of all-purpose flour

2. One cup of water

3. One cup of salt

4. Pokey thing (I used a satay stick to poke the string through)

5. Flowers (if you want to make them flat press them in a book)

6. String

Directions:

1. Mix the flour & salt into a large bowl, then add water. Stir well, then knead the dough for about 10 minutes. My child used mixing the dough as an opportunity to play with his construction toys :)

2. On a large piece of foil, flatten the dough using a jar or rolling pin, then use the pot to cut out your circular pendants. Afterwards, use a satay stick or some other pointy object to poke a hole in the top of the pendant where the string will go through.

3. It's preferable to let the dough dry outside in the sun; drying time will depend on the thickness of the pendant. If you want to speed up the process, you can bake them for 10 mins at 250 degrees F (120 degrees C).

Have a lovely day!

How to Make a Rocket Launcher

How to make a simple rocket launcher with a few basic materials that you probably have lying around your home.

• Toilet paper rolls (two per rocket launcher)
• Large rubber bands (two per rocket launcher)
• Cotton balls
• Skewer sticks (one per rocket launcher)
• Tape (a heavy-duty kind like duct take or packaging tape)
• Scissors

Steps:

1. Cut two slits on each side of the toilet paper roll.

2. Place a big rubber band through each slit, as shown in the photo.

3. Tape the slits to secure the rubber bands, so they don't fall out.

4. Cut a toilet paper roll in half lengthwise.

5. Roll the cut toilet paper roll into a smaller diameter, then tape it in place to prevent it from unravelling.

6. Poke a skewer through the rolled-up toilet paper roll.

7. Place the smaller rolled up toilet paper roll into the larger one, then stretch the rubber bands over each side of the skewer.

Step 8: Place a cotton ball inside the launcher and shoot!

How to Make a Sourdough Starter & Bread

This is my first time making a sourdough starter, and I figured it’d be a fun activity to try with the kids. In this blog post, I’ll be documenting our week-long experience making a sourdough starter and bread for the first time. 

Day 1:

• 1/2 cup of whole wheat flour 
• 1/4 cup of warm water

Simple, eh? We also used a clean pickle jar to hold our ingredients.

My cutie carefully poured 1/4 of a cup of warm water into a clean pickle jar.

Judging from the images I've seen online, this mixture looks a bit too dry, so we added two more tablespoons of warm water.

It's still a bit thick but slides off the fork with ease.

After mixing it thoroughly, here's the final result!

Day 2:

Despite being a little chilly in our home, the temperature has not prevented our sourdough starter from producing bubbles!

The sourdough starter will sit for another 24hrs then we'll feed it.

Day 3:

Time to feed our sourdough starter!

We filled the jar with a 1/2 c. of sourdough starter

then added a 1/4 c. of warm water and a 1/2 c. of flour. 

As you can see, I decided to use a different type of flour to feed our starter.

After adding more water, the consistency was a bit thicker than the pancake mix.

We decided to go ahead and name our sourdough starter, Loaf, and gave him some fun googly eyes :)

Day 4:

Our sourdough starter did not produce many bubbles, possibly because of the new flour we used and the smaller jar.

We continued our daily feedings and switched to our original wholemeal flour and larger jar.

• 1/2 cup of sourdough starter
• 1/2 cup of wholemeal flour
• 1/4 cup plus one tablespoon of warm water

Day 5:

We see more bubbles! Still not as bubbly as day two, but that's ok because we are doing this for the first time and will learn from our mistakes.

We are continuing with our daily feedings.

Day 6:

Mr Loaf is missing! I searched everywhere for him; then, about 45mins later, I found out that our youngest son had buried him in the backyard with a shovel. Thankfully, the lid was screwed on tightly, so no dirt got inside. We continued with the daily feedings:

• 1/2 cup of sourdough starter
• 1/2 cup of wholemeal flour
• 1/4 cup plus one tablespoon of warm water

Day 7: 

I'm not sure if our sourdough starter is ready because there aren't a ton of bubbles. The children and I will go ahead and bake some bread to see what happens. Either way, I'll be starting over again, so I want to give this batch "a go" before throwing it away.

Here is the recipe that we used:

• 1 cup of sourdough starter
• 1.5 cups of warm water
• 1/2 cups of sugar
• 1/2 cups of oil
• 1.5 tsp of salt
• 6 cups of all-purpose flour

Refrigerate dough overnight.

Place half of your freshly kneaded bread into a greased bread pan and bake at 350 degrees F (175 degrees C) for 40 to 45 minutes.

Things I would do differently next time:

• I would not have switched flours on day three or used a smaller jar
• I would not have used tap water
• I would have measured the dough inside the jar to see if it had risen
• I would put our sourdough starter in a safer place
• I need to figure out why the dough did not rise; maybe it was the type of flour we used?

Final results!

It's not very pretty, but it doesn't taste too bad. The worst thing about it is the texture. The crust is complex, and the middle is soft and dense. My husband describes the taste as a cross between soda bread and cornbread. He says that the sweet aftertaste is better than the initial taste, eeks; at least he was kind enough to try it.

Making bread was a fun experiment, even if it wasn't successful. I think it's important to teach children that mistakes are a part of the learning process and not take them too seriously. 

Second attempt!

We did a couple of things differently this time:

• We used  high-grade flour, which is excellent for making bread
• We used active dry yeast (an essential ingredient)
• After kneading the bread for at least 10mins it took shape in a large bowl for about 3 hours before refrigerating overnight 

The results tasted significantly better than our first attempt at making bread. It wasn't perfect, but edible.

For our third attempt at making bread, we decided to make pretzels for the first time. The shape was slightly off, but the taste and texture were divine. My family and I had at least two pieces each. The only things I did differently this time were kneading the dough a bit longer (15 mins) and letting it set out at room temperature for 4 hrs before baking it. We did not refrigerate it.

Lastly, here is a picture of the bread my son made this evening. Aww, he's too cute.

P.S. It's been one year and our sourdough starter is going strong!