A walk in the creepy forest

The nature challenge this week was a good one for using some of the woodland bits we have been collecting all Autumn.

The task was to make a mini woodland area, and then make a treasure map (with a key) to go with it.  The aim was to make one that we could give to someone else which they could follow.

You'll notice that the very useful cat litter tray is making another appearance :)

This is the corresponding map:

My favourite bit is the swamp with it's very own swamp monster.  The good news is that someone else was able to follow the map and found the treasure buried in 'Hot Mountains'.

Build it up....

This week has ended up being a bit about construction... and purely by chance!

On Monday, at science club, we had the challenge of making a tall tower from marshmallows and spaghetti.. not as easy as I thought it would be!  Firstly because you have to be careful not to snap the spaghetti (this happened a lot) and secondly because it's quite tough not to eat all the marshmallows..

After a while it becomes very obvious that the strongest structures are made from triangles.
We may have to do this one again and find some more 'real life' examples of structures that use this method.

I found this very therapeutic, in fact it's possible that I enjoyed this activity way more than any of the children did :)

Today we ended up on a surprise trip the the Milestones museum : http://www3.hants.gov.uk/milestones/

There's quite a lot there, but most importantly at this time of year: it's all sheltered :)  We found some foam blocks that need careful placement to build a viaduct, and after a few attempts made this:

All about Owls...

Our nature challenge this week was to make an owl, My original idea was to do something with leaves, but all the things we have attempted with leaves and glue have gone a bit disastrously wrong of late!  I think we must be using the wrong sort or something :D

Instead we made our own leaves and coloured them with crayons to get a slightly uneven/feather like appearance.  The feathers were all coloured separately and cut out, then overlapped onto the outline of the owl body.

A brilliant suggestion from J to mount it onto black card too:

Plus you might just be able to see where he has added the all important talons and a branch to perch on...

Italia Giorno! (or something like that)

Today was Italy day... We learned all about where Italy is and a few pieces of history too.

First up we made clay plates and decorated them in a Roman style with some simple tools:

Followed by a look at mosaics.  We've done paper mosaics a few times before, but this one was with coloured pasta... J chose to make a scene rather than a pattern - and plumped for a Star Wars battle scene (of course), with explosions and a crumbling building:

We did this at a local group, but I definitely think we can do this again at home: pick a country and learn bits about it for the day, even incorporating some of the language and food.  

Our project for this term has been all about Australia, which are are doing much more in-depth - choosing a different animal to look at each time, drawing it, finding out it's habits etc.. and later on we will be making boomerangs and some sort of montage of all things Oz...

Potions and lanterns....

We caught up on our nature challenges last week.  We usually do one every week, but missed one as we had done some many things the week before.

First up, we made a woodland potion.... We used up lots of ingredients from our nature table, with some 'forest water' (basically tap water with green food dye in it) and some glitter.

Here's how it ended up:

All mixed together with a stick and labelled up so that no-one mistakes it for a tasty drink :)

This potion is one that will help defeat the Sith.

Next up we made an autumn lantern.  Having tried lots of activities with leaves and glue, and failed at all of them... we decided to use autumn coloured tissue paper.  This was torn up and stuck with watered down glue to a jar.  We added a handle made of string, and a tea light:

I think we can experiment with making Star Wars lanterns at a later date - maybe with some figures made form black paper to give a cool silhouette effect...