A thank you, and some other mess makers

A couple of top lasses gave me a blog award doodad thingy. It was actually a couple of weeks ago I think. I'm not very on the ball with posting at the moment, so I apologise for only getting around to saying thank you now!

Thank you Sherry and Donna!

These two creative ladies run the site called "Irresistible Ideas for Play Based Learning" The tag line for it is great too "No play, no learning. Know play, know learning!" Love that! Sherry and Donna teach preschool together in Australia, and they share all sorts of fabness through their website. This is the award they passed along. It's worth going to read that, because as well as their own blog being a mighty fine read, the other sites they awarded over there are great too.

I think I'm supposed to pass the award on and tell you an arbitary number of things about me or something, but as you know by now I'm not very good at reading instructions, let alone following them, so I'm just going to pass on some blog karma in my own way if that's ok.

First up, big props to Kami over at "Get Your Mess On". She has gone and started up "Austin Tinkering School" after diving right into not only contacting her idol Gever Tulley, but getting his ass over to her neck of the woods for a three day tinkering event and then starting her own summer camp! People who just get up and DO stuff and MAKE things are the bestest! Kami, you rock!

Next up, I've just recently found Teacher Tom's blog. I only found Tom's blog because he left a comment here on one of the ironing plastic bags onto clothes posts I did last month. He tried it out for himself and discovered that if your shirt has got polyester content then the decals won't fuse enough to go through the laundry, which I had no clue about because we'd only done it with 100% cotton shirts (you can read about his experiments here and here). When I explored the rest of his blog I found the most tremendously awesome progressive preschool teacher ever! Reading through I was ecstatic to find just as much, paint splatty, sand diggy, water poury, dirt rubby, junk fangly exploration as goes on here, but this guy has a whole co-op preschool in cahoots with him, not just a bunch of his kid's mates, like I've got. If you like it over here, then you'll love it over there!

Last of the shout outs is for those of you who think their kids would like to get some mail from around the world (kids like getting any kind of mail from anywhere in my experience, so a postcard from somewhere exotic would blow their little socks off!).



Zoe over at "Playing by the book" is hosting an international postcard swap. You've got until Friday 30th April to sign up to join in, so pop over to her post about it here for more info. You might get a postcard from us, because we're definately in!

Ooh, and while we're doing a bit of a rogue post on stuff and things, here are a handful of links to what other wizards of filth have done after reading about our projects on here!

• Kami from "Nurturing the tender years" posted about them making our little print, cut out and hole punch lego cars and trucks here.



• Sandra from "Three pumpkins little" did some further experimenting with our iron on plastic bag decal thing, using tea towels rather than clothing, here.



• Kristin from "Intrepid Murmurings" made some lovely versions of the shower curtain play mats that we did way back, to give in little gift packs. See them here.



• Jen from "Creative and Curious Kids" contacted me to show me this gorgeous painted picnic table the family made after seeing the post we did on painting furniture with the kids. I can't imagine a picnic table more beautiful than that!



• Lastly, I was sent a really cute photo by Lyndsay from Scotland. These are her family's larger versions of our little tin foil toadstools. Aren't they great! I asked Lyndsay if I could post her picture here, because it's an awesome example of just using what's on hand to make a project work. They didn't have the plastic eggs or BBQ skewers, so they just crunched the foil over sticks. Worked beautifully!
  
  just before I go, seeing as a lot of you have emailed me with questions about stuff to do outdoors with the kids that are slightly less insane than an entire city made of trash, here are a few more sedate outdoor projects that worked well for us when the kids were a bit younger...
  
• Aluminium foil river


• Nails, screws and cardboard boxes


• Chalk and water painting


• Reusable mural


• Snail painting


• Paper making?

I totally skipped on the earth day post. I guess every day should be earth day shouldn't it. If you're into no impact building fun though, the easiest thing if you live near the coast is to find a beach that has a lot of drift wood! My two can't get enough of building strange forts out of things they find on the beach. I guess that's what happens when you perpetually forget to bring buckets and spades with you.



Another tip top beach art collaboration to join in with is the "World Beach Project" over at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Doesn't hurt to see if you can find any trash to pick up and bin while you're down on the beach too. We never seem to make the official beach clean up days, but there's nothing stopping folk from picking up trash whenever they happen to be there.

Well, I think that's about all I had to get off my chest ;) I have ooodles of unposted stuff, half written or with only half the pictures ready. I really need to get my act together so I can click publish on a lot of them. I like it so well "in the lab" that it's sometimes difficult to get my act together to write up ;) Did I just compare parenting to a scientific experiment? Um, no one call child services ok?! It's me experimenting WITH the kids, not ON them!