Dinosaurs in the park

Last weekend our city was visited by Erth's Dinosaur petting zoo, it had traveled all the way from Australia, so we really couldn't miss the chance to see it especially not with all the little dinosaur experts in our family. It was amazing, so glad we took the time to go. The park was packed as thousands of people came to see the show.

This was my son's favourite, a Australovenator. It got a little worrying for a time when the keepers stated he was hungry and the audience was made of meat!

As you can see he was a little anxious as the dinosaur was hungry and seemed very eager to eat the audience.

He was fed and all was well again, all this didn't worry my daughter at all, she was very eager to get selected to go on stage and put her head inside it's mouth but I think she was too small to be chosen.

My daughter liked the little ones best, and enjoyed her face to face encounter with this laellynasaura. Erth has a website if you would like to see some of the things we saw you can see it here. If you get the chance to go along and see the show my children would highly recommend it.

Paper and glue snowman sculpture

We have recently been making seasonal models from paper and glue, we saw a more adult version on a Home made craft show with Kirstie Allsop. I loved the look of the birds on the show and may at some point try a decoupage model myself, the link shows you the one from the show. We have adapted the decorating slightly to fit in with what the children wanted to make.

First make the basic shape using scrunched up paper, we wanted to make a snowman so we scrunched up some newspaper balls and taped them into the correct shape. Be generous with the tape and cover the entire ball until you have a smooth shape. At this point it is easiest to paint over the tape with acrylic paint to give the glue something better to adhere to and leave to dry. On one of our models we missed out this step, the paper still sticks but may take a little extra glue.

Once your model is dry, use PVA glue and stick small pieces of paper all over it, a bit like papier mache. The artist on the television show used brightly coloured paper for this and produced a lovely decoupage effect but we used white paper, as we had plans for our models. My son decided to make a plesiosaur, not technically very seasonal but he loves dinosaurs. Instead of making scrunched up balls for this we had to mould the paper to the correct shape and tape on the limbs.

For the snowman, we covered him in glue and rolled him in a bag of fake snow so that his whole body was coated. Then we just stuck on his face and added a very simple felt scarf and tiny feet to complete the look... a very cute little snowman. Anything you can make out of newspaper and tape can be given the same treatment as you have seen with my son's plesiosaur, which he has decided to paint.

It is not finished yet as it needs another coat of paint, some facial features and a couple of coats of varnish to make it more durable, but I think it looks lovely.

Autumn Leaf Bowls

Just time to fit in one last craft the children have been doing for Autumn before the season changes, this time we have made leaf shaped clay pots or candle holders. My eldest children made some like these when they were very small and I can remember some children making them when I was at school. So we thought we would have a go using a pack of air drying clay after seeing some recently which reminded me of how pretty the bowls looked.

First thing we did was print and cut out some leaf templates and chose one each, then we rolled out the clay to the required thickness. We rolled ours out quite thin but I think if we make some more I will leave the clay slightly thicker as I was terrified that the children would break them.

My husband put the leaf template onto the clay and cut round them all and we added a few leaf details onto the clay. For more realistic looking veins you could press real leaves into the clay and cut around them.

The cut out leaf was then placed onto a bowl, so that it curled around it and left to completely dry, we used several different sized bowls so that each leaf had a unique shape. There is a lot of waiting to dry in this craft so a little patience is required.

After the clay has dried it was possible to paint the bottom of the leaf while it was still on the bowl, we used acrylic paint for this. After the painted base has dried you can remove your leaf bowl and paint the inside, we started to paint them in Autumnal colours but the children decided to add extra colours to the inside of the bowls.

This is what we ended up with, after adding a little extra sparkle as it is coming up to Christmas. My daughter's one is mostly red, my son has added a little blue glitter and I painted mine red and lightly sprayed it with gold paint. They are not quite finished yet as we will be adding a couple of layers of varnish to make them a little stronger and easier to clean.

It looks very Autumnal with a candle in it, although we are now seeing the start of Winter. My son also made some casts of dinosaur footprints with the left over clay, just like the fossil ones.

Dinosaur Park

The last couple of weeks have been so busy my feet have barely touched the floor, I have been meaning to update on here but time seemed to just fly by. We have had a mini heatwave and we have taken full advantage of this lovely Autumn weather and been out for many day trips, the children have had so much fun. Firstly we went to the Dinosaur park, an old favourite that we have to visit every year as my son is a huge dinosaur fanatic.

This year was slightly different as they had built a new indoor play area with large slides and the children were extremely excited to try this out. Even my youngest daughter braved all the slides and thought it very funny to be completely buried in the ball pit, we found her by following the giggles.

There were not many other children there when we went as the school term had started, so we got to hold some of the small animals like the guinea pigs and even stroke a bearded dragon. It makes the day a little more memorable when they get some hands on experience.

My son is admiring the dinosaur timeline which is all around the room, he was so fascinated by this that he has decided to make one for his bedroom, it will be a nice little project for him. Just thought I would leave you with a photo of another monster we have had growing in the garden this year, one of our sunflowers reached 10 feet and had over 30 flower heads on it, grown and cared for entirely by the children.

Change of direction

It seems such a long time since I have written anything here, we have all had the flu over Christmas starting with the smallest ones on boxing day and then spreading through the rest of us like a plague. It has been a really horrible virus and we are still coughing and finding it difficult to breathe sometimes but we are improving everyday thankfully.

There have been lots of stargazing activities for us to use our new telescope on, which was kindly gifted to my son, by a lovely lady who we met through free cycle. This has enabled him to continue to learn about his love of astronomy. The above photograph was taken on the day we received the telescope, while he was trying to learn how to operate it. In the last few weeks there has been a lunar eclipse, a partial solar eclipse, a few meteor showers, visible planets and so much more.

My son has had a really difficult decision to make over the holiday season, this is whether to continue going to the football coaching classes that he was enjoying so much or not. We have left this decision to him, even though we wanted to stop him going due to the pain he has been in with his feet and legs after his surgery earlier this year, see here. We have obviously comforted and supported him while he was thinking about his options and he has come to the very painful decision that he can no longer go to football classes, participating has put him in so much pain afterwards that it often led to both of us in tears. We have wondered whether he is in more pain due to the cold weather, so he will assess how he feels when the weather warms up slightly. Bless him.

As it is a new year, I also asked him what he thought he might like to learn more about this year, he stated that he would love to learn more about his first love, dinosaurs. This will be a difficult challenge as he seems to know so much about this subject already, he is like a mini professor. The photograph above shows some of his fossil teeth collection. The thing he would most love to do is go on a dig as he is sure there are still new species of dinosaur to be discovered, he would love to be involved in finding something 'like a real palaeontologist'. So you can see my predicament, how am I going to pull that one off ?  Maybe we could visit some of the fossil rich areas and where they can be seen in the rock, I'll have to see.

The other things he is interested in studying at the moment are the Nature Journal project that we will be starting soon, he loves nature and this will be his way of documenting the world around us from his point of view. Also the Victorians have captured his interests, he has been watching lots of documentaries, reading books and even watching programs designed to show you exactly how they lived and worked. Looks like we will be very busy then!