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February 11, 2013
by Kylie Gardner
3 Comments

13 Ways to Play and Learn with Bottle Tops

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Being a teacher and a mama I just can’t help but collect rubbish. I have little collections of recycling in the pantry, the entry, the children’s rooms. It’s free craft – I’d be mad not to! I’ve been collecting bottle tops for ages. I have a zip lock bag in the pantry where I throw them as soon as they’re washed and dried and when the bag gets full I add them to the large collection amongst our craft supplies. Recently the collection was bulging and Pebble was looking for some fun, so we took them outside for some play in the water tray and our old baby bath tub.

I didn’t give any instructions or directions for this play, I just stood back and watched her explore and play and do her own thing, chatting with her about it as she went. Pebble is a particular little girl, she likes to line things up and put things in order. The first thing she did was pick out all the white bottle tops and line the bottom of the water tray with them.

The bottle tops had different purposes as she played. At first they were objects to be arranged and counted. Then they became a snake. After a long time focussing on this careful arrangement she was ready to get stuck in with the water and coloured bottle tops. There was lots of active swishing, some singing, some floating and talk about boats.

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This play gave lots of opportunities for sorting, counting, arrangingimagining, singing and experimenting - all with a few bottle tops and some water.

Bottle tops can be used for play and creating in SO many ways. Here are twelve more fun ideas for playing and learning with bottle tops and bottle caps. Have fun!

13 Ways to Play and Learn with Bottle Tops

spacer Heart Sponge Painting – Boy Mama Teacher Mama

spacer Making Lid Soup - Teach Preschool
spacer Bottle Top Painting – Preschool Playbook
spacer Sticky Window Art – A Little Learning for Twospacer Bottle Top Stamps – A Little Learning for Two
spacer Rainbow Rice and Bottle Tops – Learning 4 Kidsspacer The Very Hungry Caterpillar Sensory Tub – The Imagination Tree

spacer Spelling with Bottle Tops – Crayon Freckles
spacer The Very Hungry Caterpillar – Learn with Play at Home spacer Bottle Cap Math – Boy Mama Teacher Mama
spacer Bottle Cap Letters – Brick by Brick

spacer Sorting Colours – Learning 4 Kids

Do you collect ‘rubbish’ for play? Have you played with bottle tops lately? 

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Categories: Learn, Maths, Play, Quick and Easy, Read, Recycled Materials | Permalink

February 10, 2013
by Kylie Gardner
0 comments

6/52

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Pebble – 3 years old – cuddling with her Daddy before bed time

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Bump – 36 Weeks – Heading out for date night! Our first date night in a long time and probably our last for even longer!

A portrait of my children, once a week, every week, in 2013

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Categories: A Portrait a Week 2013, Home and Family | Permalink

February 9, 2013
by Kylie Gardner
4 Comments

Mum’s Banana Cake

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What’s your favourite cake? I find it hard to choose just one favourite… but when I was a child I always chose banana cake on my birthday. As long as it’s moist, full of real banana flavour, and comes smothered in cream cheese icing, then bring it on. I was digging through my Mum’s old recipe books again, and I found her Banana Cake recipe….. well, I thought it was her old recipe.

spacer Whatthought was Mum’s original recipe. As it turns out. Not. 

Pebble and I followed this recipe to whip up a lovely cake. She was very excited to be making a cake because making a cake means decorating a cake. She immediately decided that she wanted this cake to be pink. With glitter stars on top. Now, being the top notch food blogger that I am, I had other ideas. I was going for classic white. Maybe a sprinkling of coconut? …. then I remembered. I’m NOT a top notch food blogger. I’m a mum-parenting-family-fun kind of blogger…  bring on the pink cake!

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I made the cake according to the recipe (photographed above), not really paying much attention to the method, because I know my way around cake making these days. Cream this. Sift that. Fold this. Bake that. It turned out just lovely, and no different to Mum’s from back in the day. Although I ignored the instructions to fill it with cream and sift icing sugar of the top. She never did it like that!? It was only as I started to rewrite the recipe for this blog post that I saw the words “fold in the sifted flour, salt and soda alternately with the milk“. Um. Milk? Milk is not listed in the ingredients! And I didn’t include it in my cake.

I called Mum and asked her what’s the deal with the milk. I hear her fumbling about over the phone, pulling out the recipe book. She starts rattling off ingredients… different amounts of ingredients to what I have in her hand writing in front of me. As it turns out, the recipe I used is not THE banana cake that mum used to make for me on my birthday. THIS (below) is the banana cake that she used to make for me – straight out of the Mothers’ Favourites cookbook from our local playgroup in the early 1980s. We had a giggle over some of the other recipes that she found in there…. Jellied Pineapple and Carrot Salad? Fritz Cups?  I have a group of friends that would love to make a dinner party out of that crazy cook book. Mum has since passed the recipe book on to me – stay tuned! Until then, without further ado, I give you:

Mum’s Banana Cake

(also known as Alice’s cake…. thanks Alice!)

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Top it off with lashings of cream cheese icing (lurid colours and sugar glitter optional) and try to stop at just one piece.

What was your ‘birthday’ cake of choice when you were growing up? Did you get a choice?!

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Categories: Baking, Cook and Eat, Cooking with Kids | Permalink

February 8, 2013
by Kylie Gardner
9 Comments

One doll + one prune = ?

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We have been toilet training, on and off, for four months. Officially anyway. We’ve always done a lot of preparing for toilet training, but we haven’t had any interest or success with it with Pebble until recently. Way back in October 2012 she was going great! So well, in fact, that I thought myself quite the expert on the matter and started to write a Toilet Training Series. That didn’t turn out quite so well. In fact, it seemed that the moment I published that smug little post our dear little Pebble decided to not want to pee or poo anywhere but in a nappy. The Toilet Training Series was put on hold (and then shelved!) and I swallowed a big chunk of humble pie.

You think I’d learn, right? But NO, here I am, sharing my success and advice again. Because she’s doing it! Pebble is doing all her wees and poos in the toilet. Not the potty. The Toilet! Maybe it’s because she’s a Big Three Year Old, or because she’s going to be a Big Sister soon. And maybe next week, or next month, I’ll be back eating humble pie. But this week, it’s all working, and I just had to share this little trick with you because I think it’s genius, and I believe it helped Pebble to poo in the pooper.

Last week Pebble was doing all her wees in the toilet, but not her poos. I sent out a call for help on the Octavia and Vicky Facebook Page and received lots of very helpful feedback and advice. First of all, I learnt that it’s very common for children to master wees but still struggle with letting go of their poos in the right place. That made me feel better. Secondly, the lovely Kelsey suggested I try a trick  from a friend of hers.

The Doll + Prune + Chocolate Trick

And I quote: I once got told an apparently fall proof method. Take her favourite dolly and sit her on the potty and secretly drop a prune into the potty so it looks like dolly has done a poop! Give dolly lots of praise and then give dolly a choccie to congratulate her and let her share it with Pebble. Then explain to Pebble that when she does a poop she too will get a choccie to share with dolly. Get her to sit on the potty about he time she is ready and see what happens. Two of my friends have used this technique in the past week for their tricky toilet trainers and it has worked!! Both were great with #1s but terrible with #2s, but now do both! Good luck x

So, I armed myself with a doll and a prune and off we went. Sure enough, dolly did a poo on the toilet. Pebble. Was. Amazed. Her eyes nearly popped out of her head and she exclaimed, “I didn’t know she could do THAT!?”. Then I pulled out the big guns. The chocolate. Pebble’s most favourite treat in the whole world (even more than ice cream) is white chocolate buttons, known as milkies. I gave two to dolly and praised her for pooing on the toilet. Of course dolly happily shared with Pebble.

Pebble gave this whole experience some thought. She looked around the room. She gathered up a bunch of toys and declared that they needed to do poos on the toilet too! Smart, right? I had to explain that the only doll who could do poos was this one particular doll, and I made up a mummy lie about why. Yes, I bribed my kid with food then lied to her. I also told her the DummyFairy took her dummy and that Santa brought her presents. Moving on…

From that point on Pebble has done all her poos in the toilet. All of them. She prefers to grunt them out while smiling and saying, “milkies”. It’s a little bit disturbing, but I’ll count it as success.

So this week, I’m grateful. Grateful for the power of social media and to Kelsey for sharing her friend’s advice, grateful for prunes and dolls, and grateful for little white chocolate buttons. Without these things I fear that I’d still be peeling lumps of poo out of a pair of tiny knickers on a daily basis. Thank you!

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Categories: Home and Family, Parenting | Tags: toilet training | Permalink

February 7, 2013

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