Our crafty summer 2016

The summer holidays are drawing to a close, and as I look forward to some peace and quiet next week I'm also looking back on a lovely summer. I'll admit it has been hard work at times, my attempts to send the children along to the free summer classes at the gym failed miserably, and there were many days when I was glad to pack them off to bed in the evening. Fortunately I was granted a few hours respite every now and then when Ram took them out on long Pokemon hunting trips, so I could at least run the hoover around and enjoy the silence!

But I do love having the children around at home, and I try my very best to limit their screen time as much as I can. Mia has never been that bothered about screens to be honest, which can be a bit annoying as sometimes I just need her to be occupied for a little while, but Harry would play Minecraft and watch YouTube all day if I let him. They can play nicely together for a reasonable amount of time when left to their own devices, and of course as you can probably guess we did lots of crafting together, so I thought I'd share some of our favourite crafts from the summer.

Our summer started with a fab trip away to Blackpool and Manchester, and we worked very hard on our holiday scrapbook. It really was a joint effort, and I was so impressed with how much time and effort the children put into it. We've been leafing through it over the summer and remembering all the fun we had.

Mia received lots of craft kits for her birthday in May and I kept lots of them in reserve for the holidays. So she was kept busy painting a porcelain tea set, making gel stickers and doing sequin art. There were also child initiated crafts. Harry had spotted a tutorial for fresco painting in one of his history books and had been asking to try it for a while so we gave it a go - you basically pour plaster of Paris into a flat mould (we used margarine tub lids) and before it has set completely you paint on it with water paints. He painted two designs, depicting a tree at different times of the day.

Mia on the other hand was desperate to do some sewing, so I came up with some simple felt projects that we could do together and I loved the results, Harry made the giraffe finger puppet and Mia and I worked together on the red stuffed 'teddy bear'.

We had fun colouring in together...

and painting together - these are some blank masks which their Auntie brought back from Venice for them to decorate.

In the background you can see our checklist for the YouTube Kids summer reading challenge. I'm afraid that we didn't quite get all the way through the list but we gave it a good go. Harry has really gained confidence over the summer to tackle some longer books, and Mia's reading has improved a lot too, she is happy to try and read anything even if she doesn't always get it quite right!

We also turned to some of our old crafty favourites - we did Hama beads, made shrinky plastic crafts and did some crafting with Fimo. You may be able to spot a bit of a theme here going on!