dale lane

This week has been school holidays in Hampshire, so I took a week off to entertain the rampaging monsters otherwise known as my children.

As always, it’s been a fun mix of things. With a three year old and a seven year old, the general plan is to try something a bit different every day so they’re not bored by the end of the week.

We did a few arts and craft things. We made our own candles, melting down candle wax chips from Hobbycraft in a saucepan, adding colouring and pouring them into moulds. We did some sewing, making stuff like animal-shaped cushions.

We spent an afternoon mucking about with a camera and a microphone. Faith loves singing into a small USB microphone we’ve got, so we recorded her singing some of her favourite songs. Grace tried making a stop motion animation using her Sylvanian Families. It ended up being 25 seconds long, but between taking all the photos, and recording the voices and sound-effects, it took her ages!

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It’s still half-term, so time for another random “what can I do with the kids that’s vaguely science-y and only needs stuff that we have around the house”.

We made an evaporograph.

No, I’d never heard of it before, either.

But it was pretty cool which is why I’m blogging it myself instead of leaving Grace to write it up 😉

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I didn’t really know what a voicebox was beyond knowing that Ned on South Park used one.

But it’s half-term week, so Grace and I tried to make our own out of straws, tape and a balloon. And it sort of worked!

Here’s how it worked…

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A few years ago, I wrote a post about how you can make a font based on a sample of your own handwriting.

I did it to help Grace, at the time aged three, to make a font of her writing as part of a present for Amy.

Graham suggested doing this every year, and as it turns out, that is what I ended up doing.

It’ll be a nice thing to have when she’s older – a record of what her writing used to be like. And it’s fascinating to see how her handwriting develops year-on-year.

We’ve got a few of them now, so time to share how it looks so far.

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