Martha's Marvellous Munchies

This week was the odd one out; plants are not one of the four classical elements.  But they feature in abundance as the British summer shades into autumn, and relate to so many good craft activities. Activities 1. Leaf collection and leaf rubbing My parents stayed for a couple of days this week, and they are ideal companions for a plant theme, being far more knowledgeable than I am about both the wild and cultivated kind.  Dad helped us with our leaf collection; on a short walk around the village, we acquired at least ten different kinds. The horse chestnut leaf was bigger than the paper! In the afternoon we used crayons to make rubbings.  Toby's friends from next door were around for this bit, and the six-year-old was very keen to label all the different leaves.  This is one of her sheets. 2. Sunflower printing Another idea from my friend Ellie .  This was great for a plant theme; not only were the pictures of flowers, but the prints were ...

You know how these things work.  The first week you're full of enthusiasm and do tons of stuff, and the second week... yeah.  Not quite so much.  It's not that we haven't done things, it's just that many of them weren't related to the theme.  So we made ice lollies, played with friends, took the car to the garage (not an expensive fix, fortunately), and occasionally squeezed in a few earth-related activities too. Since I may have less to write about, I'll take a moment to mention my two main mayhem-reducing tools for the summer. The first is a whiteboard , on which to delineate our day's activities.  The intentions being a) I'm forced to come up with at least a few things to do each morning; b) Toby has some idea what's going on in advance; c) Toby improves his reading skills.  We haven't used it every day, but I think it's achieved those goals when we have. He's also been improving his writing; that says "car" in case y...

Last year it was cherries .  This year it's plums. For some reason we didn't spot any cherries this summer.  Do the trees take a year off or something?  We'd resigned ourselves to the only free fruit being blackberries - as prolific and delicious as ever - when I happened to notice a couple of plum trees dripping ripe fruit onto the pavement. I summoned the troops and we made a raid.  Between us we gathered over 6 lb of plums, without even needing recourse to a ladder.  Some were low enough for Toby to pick, although I doubt many of those made it into the boxes!  Occasionally a gust of wind brought a shower of purple fruit down on our heads, which he found extremely funny.  Once we'd packed the basket of Theo's pushchair as full of plums as we could manage, we set off home to work out what to do with them all. Jam! The great advantage of plum jam is that you don't have to take the stones out first. 2.4 kg/ 3 lb plums 450 ml / 15 fl oz wat...

As we were hurtling towards the summer holidays, I started panic-planning.  What was I going to do with Toby at home all day every day?  And would I ever get anything done that I wanted to do?  With the horrifying prospect of six weeks of "I'm bored" before me, I decided it was time to resurrect my toddler theme weeks.  I can hardly call my long-legged almost-four-year-old a toddler any more though, can I? This time round, I've gone elemental, with Water, Earth, Air and Fire, plus Plants just for good measure.  Water filled a week and a half, because Toby's preschool finished on a Tuesday, and there are almost endless things you can do with water when it's warm and sunny. Activities 1. Defrost the freezer!   Well, that was my job.  Can you believe I spent my last few hours of preschool freedom defrosting a freezer?  And as I scraped the chunks of ice off, I thought: Toby would love this.  I hoped it might amuse him for ten minut...