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Here is our latest kids educational activity ebook and it's my favourite yet!

Up! will take your child's love of blocks and building and take them far and wide across the curriculum.

With 30+ projects across math, literacy, science, art, and play, Up! shows you how to support passion-led, project-based, hands-on learning. It will help your child make connections, go deeper in their understanding, and encourage their questions and creativity.

Including inspiring ideas for block play, mobiles, rockets, airplanes, parachutes, building challenges and more. It also comes with 100 printables for use at home or in the classroom. 

One of the great things about the activities presented in this eBook is that every activity has been tried, tested and approved by real children. The activities have been carefully chosen to offer a wide range of explorations, working across the curriculum to incorporate play, imagination, math, literacy, science, sensory and art and are written by an experienced collection of teacher and parenting bloggers.

The sky’s the limit when you’re learning with Up!

Age guide: 4 to 10 years.

BUY NOW: $11.25 USD
Regular Price: $14.99.
(25% off for the first 2 weeks of launch)

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In this activity, children are invited to learn more about gravity, engineering and architecture in a fun and hands-on way.

I'm not generally one to take pictures of buildings. Sure, I admire certain made-made structures but I've never felt compelled to take multiple pictures of non-historic buildings. Until I went to Dubai, that is. 

When I asked my family living in Dubai, "Why should families visit Dubai?" and one of the answers on the list was, "Architecture (Dubai has a mix of both Arabic and modern contemporary buildings which creates a unique and interesting landscape)," they weren't wrong. Out of the desert pops this quite amazing spectacle. I had never seen buildings like them. They appeared to rise out of the ground, often so tall that they looked like they were on a lean (perhaps some were?). A new shape and design around every corner. Everywhere that we drove I found myself constantly going, "Wow, look at that one!", "Woah! Check that out." and scrambling to take a photo before we drove on. You can see some great views of Dubai from the air in my earlier post.

When I got home, my kids thought the buildings looked fabulous. Going through photos together brought up all sorts of questions and discussions. Opportunities for learning.

How do they make the buildings stay up? Why don't they fall over? How do they get them so high? How did they make it that shape?

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This is a sponsored post

A while ago we were contacted by the makers of the super creative construction kit for kids, Fort Magic. One look at their website and already I could see the huge potential for years of fun and learning so eagerly agreed to write a review and give away a set to one of our International readers. You can see what we had to say about Fort Magic here.

With our last giveaway being so popular, Fort Magic have generously offered another set for us to give away! So, have a little look at how we've been playing and learning with our Fort Magic set over the past 4 months and then enter the giveaway at the bottom to win your very own set!

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Here is a fun construction building invitation to play that I set out to occupy my toddler (currently aged 2.5). The main components for this easy set-up activity are simply playdough and blocks. Making the playdough a grey colour to simulate concrete and providing a couple of little construction tools all added to the scene but aren't necessary to still have a fun and creative activity for kids of all ages. My kids loved this little bricklaying activity.

We used this activity to further language skills, fine motor skills, building skills, knowledge of gravity, understanding of bricklaying, sensory development, imagination, role play and more.

Ages: 12 months+

(See the handy tips at the bottom for ideas to suit your child's needs)

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This is a sponsored post

Fort Magic is an innovative and creative construction kit for kids, and as such, when they contacted me to see if we'd be interested in reviewing one, we absolutely jumped at the chance. One look at the possibilities for fun and learning this kit contained, and I was very eager to see what it was really like and if it could live up to it's potential. At $199 USD, it's the kind of item that you'd want to think was good quality, that your children would gain from and was going to last you for years to come. If you're interested in finding out what we thought and for a chance to win a set, keep reading.

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Open Ended explorations for Children are vital in their development and constructive play is a great way to encourage this.

Children love to physically explore and manipulate materials as it helps them to gain a better understanding of their world and gives them the control to move, question and create.

Today M (3.5) and a mini mate, took on the role of 'Builders' and got cracking.

Ages- 2-6+

The Set Up

Creating an "Invitation to Play" is as easy as setting out a few materials to set the intention of the play and then let the kids go for it.

Materials: Empty cardboard boxes of all shapes and sizes. Any play construction toys such as hard hat, hammer, drill, measuring tape etc

I also popped a "broken" stool in for them to hone their fix-it skills

The Play

First it's fixing time

Then time to build. Notice the added containers/boxes that the kids gathered themselves?

Their minds were working hard and were set on their task.

The ever evolving construction site. Builder J is busy drilling the front.

This type of play is fantastic for Collaborative play. 

Working and playing together with their peers leads to skills such as sharing, taking turns, compromising, working together, language development and so on.

Checking to ensure it's been built to specification. 

Note the addition of measuring skills, number recognition and so on.

Handy Tips:

- Simplify this activity by simply providing the basic materials and letting the children loose on it. You could assist younger children with the building process. Talking with them about how to balance the items, which are best for the base, etc.

- Extend this activity by giving your child/ren a "brief" on what's expected. Join the role play fun by being a contractor who is calling in a building team for a particular project. Perhaps you need a building of a particular height, width etc. Add toy telephones to call your workers and explain what's needed. Be sure to add in other materials such as measuring tapes, spirit levellers etc. 

- Talk to your child about what they are doing/building in order to develop their cognitive skills (thinking) and language development. Not to forget the important bonding that takes place between you both.

- Giving children a different scale to work with or a different surface, etc, will affect their behaviour and will involve problem solving processes that they're unaware they're even using. They require concentration and identification. eg. These kids were building on a soft surface which makes their process slightly different to if they were building on a flat, solid surface

- Repeat this activity with different materials, in a different location, with different specifications... etc. Children need to be exposed to experiences more than once and mixing it up will ensure that they are focusing on, gaining or using different skills each time.

- If you don't have "pretend tools" etc... then make some! Let children use their imagination to find something or create something they think could be appropriate for the job.

Looking for more Pretend/Imaginative Play Activities?

Here are some of our favourites

Pretend School

Pretend Washing Up - Water play

Pretend Shop. Learning Numbers

Happy playing,
Debs :)

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As magnetic force is not visible, letting young children explore the concepts of magnets is a great way to introduce the idea of the nature of science.
On top of learning about reactions and attractions, it will help them to see (perhaps subconsciously) that there are processes and understandings that are not always tangible and that science involves questioning, testing, experimenting and revising.

Here we did some free construction and exploration with magnets using a couple of sets of magnetic balls and rods.

 This is the invitation to play

 The balls kept repelling one another so she had to attach the rods in order to make them "stick together"

 Using every piece to link together

 "I made a bar for her to swing from"

 Testing the strength of the magnets. How many pieces could hang from one magnet before it became too heavy?

To extend this activity I gave her a metal tin (empty Milo tin) so that she could build in a different way and discover the magnetic property of the metal. She noted that the magnets stuck to the tin, but not to the mat. Different materials!

Some tips:

- Young children need to be supervised with magnets, especially ones as small as these

- You can use all different types of magnets in order to play, explore and learn about them

- If there are objects in your house that should not be touched with magnets (computers etc) be sure to explain this to your child first

- Talk with your child about what they are experiencing. This will help them understand the physical and mental processes they are going through as well as giving them the vocabulary to describe it. "Wow, look at that bar repel the ball" etc

- If you feel your child is ready/interested, explain to them the basics of the 2 poles that each magnetic bar has and that like poles will repel one another and opposite poles attract. Let them test this using 2 of the bars.

- Play games with the magnets. Have a race to see who can "push" a ball from one end of the mat to the other, without touching it, using the end of a pole that will repel the ball.


Debs :)

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