post your letter to Santa

It’s time to start thinking about writing and sending a letter to Santa.  If you are in Australia, you should post your letter to

Santa

NORTH POLE 9999

Don’t forget to add a 55c stamp and put your return address on the back of the envelope, so that Santa is able to reply.  You can get a special Santa Mail letterhead from Australia Post here.
Now, where did I put my pen …

swimming pool games

Swimming pool games are lots of fun and they can help your child  in learning to swim by putting a challenging skill into a fun context.  Games also help to increase a child’s awareness of water resistance and motion. 
For beginners who are wary of the pool or the water.  Sit on the edge or on a step in the water (whatever they’ll do) and

• stir the water with your feet
• move your hands back and forth in the water
• scoop and pour water with cups or hands
• throw the water up and try to make rain
• kick and splash with your legs

Once they’re in the water.  Can they

• walk holding the edge
• walk backwards, sideways, on tiptoe, taking giant steps
• jump or hop
• walk while blowing bubbles or blowing an object (ping-pong ball) across the surface
• walk and do dog-paddle arms
• play Follow-the-Leader
• in shallow water walk on their hands with legs trailing behind like a crocodile
• chase an object (ball, kickboard) around the pool.  Or if you have more than one child they can “scramble” to get to the object first.
• catch and throw a ball
• push ball under and let it go to see it jump into the air
• pick-up objects from the bottom (start with crouching down, face up to pick up something in shallow water and progress, eventually, to duck diving to the bottom)
• swim through a hoop or under someone’s legs
• tag (try to cross the pool without being tagged)
• play keep-away with the ball.  One child tries to get the ball from 2 or more children who are throwing it around.
• Play “Pirates”.  Someone calls out directions and you must do the appropriate action – eg. port = swim left; starboard = swim right; stern = back; bow = front; shark = all get out of the water; pirates = all get in the water again.

For confident swimmers

• play Marco Polo
• have diving or bombing contests
• have races, for speed, distance underwater, while dribbling a ball and so on.
• play ball in deep water (a basic water polo)

[some ideas from Austswim’s Teaching Swimmimg and Water Safety, 1994]
Do you have a favourite game to play in the pool?

a handful of christmas card ideas

 
I think it is going to be hard to limit myself to a handful, but here are some ideas for making Christmas cards with your children …

1. Cut pictures from old cards, wrapping paper or Christmas-themed magazines and make a collage.  You could use a paper punch (for example a circle) for cutting out to tie the look together.
2. Cut up your potatoes to make Christmas stamps.  The easy way to create the Christmas picture on the potato, push in a cookie cutter and cut around the outside.
3. Kids Craft Weekly has got not 1 but 2 fabulous newsletters with ideas for making cards – simple cards and fancy cards
4. send an ecard from JibJab.  These are a lot of fun, you can create cards or movies.  [WARNING: not all the cards available on this site are child-friendly, you will want to supervise your children].  You can see my card here.  
   
   
5. and if all that is not enough The Cartoon Blog, by Dave Walker has one million ideas – 10 ideas for materials, 10 ideas for tools to use, 10 subject ideas, 10 colours to use, 10 ideas for sizes and shapes, and 10 ideas for messages.

Do you make Christmas cards with your children?  What is your favourite way to make cards?

golf

A favourite father and son activity …

aeroplanes and gyrocopters

We’ve been making and experimenting with simple paper aeroplanes.  B was fascinated to see a piece of paper turn into something that can fly.  Once the planes were made we started ‘fooling-around' (shh, doing a scientific investigation) to find out
which plane flies the best?
does the plane fly better if you throw hard or softly?
We also made gyrocopters (whirly-birds) to add to our fleet of aircraft.  These have a mesmerising spinning motion.  We played with making the gyrocopters heavier or lighter (by adding the paperclip).
There is much more that you can learn about flight and scientific experimentation through playing with paper aeroplanes.  This Paper Airplanes Theme Page has pretty comprehensive links to explore different types of planes and aircraft and to explain the science of how things fly.