Stickyboard fun

These are perfect Autumn fun. Kids love doing them and it gets them really looking around their surroundings. They work well at small sizes, about the size of a postcard.

1) Cover a board in double sided sticky tape. Any board will do, mountboard, cut up cereal packets, cut down cardboard boxes, old card backed envelopes...

2) Leave the backing on the face until you get to your location

3) Then once in the garden, at the park or somewhere else pretty... peel off and get the kids to pick up small stones, twigs, leaves, petals, feathers etc. that they like. (Always best to get them picking stuff off the ground, not off living flowers and trees, as it will upset the gardener!). For older kids encourage them to have a theme to their boards, e.g. a specific colour, or texture or even creating a picture with the bits and pieces e..g a bird or tree

4) when back at home put the stickyboard on display for everyone to see and enjoy!

Second, third, forth and more hand...

I'll kick off by singing the virtues of second hand... (by second hand I mean not brought as brand new).

I'd hazzard a guess that about 90% of the essential items that our daughter needed as a newborn, and now about 80% of her essential items as a toddler were/are second hand. Things including her cot, sterilser, blankets, car seats (both with know history), changing table, highchairs, sit on bike, buggy-board for the pram, wellies and clothes. Lots of non-essentials too; books, toys, DVDs, bibs and tons of art and craft materials...

These things coming from family and friends with older kids, eBay, charity shops, 'Nearly New' sales', the local library (selling off old stock) and website like freecycle and fridgemountain. Friends have also lent us things on long and short term loans, rather than us having to buy them, while they were not needed in their households. It goes without saying that when the items are no longer needed they are returned, passed on to friends/charity or even re-sold (our sling was brought new for £45, and I sold it on eBay for £30 to a lady in the north of England setting up a sling library).