Activity Calendar

I’ll be honest, in 2015 I was rubbish and horribly disorganised when it came to organising our activities to match holidays.

“What are we doing for Fathers day?” one mum asked me on Monday 31st August.

“ummmm when is it?” was my reply.

“First Sunday in September, which I guess makes it this Sunday coming.” she says.

“Well I guess nothing then” I said while silently cursing myself for being so unorganised.

To be fair I’m claiming two very mitigating circumstances for being so out of touch with what time of year it was. First I was very pregnant at the time and second I’m from the UK and they don’t celebrate Fathers day at the same time there (which would be a perfectly legitimate excuse other than I have no idea when they observe it there either.)

Prior to becoming a stay at home mum, I was seriously well organised with that kind of thing so much so that my husband jokingly referred to me as the ‘Mystical Keeper of the Diary of Fortune’ which he knew he must consult before agreeing to or organising anything. However, since I became a stay at home mum, I’ve been, well shall we say haphazard? Actually maybe I should just admit I’ve been crap at keeping track of dates and events even for myself, so playgroup stood no chance.

So, with that in mind, for the start of 2016, I setup a calendar highlighting important, or fun events and observances. With input from our playgroup members also so that we could share any specific cultural or religious events that they would also like to share. So for the sake of helping others who may be as datally challenged as myself I am sharing our calendar and volunteer roster sheet. It also helps us to identify what playgroup meeting we will organise our theme activities which means whoever is volunteering for the week can tie in with the themes as well.

I hope it helps you as much as it is already helping us Playgroup Calendar for Blog

 

Natures Treasures Collage

A few weeks ago I organised a natures treasures collage, this provided a lot of fun finding treasures such as seeds, leaves, feathers and flowers at the playground on the weekend and also made for a fun walk to playgroup on Monday morning. We even collected some flowers a week before and pressed them between some big books so they were easier to stick on, Mr3 loves to collect flowers he finds on the ground, Frangipani is his favourite

We arrived well stocked with a bag of goodies and shared these out with the other kids to make some great and fun collages.

To make the collage

We used different coloured A3 paper to get good size pictures with a fun background, you could use A4 but the larger paper works better for the big leaves and flowers we found.

First get the kids to decorate the backing paper, we used textas or crayons and my son had fun doodling lines and squiggles on his but this was free choice art to draw whatever they wanted.

Once the paper was ready to decorate I sprayed liberally with spray on contact adhesive, we used Selleys Kwik Grip Spray which you can get in your local hardware store. You need to get the paper good and tacky and I recommend spraying outside so any overspray of the glue doesn’t get onto clothes, floors or tables as it will stay really annoyingly tacky and sticky for quite some time.

Once the paper is well sprayed your kids can go for their life sticking whatever you want onto the paper.In this case we have leaves, flowers feathers and an enormous furry seed pod! You might need to respray some areas of the paper depending on how quickly your children work as the glue will lose its stickiness quite quickly.

Leave them to dry and they should be good to carry home in around half an hour. Plenty of time for morning tea, free play and stories.

Welcome to Playgroup Mum

Hi, welcome to Playgroup Mum

I’m a Brisbane mum to two gorgeous boys (Mr 3 and Mr 6 months) and coordinator of a local playgroup.

While helping to organise the playgroup I’ve found it hard to find everything I need in one place, so I’ve started this blog to share ideas for craft, healthy morning tea snacks for mums and the kiddies and playgroup admin.

Feel free to share my ideas and I hope you enjoy your own playgroup journey !