Music: Lost In Space theme by Apollo 440
Tag Archives: rainy day activity
Make a bus like the Andersons’ Old Red
Take a look at Old Red in The English Family Anderson and have a go at making a model bus just like it 🙂
You’ll need:
some cardboard, a pencil, a rubber, a pen, some paint, some scissors, a ruler and some sticky tape.
First measure out the shape of the bus. Using a cereal box made it easy because I could use the side as the roof (so it already had neat folds). The front needs to be the same width as the roof; make the length at least twice the width of the bus. Mine came out a bit short but you can make yours as long as you’ve got room for on your cardboard.
Once you’ve got the two sides, roof and front measured out you can draw in the details. My bus is open at the back because I want to be able to furnish the inside later, but if you’ve got a long enough piece of card you can draw a back too (see the video at the bottom for how it should all be laid out).
When you’ve got it all mapped out, go over all the good lines in pen.
Then rub out all the untidy planning lines you don’t want anymore.
Then paint it 🙂
When it’s dry, cut it out:
Now you’ve just got to fold it and stick it. If you’ve used a box like I have, you should already have good tidy creases between the sides and roof, but you’ll need to score a neat crease where the front folds to meet the other side. Carefully place a ruler on the wrong side (inside) of the bus, along the line where you want to fold it, and score a line with your scissors.
NB: If you want to furnish the inside of the bus then take a look at this before you stick it together. Then put a piece of tape on the top and side edge of the front of the bus (again on the wrong side)
Then you can fold it and stick it to the top and other side of the bus.
It’s a bit fiddly but you’ll get there 🙂
And there you have it!
I got this idea from Dylan Bryan.
Watch him do it (especially look out for his mum interrupting) I love this video* 🙂
* sadly, Dylan’s video is now deleted from youtube 😦
If you want to furnish your bus, go to Part 2 🙂
Lovely Pink Pyjamas
Make Your Own “Helping Venus” Game
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Venus works hard trying to clean up the rubbish in the ocean in order to save the animals who are being poisoned and ensnared by it. But since 80% of the rubbish in the oceans originates on land, it’s impossible for her to keep her beloved sea clean. So, the rest of us need to make sure that all our rubbish is properly disposed and not littered. More than that, we need to actually pick up other people’s litter in order to protect wild animals and help Venus.
Yuck! That sounds like a dirty job, and it’s important to take care not to pick up anything dangerous like broken glass or needles (ask a grown up to deal with that stuff) but if we don’t do it, who will? Of course it would be better in the long run if we stop buying things that don’t degrade harmlessly in the environment – namely plastic – and then this nasty litter problem might be solved.
Anyway, I’ve invented a board game that you can make for yourself and all you need is paper; something with which to draw or paint; stones or buttons or whatever little things you’ve got lying around to use as counters; and a dice pinched from another game.
1. Paint an aerial view (map-type) picture of Venus’s home town (it doesn’t have to be the same mine, you can use your imagination 🙂 )
2. Add places to visit, like shops and cafes
3. Then add ways to score points like picking up litter; refusing to buy plastic items; recycling what you’ve found or bought; and freeing animals who have been trapped in cages.
4. Finally add stepping stones which link all these places on your map.
Now your picture should look something like this:
NOW YOU’RE READY TO PLAY!
Imagine you have come to visit Venus and are staying at the campsite (place all the counters at the campsite to start). But Venus is out diving, cleaning up the rubbish in the sea, so while you’re waiting for her you can explore the town.
Each person rolls the dice and the one with the highest score starts.
When you roll the dice you move that number of spaces (stepping stones) from the campsite. You can go in any direction but you can’t change direction in the middle of one roll.
The idea is to go around the town, accumulating points by landing on the award-giving spots. You have to roll the exact number to land on the award-spots (and that doesn’t mean the stepping stone next to the award-spot – you actually land on the award-spot).
You can go around the town as many times as you like and land on the same awards more than once, but if you go back to the campsite the game will be over.
In other words, the game can last as long as you like. As soon as the first person gets back to the campsite, the game is over and you add up all your points. The person with the most points is the winner (not the first person back to the campsite). So, you need to be aware of when you are in the lead on points and then get back to the campsite as quick as you can before someone else overtakes your score.
It’s fun and very easy to make 🙂
Home Made Vegan Monopoly
Cut out a large square of cardboard from your cereal box or whatever and draw a line inside the outer edge to create a border. Then divide the border into squares like this. A traditional Monopoly board has 40 evenly-sized squares altogether, like this one, but if you want you can have a random number of different-sized squares. It’s up to you!
Each square represents a place, so think about places in your town, or places you wish were in your town and put them in – include places like veggie/vegan cafes and shops like ‘The Loving Hut’ and ‘Infinity Foods’ in this one, and places you enjoy going to like the cinema, the park and the pier. Don’t forget to put ‘GO’ in one corner and a few ‘chance’ squares. The original Monopoly also has fines on some squares like ‘income tax’ but you can make up your own like we have with ‘bus fare’ and ‘new shoes’. Just free your imagination and run with it!
You need play money for monopoly so you can make some fake paper money or you can make coins. We made coins by finding whatever coins we had lying around and making rubbings of them with our crayons. Then we stuck them on cardboard and cut them out – or the other way around but that’s twice as much cutting!!
We found an odd assortment of coins including a commemorative £5 coin and an out of date ha’penny – anything goes when you’re making it up yourself!
Now that you’ve finished your board and you know what each place is, you need to make property cards – one for each place (don’t include fines/go/free parking/free cup of tea and the like). You need to decide on a purchase price for each place and a landing fine to be charged to other players that land on it. Bear in mind what denominations of money you’ve made when you decide on prices but don’t be too serious about it – we went crazy and our landing fines were often higher than the purchase prices! Just have fun with it.
There are also in Monopoly ‘Community Chest’ and ‘Chance’ cards. Your game doesn’t have to have these but it’s good to have some kind of ‘chance’ spaces around your board (as indicated earlier) which you can give any name you like. In our game these spaces are called ‘Family Treasure’ and ‘?’. Now you need to make cards for players to pick up if they land on these spaces. You can write something good or something bad on these cards (for eg the player has won something, or has to pay something) – but again, just use your imagination, it can be anything you want.
Crossword Answers
Violet’s Veg*n e-Comics Crossword
There’s no need to print this out. Just save the picture; then open it in ‘Paint’ or equivalent picture editing program; increase size if necessary to make it a comfortable size to write on; choose a suitably-sized font and fill in the answers using the text tool.
🙂
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crossword for kids
Violet's Vegan Comics 