small world space

I have been meaning to do more small world play with G and E for a while and I came across this website (http://www.yellow-door.net/small-world-play) which inspired to me to get on with it. I have made this lunar landscape with some small space figures, some silver sand and glitter and some black rocks all in a very cheap plastic tray from a garden centre.  There has already been some moon adventures!

Astronaut Food Ice Cream

To continue the space theme I thought it would be fun to try a freeze dried all-American astro-snack! The girls thoughts ranged from yuck to quite nice! It was very different to actual ice-cream and led to some interesting discussions about the process and why you couldn't take actual ice-cream to space.

World Space Week

To celebrate this (http://www.worldspaceweek.org)  belatedly I thought we would do some crafts related to space. So today I and G have been painting the solar system  ... I have bought a kit from Amazon. It was small and fiddly and the girls got frustrated with the patience needed. But it was a good way to introduce the planets and their positions.

Play dough

At school we are doing a topic on dinosaurs, so I made some grey play dough to be rocks and the children made pretend fossil imprints of plants and dinosaur footprints. I have never made cooked play dough before.. it is certainly more like shop bought play dough and easy to make (although I got the husband to wash the pan for me). Here is the recipe:
Ingredients:
2 cups of plain flour
1 Tbsp. of cooking oil
1 tsp. cream of tartar
2 cups of coloured water
1 cup of salt
Directions:
Place all of the ingredients in a medium size or large pan. Cook slowly on medium-high and stir it until the play dough thickens. Keeps best in the fridge in plastic containers.

They really enjoyed pushing things in to it and it led to some great discussions about materials that would be good to leave imprints in (mud at a waterhole for example).  This followed on from reading this great book on how fossils are made:

Incidentally, I also fancy having a go at this cloud dough: http://www.flightsofwhimsy-ece.com/2011/10/playdough-no-cloud-dough/