Monthly play roundup: September

Hooray! Spring is finally here. Really loving the warmer and sunnier days we’ve been enjoying. Time to get busy in the garden with a mega backyard project we have in the works. But I’ll save that story for another time. For now, here are some snapshots of some of our activities last month…

For the Super Dads
We kicked off the month of September with Father’s Day activities. This year, we treated the dads to a scrumptious chocolate bar. We dressed the bars up in superhero outfits in tribute to all the fantastic superdads in our group. I used some of the printouts for this activity from here.

‘B’ for Bee
We’ve been spotting a lot more bees buzzing around these days (I suppose that’s expected with the increasing number of flowers popping up in everyone’s gardens). A favourite book we’ve been reading this month is ‘The Bumblebear’ by Nadia Shireen. We practiced writing the letter ‘B’, made cute little egg carton bumblebees, and talked about other insects and bugs in the garden.

The Enormous Turnip
We’ve been talking a lot about fruits and vegetables lately. Maybe it’s a spring thing. Or maybe it was this book which we borrowed from the library last month. Anyway, it turns out that none of my kids had tasted a turnip before (or if they had, they couldn’t remember). We read the classic Ladybird book story of ‘The Enormous’ turnip and played out the story with a real turnip I had picked up and paper characters from this printable. I cut thin slices of fresh turnip to munch at morning tea which the children all declared tasted ‘quite nice’. Afterwards we made our own story puppets from the same printable I used earlier to practice story sequencing and story telling skills.

Puzzles and Shapes
One of our featured themes this month was about shapes and puzzles. I had a lot of fun preparing the various activities for this. I made a Tetris-like puzzle using Lego. I set up a Tangram activity tray with our Tangram puzzle set and these Tangram challenge cards. I set up a magnetic pattern block play invitation using this printable on magnetic A4 sheets and these pattern block picture cards.

Here’s a closer look at the Lego puzzles I made (scroll to last image for video)

Presenting........... our exclusive inhouse custom designed #LEGO puzzles!!!! (swipe to see video of them in play)

A post shared by Serenely (@livingserenely) on Sep 26, 2017 at 4:48am PDT

Mini Beef Pot Pies
My favourite cooking activity and dish this month were this mini beef pot pies. I don’t have a particular recipe. Basically I just whipped up a basic minced beef filling. And then I set out a few sheets of shortcut pastry for the children to cut out shapes from to decorate their individual mini beef pot pies in ramekins (or you can use teacups). Pop everything into the oven for 15 minutes and lunch is served!

DIY sponge cakes and sandwiches
Something cute I’ve added to our home corner and play kitchen area are these little cakes and ham & cheese sandwiches made from sponges and felt. The sponges are just regular kitchen sponges cut out in bread shapes for the sandwiches and triangle shapes for the cakes. I cut out the ‘cream’ for the cakes from white felt and added a pom-pom as a decorative cherry topping. The sandwich fillings were pink felt for the ham, yellow for cheese and green for the lettuce.

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If you enjoyed this post, you can check out  last month’s roundup of activities and more of my other play and learning ideas. Stay tuned for next month’s roundup!