Party Season

It seems to be party season - every weekend at the moment I'm taking my elder son to birthday parties.  Over the last few weeks he's been to a Karting Party, a Tubing Party (i.e sledging - looked like great fun to me) an exotic animals party (where he got to handle snakes, tarantulas, giant frogs, etc) and a Football Party.  At least he would have gone to a football party, except silly mummy got the date wrong and turned up the day after.  My poor son was gutted, he'd been looking forward to it so much, and I felt so guilty.

Last weekend I took him to a party where they had introduced a very simple idea that I rather liked.  In some ways it is rather similar to the idea used at some weddings where a large sheet of paper is provided for the wedding guests to sign, write messages, draw pictures or whatever.  On this occasion it was a large sheet of paper stuck to the wall,  for the 5 & 6 year old guests to draw upon, with the crayons supplied.  I thought it made a lovely keepsake for the future, especially since so many people move now and children’s friends change so quickly.  Unfortunately I didn’t have a camera, or even my phone with me, so can’t show you what it looked like, but I’m sure you get the general idea!


New Artful Kids Flickr Group 

I'm in the process at the moment of trying to customise my blog, so you may see some changes taking place over the next few weeks.  I have lots of things I'd like to do, but it's still very much a learning process at the moment.  Anyway, as part of this whole process I have set up an Artful Kids group on Flickr for people to contribute photos of their children's artwork to.  I'm limiting it to paintings or drawings, by children under the age of 12, and I've set it up so that you have to 'apply' to join, simply so that I'm hopefully less likely to get photos of goodness knows what added to it that way.  The plan is to choose one to feature on Artful Adventures each week, or each month (depends really on how many people contribute to it).  So if your child has just produced a masterpiece, then why not 'exhibit' it by adding it to the group and sharing it with us all, and maybe I'll choose it to feature.  The address is:  
http://www.flickr.com/groups/artfulkids/

Hand and Footprint Poems

This week I thought I would share some poems to accompany children's hand and foot prints for gift and display purposes.  You may have come across them before - I first saw them when my son came home from his first term at school with one printed next to his handprint, which had then been laminated and had a calendar attached to the bottom.  I researched them further as I thought they looked perfect added to a child's photo and handprint, and it seems there are a whole lot of variations on a theme.  I've included a couple here, but many more can be found at the links given below: 

Sometimes you get discouraged
Because I am so small

And always leave my fingerprints

On furniture and walls.

But everyday I'm growing
I'll be grown up someday,
And all these little fingerprints

Will simply fade away

So here's a special handprint

Just so you can recall
Exactly how my fingers looked

When I was very small

Find more hand & footprint poems at:

http://www.dltk-holidays.com/dad/mhandprintalt.html

http://www.canteach.ca/elementary/songspoems28.html