Tag: Holiday Fun

Easter Egg Hunt with a Difference

Easter is just around the corner.

Adults associate Easter with different things like religion, long weekends and stuff like that. Many kids see it as a time to have a chocolate bunny or egg. In some households, there is a tradition of hiding goodies for children to find – usually outdoors. Brightly coloured bunnies poke their heads out of bushes and eggs nestle in odd places where no self-respecting chicken would ever dream of laying.

This year we decided to do something fun – an Easter egg hunt with a difference!

We’ve painted lots of pebbles and rocks and we’re going to hide them around the neighbourhood for other people to find. They can either keep them… or hide them again in another place for somebody else to come across.

“Yeah, yeah, Sibo,” I hear you saying, “what’s this got to do with me? I just can’t wait to get my teeth into a yummy choccy egg – not a painted stone.”

“Well… I was hoping that you’d join us, and paint a pebble or two and hide them in your neighbourhood, where ever you are in the whole wide world.”

You could team up with a friend or two, share paint and have some fun in the process. Your stones can be as fancy or as simple as you please. If you don’t have paint, you could draw on them with felt-tip pens, chalk, nail varnish or anything else. You could even stick a pretty picture on a stone.

You don’t have to go far to hide them either – you could simply put one in your neighbour’s post box. They wouldn’t know it was from you.

The whole point of this is to give something pretty to somebody else.

Ginny gets her paint from PNA in Silverwater Crossing – it is acrylic (waterproof) and costs around R20 for a little pot. You only use a teensy bit of paint on these stones. She uses a stick and the back of an old ballpoint pen (she uses the tip, too) to decorate the stones. They’re mainly a series of dots, all joined together to make flowers. Sometimes she goes overboard and they look a bit crazy, but they’re still pretty.

If you don’t have any stones, you could always use bottle tops – those work nicely too.

If you decide to join in the fun, why not post a photo of your creation on Sibo’s Facebook page—we’d love to see your ideas.

This is a pebble painted by Isabella – Ginny’s granddaughter.

So… if you live in the Meyerspark area in Pretoria East, keep an eye out next weekend—over 150 painted pebbles and stones are going to be hidden over Easter.

These are stones that different people from around the world painted and hid in their neighborhood’s. Faye from Canada, Heidi from the Isle of Weight, Lisa from KZN in South Africa and Judy and Hamish from Cape Town. Thanks very much for participating everybody.

Tie-dying fun

Its school holidays and sometimes one gets bored – especially when it’s cold.

Assuming you have no desire to read a book (I never give up – do I?)— what about having some fun tie-dying a piece of clothing… or even your socks (cotton ones work best). Although please check with your parental agent first though, before you start adding colour to your wardrobe.

This is what you need:

  • Fabric paint
  • Elastic bands (you can use loom bands – they are cheap and work a treat)
  • Water
  • Old plastic containers
  • Black bag
  • Rubber gloves (or small plastic bags to put over your hands)
  • Paint brush
  • Old white or light-coloured t-shirt
  • Imagination

These days you get Dala fabric paints that actually come in little spray bottles. They make life super easy because you don’t really even need to mix paint in containers with water or extender.

Imagine you want to breathe some life back into an old grungy t-shirt.

First thing you do is make a little peak and wrap a rubber band around the bottom of it. Do many of these all over your garment (including the sleeves) so it looks a bit like a fabric hedgehog.

Put on your gloves, spread out the black bag (or any big sheet of plastic) somewhere where you won’t get into trouble for messing and lay your t-shirt on top of it.  If you’ve got the Dala fabric spray paints, go wild and spray colour all over your t-shirt.  Make sure you do both sides – you can always mop up any excess paint that you’ve sprayed on the black bag too.

If you have jars of fabric paint – put two teaspoons (make sure you wash the spoon immediately or use a plastic spoon) of paint into about half a cup of water, mix it up well and then use your paintbrush to slosh the paint onto your t-shirt.  Two or three colours works best, but one colour will still look cool because it will contrast with the original colour of the T-shirt.

Please ensure you don’t work on a carpet – fabric paint stains. Food colouring is even messier but can be used in lieu of paint. This is why you must cover your surface with plastic.

Hang your T-shirt on the line and wait until it is properly dry before you take the rubber bands off.

Iron it to set the dye – otherwise it will wash out.

Have fun!

Sibo

xxxx

Growing things

Last time we talked about sniffing and growing Rosemary. At the moment, a certain supermarket is onto a really cool thing – giving out little pots of flowers or veggies with every purchase over R150. I know many kids are hounding their parents to go shopping there to increase their collection, but fear not if you don’t get it right.

You can easily grow your own veggies without any fancy little pots.

All you need are egg boxes, seeds and soil (seedling soil really works the best – but it’s not completely necessary).

Get a group of kids together and share resources. One bag of seedling soil goes a really long way. If you don’t have any money for seeds, ask friends who have gardens if they have any to spare. Marigolds grow very quickly from the seeds that you can harvest from a dead flower. So do lots of other things – like tomatoes.

Simply fill the egg boxes with soil – poke a little hole in the middle – about 1cm deep and plant a seed (or two). Cover the hole up with a bit of soil. Water gently and put them on a windowsill or somewhere light. They don’t like direct sunlight too much because then they dry out.

Make sure that you keep them moist – if the soil gets dry your teensy babies will never sprout.

The time it takes to sprout depends on what seeds you have planted. Some spout much quicker than others – for instance, Sweet Alyssum starts sprouting in about 3 days but onions take around 10 – 15 days to poke their little green shoots out into the world.

Once they do start sprouting, plant the whole egg box in the ground. Or you can carefully cut the little sections apart and scatter them around your garden or into pots. The egg box material is biodegradable. Just (obviously) make sure you do not use plastic egg boxes!

You can even have fun making your own artistic signs out of ice-cream sticks or bits of cardboard box so that you know which seeds are which.

Consider having a race with your friends and see whose seeds sprout first.

By the way – if you want to know how to make a veggie bed the size of a door – my book – Sibo and the Veggie Bed (check out the cover above) is available this month as a free read on the website.

Explore your green-fingered side guys!

Have fun.

Sibo

Xx

Fairy sized crackers

Last week we made some paper chains using recycled magazines or papers. This week I thought I’d tell you about the cutie little fairy-sized crackers that I had a go at making.

You need a few basic things to make these – but before you start I should mention that they do not actually crack! (Although you can buy the poppers at some art stores if you really want some.)

You need:

  • crepe paper
  • the inner core of a toilet roll
  • glue, sticky tape, scissors, ruler
  • pretty string
  • shiny tape or wrapping paper
  • goodies to put into the cracker – like sweets, little charms, jokes or even vouchers to wash dishes or make cups of tea or coffee.

First you need to modify the toilet roll core.

A normal toilet roll core is 10cm long and 4cm wide. Cut it down the centre and then cut it in half.  Roll one half around your finger and tape it closed. This should give you a baby sized toilet roll core of 5cm long x 2cm wide.

Crepe paper is nice and stretchy and comes in flat rolls in many different colours. You can get lots of crackers out of one roll.

Put your tiny core in the middle (at the bottom) of a rectangle of crepe paper that measures ~15cm x 11cm.

Roll it up and put a bit of glue on the edge to stick it down.

Carefully tie one side up with a piece of pretty string.

Pop the sweet or whatever you are going to use into the core and tie up the other side.

Then you can decorate the middle bit of the cracker with shiny tape or anything you have handy – stickers, pictures, leaves – get your creative hat on.

The crackers can then be used as table decorations for a special meal, or you can hang them on the Christmas tree if you have one. You could even staple one end of the cracker to your paper chain. Or you can simply use them as little presents.

Remember – you can always adapt ideas and make them your own. There is no right or wrong when it comes to being creative.

The main thing is to have fun in the process.

Lots of love,

Sibo.

Festive Decorations

Somehow the festive season always seems so much more jolly when decorations are involved.

Of course, you could tootle off to the shop and spend money on fancy, shiny, plastic, commercial decorations that might, or might not, land up in the bin after all the festivities.

Or you could make your own.

Like paper chains – they are nothing new – but they’re still fun and easy to make.

All you need is… imagination, an old magazine, scissors, a ruler, a glue stick or stapler.

  • Cut the magazine into strips. (~2cm strips are very easy to use and you get a chain of about 60cm long from one page.) If you make the strips 1cm or less, it becomes a little fiddly, but you obviously get many more strips out of a page so your chain is much longer.
  • Cut (or tear) all the strips in half.
  • Make a circle out of the first strip (overlapping the ends) and glue or staple it closed. Stapling is easier but is less environmentally friendly because when the paper breaks down you are left with little bits of metal that hang around for a whole lot longer.
  • Interlock your next piece of paper through the first circle and close it.
  • Keep going until you have a chain long enough to stretch from one side of the room to the other – or however you want to drape it. Better check with your parental agent before you stick things on the walls though.

Get creative and make little bunches of shorter chains to hang at the end of the long chain.

Traditionally chains used to be made out of coloured crepe paper. You can easily still get this paper and it’s not very expensive. Crepe paper has a bit of a stretch to it – so does not break very easily. It also comes in lovely bright colours.

If you are financially challenged though – magazines work just as well. You can even use newspaper!

You could glitz the chains up with a bit of glitter… but I was reading the other day that glitter is also becoming an environmental no-no. It is now classed as a micro-particle – it gets into the water system and does all sorts of nasty things to birds and other little critters.

Next week we’ll make some more decorations so stay tuned!

Have fun and stay safe this holiday.

Sibo

 

Holiday Fun – Short Story Writing

It’s school holidays again and whilst it is great not to have to get up early on cold winter mornings, I bet some of us are going to get a bit bored somewhere along the line. Especially if we are staying home and our friends have gone away.

When I get bored I like to read. It’s hard to stay miserable if you have a great story to get lost in. If you don’t have any nice books to read you could maybe swop with a friend or even ask your parental agent to take you to the closest library. Libraries are awesome places, full of fabulous things to read and some of them even run holiday programmes that don’t involve only reading but doing lots of fun stuff too.

If you do get fed up and have nothing to do, think about writing your own short story. It could be about anything – your life, your pets, your family or even something crazy that you just thought up in your head.

Remember though, stories have a structure. They have a beginning, a middle bit and an end!

Before starting to write a story, think about the stuff you like to read… probably most people are not that fond of boring old blah blah blah stuff that puts one to sleep. Mostly we find that something that‘s exciting and makes us wonder what is going to happen next is much more interesting. The ones that have us turning the pages in a hurry to get to the end to find out what happens.

Here’s another idea… think about writing a story from a funny point of view.  Just imagine if you were a bath plug… you could write a seriously wacky tale. Or maybe a tree – a tall skinny one that can see incredibly far and has odd wavy branches that point all over the place. Think what fun a person could have writing a story involving all the creatures that live in that tree.

Go nuts and use your imagination. You could illustrate your story too.

Email your stories to sibo@sibo.co.za (or click on the email icon above) and we’ll publish the best ones on Sibo’s website so that other people can also read them. (Keep your story between 400 and 1000 words please. Remember to include your name and age.)

Happy holidays everybody – get your creative writing hats on!

Sibo