Making things – Page 3

Easter Eggy Fun

Maybe you remember that last year we had a blog on how good eggs are for you. Well… now we are going to have fun playing with the egg shells.

Easter is just a few days away and whilst chocolate eggs are seriously delicious, you can easily make your own Easter eggs for decorations.

For the basics you will need: eggs, paints and a sosatie stick.

Instead of cracking your breakfast egg – carefully make a little hole (using a nail or something sharp) at the top and the bottom of the egg. You might need three hands to do it without breaking the egg shell – so get somebody to help you.

Hold the egg over a bowl and blow through the hole at the top. The egg should slowly slide out the bottom hole. If it’s really hard – you may need to carefully make the hole a bit bigger at the bottom.

One you’ve blown all the egg out into the bowl, give the egg a wash and let it dry. (If you are in a hurry to get started – use a hairdryer to dry it out.)

Now the fun starts.

Carefully slide your hollow egg onto the sosatie stick (if you don’t have one of these any thin stick will do). Paint your egg with a base coat colour – something not too dark like yellow or light blue or even white.

Stick it in a pot plant to dry. Once it’s dry you can start decorating it some more. You can make stripes, zig-zags and spots. You can even use some glue and stick beads or glitter onto it.

If you want to be really fancy you can cut little strips of fabric or lace and glue those on too.

Your imagination is the limit. You can make your egg as simple or as fancy as you please.

When the egg is dry you could give it a spray with some clear varnish – if you want to. This will make the egg last longer if you plan on keeping it for some time.

A bowl of these decorated eggs looks really pretty on the table. Or you can leave them on their sticks and put them into pot plants. You can also hang them up or make a mobile.

You could even give one to your parental agent as a special Easter present.

Again – use your imagination!

Best of all – have lots of fun making them.

Have a Happy Easter.

Sibo

Cookies

In honour of International Woman’s Day (8^th March) – not to be confused with our South African National Women’s Day on the 9^th August – I decided to write a blog about cookies.

Yum!

My mum has this incredibly easy recipe that I thought I’d share with you. Just make sure that you get your parental agent to help you out when using the oven please.

This is what you need for the basic sugar dough recipe:

125gm margarine (that’s a quarter of a block)
1 cup sugar (white or brown)
1 egg
2 cups of flour
Pinch of salt
Teaspoon of vanilla essence.

Heat the oven to 180^oC.

Melt the margarine in the micro (or leave it out of the fridge for a while until it gets nice and soft). Add the sugar, salt and vanilla essence and mix it all up.

Crack in the egg and stir it well. Lastly, you add the flour and mix it all up together.

Using a teaspoon (or you can roll the dough into little balls in your hands if you don’t mind getting a bit sticky) drop small amounts onto a well-greased cookie tray.

Gently flatten the top of the cookies with a fork. (Sometimes it works better if you put the fork into a cup of hot water first.) You should get at least 24 cookies out of this mixture.

Pop the tray into the oven (this is the bit where you might need an adult to help you – don’t burn yourself – remember the oven is hot!)

When they are cooked and you take them out of the oven – let the cookies stand on the tray for a little while before you transfer them onto a wire rack to cool down properly. If you move them too soon they may break or crumble.

You can also do variations of this recipe – add a cup of coconut, crushed peanuts (just put a handful or two into a small bag and bash them with a rolling pin), two spoonfuls’ of peanut butter or if you want chocolate biscuits – add two tablespoons of cocoa powder to the basic recipe. If your mixture gets a bit dry you can always use 2 eggs instead of 1. If it’s too wet – add a bit more flour.

Once you get good at baking tasty cookies you could always sell them at school markets, or make extra-special ones for birthday presents to give to the people that you love.

Happy baking,

Sibo

Festive decorations

It’s that time of year when school is finished and kids are on holiday. The first few days are fun because you don’t have to get up early and can spend more time in bed in the morning, but if you are anything like me – after a few days you start to get a bit bored.

Some friends are lucky and go away on holiday for the festive season, but lots don’t. The thing to do is to find ways of keeping busy.

One way is to make cool decorations for your room or house.

If you get a group of friends together – it’s even more fun. Plus sometimes you can pool your resources and then share – like buying spray paint, glitter and stuff like that.

Try making a bowl of popcorn – either on the stove or in the microwave (yes – you can eat some of it). Obviously you don’t put any salt or butter on the popcorn that you are going to use for your decorations. Ask your mom for a needle and some thread and string up length of about 60cm of popcorn. Make sure to secure it properly at both ends so that it does not fall off. You can also spray these with some gold or silver spray paint to make them look even prettier on your Christmas tree.

Other easy and cheap decorations to make are paper chains. Find an old magazine or use crepe paper and cut strips of paper (about 2cm wide x 15cm long). You can either staple them or glue them together to make a long chain. You can experiment making them wider or thinner and see which ones you prefer. Have a competition with your friends to see who can make the longest chain.

Paper beads are also fun to make. Take a strip of paper (2cm wide x about 7cm long) – roll it up tight into a tiny skinny little tube (you can use a tooth pick to roll it around) and then stick it down with a dab of glue. Once the glue is dry you can paint your paper beads different colours and string them all together to make your room or tree look pretty. You can even sprinkle some glitter on them whilst the glue is wet – to make them all shiny.

Remember – you can make your own glue by mixing flour and water into a paste (not too runny and not too thick).

Have fun,

Sibo

Making money.

Last week we had entrepreneurs’ day at school. I enjoyed it much more than I did the year before – probably because this time I actually made money!

Last year I didn’t give much thought to what I sold. I had lots of beans growing in the garden and so decided to sell fresh beans at school.

Silly me – I just didn’t think that kids don’t particularly like eating beans. And they definitely would not spend money buying them. So I landed up giving all my beans to the teachers instead.

Dad said I was a bit of a nutter – I should have offered them at a discount, rather than giving them away.

Oh well! Live and learn.

But learn I did. There has to be a market for what you are selling, otherwise you are wasting your time (and money).

This year I sat and thought long and hard about what to sell that would make money.

Mum suggested making cupcakes. That’s always a good idea because they sell, but the problem is – lots of other kids do the same thing because it is easy.

The same goes for popcorn and chips – junk food always sells well.

Dad offered to take me to Macro to see what was available and how much everything cost.

We trawled through the sweetie aisle. There was so much stuff it was unbelievable. I wandered up and down taking notes.

I only had R100 to spend. I also had to give R10 of that to the school to have a stall – which meant I really only had R90 to spend. I needed to buy something that everybody would want that I could make money on.

In the end I bought 3 bags of different flavoured Fizzers for a total price of R77.85. There were 24 Fizzers in each bag and one bag cost R25.95. This meant that one Fizzer cost R1.08c.

Fizzers take long to eat and are value for money.

I sold them for R2 each.

After paying R10 for my table, I had R12.15 left over. I asked Dad to give me R1’s and R2’s for this money so that I had a float in case I needed to give somebody change.

I sold all my Fizzers in the first hour and made a total of R144.00. That was R66.15 profit (excluding the R10.00 I paid for the table).

Smart thinking hey!

Sibo

Word of the week: Profit

Meaning: a financial gain, especially the difference between the amount earned and the amount spent in buying or producing something.

Example: I made a profit of R66.15 at Entrepreneurs’ Day – which I am saving so that next time I will have more money to spend to make money.

Holiday Fun

I was thinking that a good project to do in the holidays is tie-dying an old white or light coloured T-shirt that is worn out or stained. You can give it a new lease of life by painting it.

You need some fabric paint, old plastic cool drink bottles – with their lids plus a few extra lids, and an old plastic container (like a margarine tub or something), medium sized elastic bands, water, a garbage bag and 4 stones (or something heavy to anchor the bag on the grass).

Maybe it’s best to experiment first with an old pillowcase or something – just until you get the hang of it. Also, it’s fun to team up with some of your friends and get them to buy different colours of fabric paint – that way you can all share.

Take a few teaspoonful’s of one colour of fabric paint and put it in the old container. Add about half a glass of water. Mix it up well. Carefully pour it into one of the cool drink bottles – if there is still paint left in the bottom of the container – add a bit more water, swish it around and add it to the bottle. Put the lid on the bottle and give it a good shake.

For each different colour of paint – make a separate bottle. Be careful to wash out the container that you mix in each time – otherwise you’ll mix your colours up.

Take the extra lids and make little holes in them – using a nail or something sharp. Replace the whole lids with the holey ones.

Take the item you want to dye, grab a small handful of the fabric and put an elastic band around it. A bit like you are giving your t-shirt a pony tail. Do that all over the shirt – make lots of pony tails.

Spread the black bag on the floor (outside of course, and make sure you are wearing old clothes) put your item down and sprinkle it with colour from a bottle. Smoosh the paint in with your hands (this is the fun part). Add more colours if you want to.

Replace the holey lids with whole lids when you are finished. You can use leftover paint again.

Hang the t-shirt on the line to dry. Wait until it is properly dry before taking off the rubber bands.

Make sure you iron the T-shirt before you wear it – the heat sets the paint so that it does not wash out.

Have fun. Send me pictures if you want to.

Sibo

For more details and pictures visit my other blog.

Fun stuff to do

Sometimes I get bored in the holidays. I mean the first few days are great – you get to sleep in late and don’t have any homework or stuff to do.

Then it gets to when I’ve read and reread all my books and the novelty of sleeping late has worn off. My beans are growing nicely on their own – all I have to do is water them, talk to them and pick them when they are big enough.

I do go play with friends sometimes, but they are not always around – they also have their own things to do and… some of them go away for the holidays.

I spend time with my dog too – take him for walks, brush him and train him. He’s my best friend and I really love him. I always get so sad when people mistreat their animals. Some people even leave them chained up in their yards or go away without bothering to get somebody to look after them. That’s so bad. I would never do that to my dog.

But even after doing all of the above – I still get bored and that’s when it is great to have some fun stuff to do.

Like what Sibo? I hear you asking…

Well – you all know I like recycling stuff – right? So I found a cool way of making a hanging mobile or a hanging curtain (if you’ve got lots of time and patience) using stuff like plastic bottles, bottle tops, corks, beads, buttons, straws and anything else that’s lying around that you can thread on a string.

You might need one of your parental agents to help you with the plastic bottles. You cut them up into shapes, like circles and squares and triangles using scissors – sometimes make the first cut is the hardest and that’s where you need help. You can also put glue on the plastic and sprinkle sand or glitter on the pieces. Then you thread all the stuff on a piece of string, or wool, or fishing line – whatever you have. Make a knot at the bottom. Put something heavyish on first so that it hangs nicely.

Have fun! Send us some pictures if you want to.

Go check out what my friend Ginny did: http://sibosays.blog.com/2011/08/16/make-a-cool-beaded-curtain-from-old-plastic-bottles/

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Cool word for the week:

Hah! It’s holidays – you get a break from leaning cool words!!!

Full of beans

Hi everybody

You know how adults always talk about sustainable farming, growing your own food and stuff like that? We don’t think that it applies to us – but it does, you know. There is nothing to stop us growing our own stuff to eat.

Like beans.

Beans are really easy to grow. And it’s fun to watch them grow too. Better still, those little beans (when they are about 7 cm long) are really good to eat raw. They taste a million times better than the big ones your mom cooks for dinner.

You get two types of beans – pole beans and bush beans. You can buy bean seeds at places like Checkers or Pick ‘n Pay. Maybe it’s a plan to club together with your friends, buy a packet of seeds and share them.

Back to the beans – pole beans grow tall and need something to lean against, like a stick or a wall or a trellis or something. Otherwise they get all tangled up and are not such happy chappies.

Bush beans grow in a little bush and don’t need to have a stake like pole beans do.

If you don’t have a nice piece of ground, you can grow your bean(s) in a container. You can even use a 2 liter cool drink bottle. Just cut the top off (get a parental agent to help). Cut it quite high up so you can have more soil and there is more space for the roots. Make some little holes (using a nail) in the bottom for the water to drain out.

Stick your finger into the soil up to the second knuckle. Put your bean into the hole and cover it up gently with soil. Give it a little bit of water. Beans don’t like too much water so be careful not to drown it. If you leave it on the windowsill or outside in the sun you will need to check that the soil is always a bit damp – don’t let it get too dry or it won’t grow.

After about five days you will notice that your bean has begun to sprout. Once they start growing, they grow really quickly.

It’s great fun to watch plants grow.

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Cool word for the week:

Word: dodgy

Meaning: unreliable or dishonest

Example: The weather forecast is often dodgy – you never know if it is actually going to rain or not.

PS – you can visit http://www.sibo.co.za/page13.html for more info about Sibo and the Veggie Bed!

Sibo makes a clever plan

Hey guys!

Hope you are all surviving this hot weather.

I was so hot the other day I had an extra cold shower in the middle of the afternoon. But then I felt really bad about wasting water so I came up with another plan.

I asked my mum if I could have her old spray bottle – the one that had stuff in it to clean the windows. She had put it in the plastic pile to be recycled. I always go and nose around in the recycling pile to see if there is anything interesting that I can re-use or modify. Think I sometimes drive my poor mum a bit crazy.

I washed the bottle out very well, using some sunlight liquid to make sure that all the nasty detergent was gone. Then I rinsed it out several times too. I thought it was okay to use all that water because I’m planning on using the bottle for quite a long time.

Then I filled the bottle up with water and put it in the fridge for a while.

Later on, while I was doing my homework – I sprayed my legs and arms with nice cool water. It worked a treat. If you’ve got a fan – you can also spray the water into the fan and stand in front of it – that works well too.

But be careful not to make your books all wet and smooshy though, otherwise your teacher will be miffed with you.

I know some people are lucky and have swimming pools that they can use to cool down in – but we don’t. So I had to think of a clever plan instead. My Grandmother always says to me, “Sibo! When you have a problem, you have to put on your thinking cap and figure out a way to solve it.”

Sometimes it’s fun thinking of ways to unravel problems. And sometimes it is easier than we imagine. It’s the really simple things that work and make a difference.

Did you know… the 22^nd of February is World Thinking Day?

Imagine that! A whole day dedicated to thinking about thinking.

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Cool word for the week:

Word: miffed

Meaning: to be annoyed with, to be displeased

Example: I left the recycling pile in a mess when I took out the spray bottle and Mum was miffed with me.