Scrabble with a twist

Recently Ebi-kun is really into board games, he was given Shopping List when we were on our travels which is great, a twist on the memory game and I got him Guess Who which he loves too (once he got the hang of it!). Anyway, we needed a somewhere for these new games to live, so I cleared space in the draw where our scrabble and chess set are kept. Of course, he spotted the scrabble and wanted to learn how to play. He can't manage to play properly yet so I made up some alternative games, the first he had to pick a small object from out of a bag and then spell the word out, placing them on the tile holder.
After we had done a few of those he asked to learn to play properly again, he realised that we weren't using the board that is in the box. So, alternative game 2, we placed all the scrabble tiles on the mat and spelled out one word to start off with, then we took turns spelling out new words and adding them to the board.
It was basically spelling practice, the sort of thing we do with the moveable alphabet but it was interesting (for him) because we were using something new.

In the afternoon I made up some side walk paint, I have seen this on a number of blogs, I'm not sure which one I saw it one first but it is easy to do and a great alternative to chalk.

1/2 cup corn starch

1/2 cup water

few drops of food colour

mix together, I ended up adding a bit more corn starch to make it a bit thicker, we did some painting, then I painted out hop-scotch and taught him how to play. After I painted it, I decided it looked wrong so I added a number 10 too, I can't remember if that is right or not! We haven't had much rain since we did this so it hasn't washed off yet, I hope it does or we will have the neighbourhood police after us :o)