Internet Origami Lesson

We use FaceTime (like Skype) to chat to my mom 3 or 4 times a week, which is a great way to not feel so far apart and she gets to see Ebi-kun on a regular basis. In fact she sees more of him that the other grandchildren who only live an hour or so away!

Anyway, my step-sister and her family have just moved back to the UK after a 15 year stint in Greece, we have never actually met her kids in real life and Ebi-kun and A are the same age. They have been staying with my mom for the week so we got to chat a couple of times. A and Ebi-kun hit it off straight away and within minutes Ebi-kun was giving A a lesson on how to do origami. Mom has a stockpile of supplies but the book they had was all in Japanese, we have the same book here so Ebi-kun did step-by-step demonstrations for her.

I love how technology can bring us closer together. The next time we spoke, A was doing her spelling homework, so that turned out to be an international spelling bee!

Going For Gold...

I spotted this download from Tinyme Games, it has popped up on several blogs I read over the last couple of days and since we are studying the Olympics just now, I thought I would have a look. If you click through there are loads of printables and the design work is really cute. We downloaded the board game, printed it onto card and gave it a test run this afternoon.

image: Tinyme

If you are making this for little ones I recommend just making the dice then folding the counters over to make a triangle because that are a bit of a faff to stick together and too difficult for Ebi-kun to do alone. We played it a couple of times, it was fun but Ebi-kun said next time we should make the forfeits more difficult as long as he doesn't expect me to do the 100m dash or high jump! 

At the end of the day, it's cute, it's free and it's topical, what more could you want?

adorable little printable....

First off I want to say a great big THANK YOU to everyone who filled in my questionnaire, it has really helped me see what I was missing and raised some great topics to tackle plus reassured me that I was on the right track with most of it.

I'm taking a business course at the moment, I'm the second week in, there is a tonne of homework which I'm really enjoying but it doesn't leave much time for anything else! Today I will be working on the new website and working through the next step in this weeks module and I will also be doing some tinkering over here again (I hope not too many people noticed that I crashed the whole blog last week!)

Anyway, I thought it would be nice to give you a little thank you for your help, so I rustled up a printable for you. It can be used in two ways - I love multi-functional things, don't you? So, you can fold it to make a mini colouring book - handy to keep in your bag with a pack of mini crayons for those 'I'm bored moments'

OR

You can colour them in then cut them out to make little play characters. There are instructions for both in the PDF below. (If need to click through to the blog to print it)

Little Animal Friends

If you like it, please share it with your friends, especially those on social media, your twitter followers and Facebook pals and if you come up with a different way to use the file, let me know!