Keep your Summer Holiday Sanity by
Getting Creative

The six week holidays are here and you are becoming increasingly aware that taking children somewhere everyday can become expensive. The advice from Mucky Pups children’s arts and crafts classes is “plan ahead”. Mucky Pups founders Kate Hepworth and Fiona Haji- Michael explain:
Children love art, craft and mucky time but with increasing demands on school curriculums, they don’t always have the opportunity to explore and experiment with the freedom they desire.
Even though this is your child’s break from school, their minds still benefit from funnier, muckier variations on what they’re used to doing at school. You can pat yourself on the back after an arty session with your children, knowing that you’ve encouraged:

1. Learning through creativity and experimentation, and problem solving
2. Feeling good about themselves and their abilities
3. Experimenting with cause and effect while further developing motor skills and hand/eye co-ordination
4. Learning that it is the process and not the product that is the key to having fun!
5. Focusing their energy constructively

Simply make sure you prepare by spreading out a large sheet or bin liners and newspaper on the table, so you can just scoop up all the mess and throw it in the bin. Find each child an old t-shirt to protect their clothes.

Garden in a box
You will need: One shoe box per child. Silver foil. Glue. Access to a park or garden.
To do: Gather a selection of flowers, grass, leaves and pebbles from a garden or park. (You can do this with or without the children.) Each child can create their dream garden in a shoe box by arranging the flowers and grass in the box with glue. Cut out the foil for a pool. Ask the children who lives in their garden? Perhaps it is fairies or dogs or dinosaurs? They can draw small characters to live in their garden.
Matchbox challenge
You will need: One matchbox per child. Paint, glue and glitter. General small items from the home or garden, eg: paper clips, buttons, blades of grass, gravel.
To do: Give each child an empty matchbox to decorate with paint glitter or glue in their chosen style. When these are dry, begin the matchbox challenge! How many tiny items, from the pile you have provided, can each child squeeze into their matchbox?
Summer scrapbook
You will need: One scrapbook or notebook per child, pens, glue, old magazines, some photos and souvenirs from places you have been as a family, eg: ticket stubs, receipts, parking tickets.
To do: Each week or each day, the children can sit down with the pile of receipts and souvenirs (perhaps the result of your handbag clear out!) and stick into their book their own choice of mementos from the summer holidays. Cut out pictures from magazines and catalogues that remind them of what they enjoyed doing.

Mucky Pups covers part of the Early Years Learning programme set out by the government and the themes have been put together by a qualified teacher.
Mucky Pups was formed in 2003 and is THE place to paint, stick, make craft projects, use play and salt dough, and create with food, and cut & colour.
Mucky Pups classes take place in Somerset, Cornwall, Devon, Dorset and throughout the UK.
For further inspiration or information on your nearest Mucky Pups class, visit www.mucky-pups.com