Aquarium

About a year ago Beth was poorly, she'd had a temperature and been sick a couple of times during the night but was in very high spirits the next morning. The weather was terrible and Daniel was feeling a bit warm so I didn't want to risk taking him out and getting him cold (he was only about 12 weeks at the time). Normally this is the kind of thing I would let TV field but we every Lent we have a no daytime TV (9am-5pm) rule. Faced with a dull Monday I asked Beth what she would like to do, she said she wanted to go to the aquarium, I told her we could make an aquarium if she liked, little did I know what a big project it would turn into.   

I had just started to follow a really good blog (be warned, this link will make you cry with jealousy even if you don't have children, you'd wish that you had a playroom like this for yourself) Play at Home Moms and whilst we don't have even a small fraction of the space or resources I had been inspired to create an art shelf that Beth has free access to and as a result we had all the resources we needed. 

The first job to do was write a list of everything Beth could remember from her last visit to an aquarium (about 6 months previous). I was expecting this to be quite limited but Beth is a little like an elephant in terms of her memory so we came up with this list. 

• Shark tunnel 
• Fish tank
• Penguins
• Jelly fish
• Touch pool with star fish

Beth was pretty good at thinking big and a lot of the ideas she knew how she wanted to do it, but there were a few things where I needed to think on my feet. I wanted her to realise that if you dream it you can do it, so I didn't say no to anything and I think we came up with a pretty amazing aquarium. 

sorry about the picture quality

We decided to start with the shark tunnel. We have a loverly period arch between our living room and dinning room and it was just the right shape for a shark tunnel so I drew and cut out a shark and a turtle  on Art roll, (although lining wall paper does the same job and can be a lot cheaper) and got beth to colour them in then I cut out the seaweed from sugar paper. 

Then we moved on to the penguins, we had just sent off for a sun holiday so had plenty of newspaper around that would never have been read. We scrunched some up and used them to make a head that, we taped these to toilet rolls, and painted them black and left them to dry whilst we went digging for some rocks for our rock pool. Later we added some googley eyes a barely visible white patch and foil wings, oh and Beth cut out the beaks. 

Of course they needed a home and we painted a box white but again the white wasn't very white and we decided to use cotton wool to make some snow. The penguins also had there own pool made from foil and a little dish complete with tiny fish (cut out from yellow paper). Beth still loves playing with this now and creates a loverly small world scenario, where she feeds the penguins fish in the dish and then they come along and eat them and drink from the pool.












The rocks for the rock/touch pool, were  cleaned then placed in the biggest Tupperware I owned and I added blue food colour and luke warm water. We drew out a star fish, a little crab, an anemone and some different shaped shells on white paper and some seaweed on green paper. We coloured these in then cut them out. I tried to be clever at this point and water proofed them with Sticky backed plastic (contact paper on the other side of the pond), which did act to make them water resistant for about half and hour but by the end of the day they'd come apart and the colour had run. *

The fish tank was another exercise in sticking and colouring, we also found some handy net shaped packaging to add a bit of scenery to our tank.

The jelly fish were an inspiration from Beth in the end. I asked her what she thought would make a good jelly fish and she thought about it and said a plastic bag. Almost all the bags in the house were multi coloured, except for the corners of two Home Bargains bags, we stuffed them with tissue paper and tied them with embroidery string then taped them above the glass on top of our stair way.

 

By the time Beth had finished and played with the aquarium we had spent most of the day crafting and it was only an hour or so before 'daddy o'clock'. I asked her if she wanted to watch telly and she said no she wanted to make a sign for the aquarium. This was just as she was learning to differentiate sounds in words and I was very proud that she had managed to tell me that aquarium started with an 'a' and then a 'q'. After I wrote 'aquarium' she coloured it in, and we placed it above the door to the dining room. We also made daddy a ticket (cost of £14 was Beth's idea, which I thought showed a good grasp of the value of money) and a Booklet/map (£2.50). Although by this point Beth's hands were getting tired she pointed to where everything should go on the map and I drew it for her, it was surprisingly accurate.
When daddy got home he was given a tour of the dining room (in fact most people were for the next month wether they'd seen it before or not).

What Daniel did all day 

 *I now own a laminator and may have more luck, but i've not repeated the experiment, I might in the summer use this as a water play idea and add hidden treasure for them to find, or make some shapes for role play at bath time.