Last week we had a nice day of outdoor play in the garden, collecting leaves and twigs and lot's of wonderful things for our nature suncatchers.
Once the boys were happy with the bits they had collected we came inside to make our nature suncatchers. We tipped their bags out and explored all the things they had collected, and even found a little surprise in there - an earwig!
I brought out glass dish and a cake tin and a couple of smaller pots and they boys started filling them with water and twigs, leaves, petals and flowers.
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| Adding water and nature ready to freeze! |
Unfortunately I forgot to think about adding string! And because we had started quite late in the day, by the time it got dark they still hadn't frozen yet! So we left them in the freezer and waited for a nice sunny day to get them out.
A couple of days later the sun was gloriously shining and we didn't have plans to go out anywhere so we thought it would be the perfect time to get them out.
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| Freshly frozen suncatchers |
I put them on the tuff spot for the boys to explore and play with whilst I went to get a hammer, string and nail.
When I got back they told me they couldn't get them out of the tins! Oops, I think perhaps we should have used silicone rather than glass or metal! I couldn't even get them out myself.
I asked the boys to get some water to help get them out of the moulds. It worked perfectly, Joshua used his watering can to pour water over them, the ice started to crack really loudly which they found interesting! And once the ice had cracked it slid perfectly out of the tin.
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| Joshua pouring water to help release them from the moulds |
We got to work making the holes, I held the nail in place whilst Jakob used the hammer to nail it through the ice. We then threaded wool (I run out of string!) through the suncatchers and Jakob made the knots to hang them up.
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| Making the hole with a nail and hammer, to thread the string through |
He went and got his step stool so that he could place them on the branches of a tree. There wasn't much choice with the tree because of where the sun was shining in the garden, but he didn't care.
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| Hanging up our suncatchers |
We watched the suncatchers hanging from the tree, there was a slight breeze so they were twirling around, and as the sun was directly hitting them where Jakob had put them, they began melting quite quickly, and were dripping almost constantly which both the boys enjoyed watching.
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| Melting suncatchers! |