Budget play ideas

We’re going to show a few budget friendly play activities with you that you can do at home and adapt to every season.

Colour hunt

One of our favourite things to do is to have a walk around a local forest or park anywhere that’s got lots of open space with trees and flowers and to look out for what colours we can find.

What you need:

A colour wheel and pegs

We suggest taking a picnic and warm drink (for mum and dad) especially if it’s a bit chilly out!

We take out with us a colour wheel that we got from @drawmelincoln it came with the pegs which makes it easy to clip your nature finds to the colours.

This activity costs nothing to do you can make your own wheel or take a little basket to collect your colours in.

It helps make your little one to stop and appreciate nature look at the surroundings look at all the small things that you might miss.

You can also do different twists so you can do it seasonally what can you find in autumn what colours can you find in the summer, spring or in winter. Or you could explore other areas like the seaside what colours can we find here?

We’d love to see your colour hunts, so do tags us and share your colour adventure with us!

Leaf printing

One thing we love to do with fallen leaves is printing! This is a perfect budget friendly activity we can do this with card paint or crayons and some leaves. A tiger excuse to get outside to collect some nature treasures giving you two activities in one.

There are a few ways you can make leaf prints, here are our favourite ways;

1. Paint the leaf (skeleton side) and stamp on paper or

card.

2. Place leaf on paper and use watercolours to paint

around the leaf.

3. Place leaf under (skeleton side up)paper and use

wax crayons to rub over the leaf gently.

4. Using fabric, a stone or hammer you can print the

leaf onto fabric.

Chunky crayons are from @colourmelincoln

Homemade Play Dough.

Do you want to give your little one an activity that keeps on giving!? Then here it’s is! Make your own play dough. It’s a great way to bond together, follow instructions and a little sneaky math thrown in for good measure! Your play dough will keep for ages too if you store in an airtight container!

Playdough can be used in small world play, use as a learning resource or open ended play, give them a tray of loose parts and you’ll have peace for a good hour or so!

play dough recipe.

Ingredients:

192g  plain flour

64g table salt

2 tbsp. cooking oil

2 tbsp. cream of tartar

250ml of boiling water

food colouring (optional)

step 1

Mix together the flour, salt, oil and cream of tartar in a bowl.

Step 2

Add together your chosen food colouring (optional) to the hot water, mix then pour into the bowl with the other ingredients.

Step 3

Mix it all together and you should get a smooth dough texture, if not add more flour to the mixture.

Step 4

Allow the mixture to cool down slightly.

Step 5

Take the dough out of the bowl, sprinkle some flour onto a clean surface and knead the dough for 3-5 minutes.

Step 6

Your dough is ready to be played with or kept in an airtight container for another play day.

We hope you enjoyed this weeks blog, like, share and comment! We'd love to know your favourite budget play idea!