Continuing on the other day’s shape-thing‘s wave, my mom made a second cool gift for Kayla. This one is a fishing dam with glittery fish and fishing poles.

And it’s just as easy to make and effective at occupying little hands as the shape-a-ma-jig.

What makes this one great is that Kayla can fish on her own or one of her parents can join her. She loves fishing with Mom or Dad and then mimics what we do. If we catch a green or purple fish, she’ll aim for one of the same colour. The concentration on her face is priceless too.

Once again this is a great teacher of colour and awesome for fine motor skills. It also installs concepts about magnetism and movement, because Kayla realises now that when she moves the fishing pole too much (AKA wildly), she can’t catch fish. She knows she has to move it slowly. Slow is a big thing for a two-year-old. 😛

What you’ll need:
Different coloured felt and a scissor.
Paint and glitter pens / Glue and glitter. (Note here. Glitter is like the plague. There is always an outbreak of glitter when used, so proceed with caution :D)
Metal paper clips.
Glue. (Mom used a glue gun)
Thin rope and wooden poles. (In this case, 2 poles. My mom used about 75 cm rope and the poles are 20 cm. Adjust this to fit your child’s height)
Magnets. (In this case, 2 round magnets)
Embellishments.

What you’ll do.
Cut an ovalish blue shape of felt for the pond. Use your own discretion at the size, but ours is about 55 x 45 cm at its widest points.
Embellish your pond with flowers and leaves. You’ll need the glue for this step. 😛
Cut out your fish from different coloured felt. You’ll need 2 pieces of felt for every fish, a front and a back. Our fish are about 6 x 5 cm at their widest points. My mom made 20 fish. The fish in the image below is actual size.

Embellish all of your fish and paint the spots for their eyes.
Stick a paper clip onto the inside of the fish and then glue on its back. You could  use a needle and yarn for the fastening if you have time and no glue.
To make the fishing poles, tie the rope onto one end of the poles and glue it fast.
Glue the magnets to the free end of the rope.
My mom glued flowers to the end of the magnet where she stuck the rope and also to the top of the fishing poles where she tied the rope. This is both to strengthen and hide the glue.
Let the glue dry well before handing it to the kids, or make the drive of shame to the ER with a fishing pole stuck to your child’s hands. 😛
GO FISHING!

This is another one of those things that keep Kayla busy for hours. She had her friend, Jasper, over the other day and he enjoyed it just as much!

Thanks again Mom!

Completely unrelated, I want to wish my aunt Flora a very happy birthday! I hope you guys have an awesome day.

I’ve got some cool posts planned for the blog too. I’ll have a German Chronicle post up in the week and I’m also working on another Current Chaos. If all goes well, I’ll start working on the final draft of The Physician’s Apprentice too. Well, the final draft I’ll send to the editor anyway. Because I’ll probably have fixes to apply before I publish it and all. I wrote about the editing process the other day (more on that here) and I’m super inspired to get to the actual writing, once my world building is done. A lot of changes will be made, but I think this is going to be worthwhile. I haven’t been this excited about writing in a long time!

Hope you have a good one, folks.

Yolandie