Holiday Play with Miss Five

Miss Five - our Grand Daughter is more than ready for school.
Keeping her occupied and captivated becomes harder and harder.
Yesterday, an impromptu visit with her Nanna  had me racking my brain for an activity we  had never done before and was challenging enough for a five year old.
Here is what I came up with.

1.  Choose the primary colours from a box of colour pencils or crayons etc.
2.  The eldest person in the room holds out the pencils.
3.  The youngest person in the room closes his/her eyes and chooses one colour pencil/crayon etc.
4.  Everybody then goes on a hunt to find as many items as possible in that chosen colour only.
5.  We made some rules about what we would classify as being okay to choose.  For example, it had to be safe (not heavy, not too big, not up high).   Set your rules as you see fit.  Don't overload children with rules.  If you don't want certain items or rooms touched exclude these.  For example if you don't want plants shredded, exclude plants (or the entire garden).
6.  Set a time limit - we searched for about 5-10 minutes but we were just two.  If five people are searching you will collect many more items in the same time. (In actual fact we ran out of items to collect and this is why I suggest using only primary colours from your pencil box).
7.  Allocate a spot to place collected items.
8.  On a sheet of large white paper arrange all items into a pattern.  (We used our blackboard table top because it was available).
9.  The youngest person/s take photographs of the arranged items.  If more than one child is doing this activity allow them to have turns, starting from the youngest up, allowing each to take say 3 or 4 photographs each.  I allowed our Grand Daughter to use our Canon Supershot under supervision and set it on an anti blur setting.  She had unlimited shots to take but she took about forty photographs before she lost steam.  More than half of these were in no way related to our activity! and she wandered off into the garden to take photos of lots of other things.  So if you have more than one child taking photographs...set boundaries and then if they wish to take more photos later make that another activity.
10. Print out small prints of the photographs and make mini cards.  On one sheet of A4 paper we were able to print out 8 photographs.  I used a matte paper (heavyweight) which is cheaper than photographic paper and provides a quality print. The photos were adhered to the front of folded mini cards.  Miss Five will now use these to write thank you notes to people who gave her gifts over Christmas.

The above photographs are cropped photos from originals taken by Miss Five and used to complete her thank you cards.  (But I must admit...the little feet and knees at the bottom of the photographs did look cute!)

Sorry we don't have photos of the cards to show you...Mum arrived before they were ready!