FREE Halloween Pip Ahoy Printables & Activites

Earlier this week I had the chance to have a tour of the CHF Entertainment studio, they are the makers of the fantastic cartoon Pip Ahoy! Pip Ahoy is part of Milkshake! on Channel 5 and is also shown on Cartoonito. The studios are in a beautiful, historic and top secret location in Manchester, close to my home and accessible only through underground tunnels (might have made that last bit up). CHF Entertainment are the reincarnation of animation legends Cosgrove Hall who made iconic cartoon series such as Danger Mouse, Count Duckula and The Wind in the Willows (and literally hundreds more).

For those who haven’t yet seen Pip Ahoy! It is all about the adventures of Pip the puppy, and his friends including cute kitten Alba and adorable Alan the penguin in the seaside town of Salty Cove. Pip Ahoy! features the familiar voices of David Jason, Stacy Soloman, Teresa Gallagher and Jimmy Hibbert. Pip Ahoy! is aimed at pre-schoolers and my (nearly) 5 year old son loves watching it on catch up and gets really involved in the goings on at Salty Cove.

With the October half term approaching and Halloween creeping ever closer, I’m delighted to be able to offer my blog readers a set of FREE downloadable Pip Ahoy! Halloween Activity Sheets to help keep your little ones entertained, or to use to plan your perfect Pip Ahoy! Halloween Party!

Not only that, but I’ve also got nine brilliant pumpkin carving stencils to share with you, I think stencils are great, especially if you’re not confident about carving freehand. As well as the usual pumpkin faces, you can also carve your own Pip, Skipper, Hopper, Alba, Pasty and Alan characters – so much to choose from! Pip Ahoy These free printables, stencils and activity sheets are brilliant for your little Pipsqueaks. Happy Halloween!

Milestones: His first day of school

Today was one of those milestone days in my son’s life. Today he trotted off to join his Reception class and start his school days properly. Last year he was lucky enough to get a place in the school nursery, but there was no guarantee of an actual school place, so he’s already been going to the school part time for a year now. He knows some of the ropes, most of the staff and has been settled and happy there, which is all a parent could ask for.

Despite the fact he was already fairly established within the school, there were a few “first day of school” anxieties, mainly from me and his dad. He was just looking forward to seeing all of his friends again and being with his new teacher who he’d met a few times last term.

We’d had a busy summer and we’d spent lots of quality time together and cemented a new kind of friendship between us. I’ve seen him through other people’s eyes and realised what a kind, funny and well-mannered little lad he is. It’s so easy to get bogged down in petty squabbles about where he’d thrown his underpants and forget about all the really good things about him.

This morning arrived too soon. Collectively the three of us tumbled down the stairs towards the front door, perpetually running slightly late, frantically pulling on shoes and coats. Checking and double checking the contents of our bags. Cartwheeling out of the door and galloping off to the school gates. Late, always late.

But today we paused, because it was our son’s first day at school. First proper day at school. We took the obligatory photo of him in his new, clean uniform stood in front of the house, we didn’t expect him to smile, we didn’t really expect him to pose. But what we got tells us everything we needed to know about his feelings about his first day at school. I think he’s happy, don’t you?

first day of school

And if you’re wondering how he got on, he emerged at home time with a huge smile on his face and can’t wait to go back tomorrow. Long may that continue!

Growing up fast – The end of Nursery

This week the small boy finishes nursery, he’s starting to not be quite so small and he’s growing up fast. Heartbreakingly fast. I know it’s all a massive cliché, but where did my baby go? Those precious few months where he was all cuddles and he smelt of milk and love have passed in the blink of an eye. I fall more in love with him every day, despite the various challenges of raising a four year old who is as stubborn and wilful as his parents.

growing up fast

In September 2014 he put on his too-big jumper and toddled off to school nursery. We didn’t know if he’d be lucky enough to get one of the 28 places available in a our local and much sought after primary school at that point, but we felt by sending him we were doing the best for him, and we were right.

He quickly made friends, partly because he knew several of the other children from various playgroups and from church, partly because he’s an easy going, friendly and caring little chap. He settled in fairly easily and his teachers quickly discovered that he has his own stubborn little personality. Whilst dealing with a stubborn person can be frustrating, I am of the opinion that stubborn is good, stubborn is what has got me through the last few years despite considerable physical hardship and pain, so stubborn will see him right, eventually.

It’s not all been plain sailing, one of the boys took against him at one point and for a week or so in the autumn he’d come home and we’d have to check him for injuries, this other child had scratched his face so badly it’s left a permanent scar. The school dealt with it well, which is all you can hope for really and there’s been no further trouble.

Despite this he has always gone to school cheerfully, he wakes up raring to go and spend the day there with his friends and his teachers. He adores them all and I spent a few days volunteering and helping out, so I know what a lovely, warm, welcoming place it is.

In April we were delighted to discover that he’d got a place at the school, so this coming September he’ll be starting in Reception. He’ll mostly have the same group of friends with him, but he won’t have the same teachers, which I think will make him sad for a little while.

He has come on in huge leaps and bounds this year, at the start he was a bit behind his peers in terms of his language development, but since he had grommets put in both ears he’s raced ahead and caught up. I’m so proud of my boy and his growing confidence. Last week he stood up in assembly and spoke confidently in front of the whole school, my eye did a little wee.

growing up fast

He is my pride and joy, the apple of his father’s eye and beyond a shadow of a doubt the very best thing to ever happen to me. This Friday will mark the end of an era, come September he’ll be a schoolboy and there full time. I will miss our afternoons together, but if the last academic year has been anything to go by, he’ll love being there and he’ll carry on loving learning too.

Fun to Learn First Friends Magazine

Whenever we go into a supermarket the small boy always heads for the magazine stand and spends some time weighing up his options before choosing a children’s magazine to take home. When he was younger I used to have to hide it away until we got home or he’d trash it in the car, but these days he sits beautifully in the back of the car pouring over the contents and deciding what he’s going to colour in or put stickers on when we get home.

This month a brand new children’s magazine has been launched by award winning pre-school publisher, Redan Publishing Ltd. They publish a whole range of kids magazines which you will be familiar with, such as Peppa Pig Magazine, Ben & Holly’s Little Kingdom Magazine as well as Friends Magazine and Favourites Magazine – all of which we’ve bought and read a number of times.

The new publication, Fun to Learn First Friends Magazine, is aimed at pre-school children aged 2-4 years. It contains stories and activities featuring popular children’s TV characters including, Elmer, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Spot, Woolly & Tig, Abney & Teal amongst many others.

Fun to Learn First Friends Magazine

This lovely magazine encourages learning through play, with easy to follow stories and fun activities, including early learning crafts, letters, counting, making, matching, puzzles, colouring, all of which are great for a spot of stealth learning and for sparking a bit of creativity.

The first edition of the monthly Fun to Learn First Friends Magazine costs £2.99 and is published on 8th July. It comes with a free gift of a Very Hungry Caterpillar Tea Set, 33 stickers, an Elmer height chart, a Spot the Dog poster and the chance to win a Gruffalo Trunki.

Fun to Learn First Friends Magazine

As you can see, the small boy really enjoyed Fun to Learn First Friends Magazine, he loved the activities, especially the colouring in. He liked the Spot the Dog poster and he really, really loved the little free gift of a tea set. It was the perfect activity for an afternoon stuck in the house.

Learning: Encouraging Creativity in Kids

When I was pregnant with the boy we sat down and had a number of earnest discussions about how we would bring him up. We made many decisions and made plans for him, whilst understanding that if he was like us he’d be stubborn and stick to his own path, so we’d let him follow that, but we knew we wanted to encourage some creativity in him. So we did.

We both love music and we knew we wanted to encourage a love of music in him, we’d love him to play an instrument and enjoy playing for himself, but we would be happy if he just enjoyed listening to music. He does love listening to all kinds of music. He has a few small instruments, he likes his guitar, but he’s developing a real love of the drums, so much so we’re taking him African drumming over the weekend. Drumming gives him a lot of pleasure, though less so the people around him but I’m sure he’ll find his rhythm eventually.

We knew we wanted to encourage him to lose himself in a book. Reading is such a wonderful gift for the imagination. Since before he was born we’ve read to him nightly. When we have an afternoon together we often snuggle up with a pile of books. He’s too young to read by himself yet, but reading has given him such a wonderful, bright imagination, I love sharing that with him.

It’s well documented that despite a three year stint in an art college (doing a journalism degree) that I am terrible at arts and crafts. I am comfortable with the shonky nature of what I produce and my main aim is to teach the boy that arts, music and general creativity are for fun and personal enjoyment. It doesn’t matter so much if it isn’t perfect, it matters more that you enjoyed doing it. If you happen to have a talent or a gift for the arts then so much the better.

One way we try and encourage his enjoyment is by taking him to various creative learning events such as arts festivals, the theatre and to see interesting and diverse things such as African drummers and such like. It’s lovely to see him respond positively and enthusiastically to the new, exciting and colourful things he sees, and the feedback from school nursery is that our efforts are paying off. We have a boy who gets stuck into music, dance and drawing, we couldn’t be prouder!

How do you encourage creativity in your kids?

This post was featured by Twinkl in their Creativity in Children blog

Heroes of the City YouTube Channel Review

We’ve been enjoying playing with the Heroes of the City app for a good long while now. It still gets played with regularly, especially now the small boy has inherited my old iPad. He has also discovered YouTube and we let him watch cartoons and things on it sometimes. He was really delighted to discover that Heroes of the City had their own YouTube channel. I was delighted too because it’s been the school holidays and it’s kept him happy for half an hour while I’ve got on with a few chores.

Heroes of the City is an animated TV-series for preschool children about rescue vehicles, it is set in a small town where everybody gets to be a hero. The TV-series contains a lot of warmth and teaches the importance of friendship and what we can be achieved by helping each other and working together.

I love that there’s a proper Heroes of the City YouTube channel now and so does the small boy. He loves watching the adventures of Pauli Police Car and Fiona Fire Engine as well as the clumsy Calamity Crow. He loves emergency vehicles so anything emergency or rescue themed is always a winner.

On the Heroes of the City YouTube channel there are already 6 hours of video including music videos, compilations, Crafting with Calamity Crow, Memory Games and a range of full episodes and shorter clips for smaller children. The videos are high quality and are suitable for children 2-6 years and the YouTube channel is available in 18 different languages.

It is now firmly part of our YouTube repertoire and it’s something he can enjoy alone, or watch with us and we can talk about the themes as a family. If you want to take a look at the Heroes of the City YouTube channel you can find it here.

Helping children cope with bereavement

Whatever age you are, dealing with the death of someone close to you isn’t easy and is one of the most emotionally painful things a person can go through. When we lose a loved one as an adult, we usually have an understanding of why they died and we’re able to work our way through the grieving process. Children, no matter how mature they are, can really struggle to understand why their loved one died and deal with their complex emotions in the weeks, months and years following their death.

Co-operative Funeralcare have teamed up with CHUMS the Child Bereavement, Trauma and Emotional Wellbeing service to create a DVD and resource pack to help families and children aged 7- 16 cope with the loss of a loved one. There are four DVDs in the series, ‘Our Year Since Mum Died’, ‘Our Year Since Dad Died’, ‘Our Year Since Gran Died’ and ‘Our Year Since Grandad Died’. I was sent the ‘Our Year Since Mum Died’ DVD to watch and understand.

The DVD, which can be picked up free of charge from any Co-operative Funeralcare Home is a well put together package. The DVD is animated which makes the content more accessible to the children it is meant to help. Each DVD comes with a booklet of guidance notes to help families, schools and other professionals support the bereaved child.

Each of the DVDs follows the first year following the death of a loved one and talks about how different family members may react and cope with the death of a relative, as well as looking at how Gemma (the girl in the DVD), copes and tries to get back into normal daily life, including dealing with big family occasions and anniversaries like Mother’s Day, birthdays and Christmas.

Bereavement is such a difficult subject for anyone to talk about, having this DVD is a great way to open up the conversation and help children to understand that what they are going through and how they are feeling is all perfectly normal and it’s fine to feel angry or abandoned or just incredibly sad.

The DVD has some downloadable resources which have been developed to help teachers, adults, support workers etc. offer the support a bereaved young person may need. This includes a lesson plan, a PowerPoint presentation and some questions and answers.

The booklet of guidance notes comes with the details of a range of organisations that can help with child bereavement, offering counselling, advice and support where needed.

Bereavement is a difficult subject for many and the reality is that in the UK a parent of a dependent child will die every 22 minutes, leaving 41,000 children without a parent each year. These Co-operative Funeralcare DVDs are an excellent resource and one which will help many children through an incredibly difficult time in their lives.

If you, your family or organisation are interested in obtaining a copy of any of these free DVDs, you should contact your local Co-operative Funeralcare Funeral Home directly. There are previews of each of the DVDs on the website, as well as more information about how and why it was made and further information about the child bereavement charity, CHUMS.

This is a sponsored post.

Our Favourite Fancy Dress Costumes

I wish I was more creative, I wish I was able to make my son a cowboy costume from a tablecloth and a selection of objects from the recycling bin but I can’t. I firmly believe in playing to your strengths and my strength is going to the shops and buying a fancy dress costume for my boy.

World Book Day has been and gone and my boy went to school dressed as Where’s Wally. We think he looked ridiculously cute. The costume came from ASDA and cost us £12. It did come with a pair of glasses too but he wouldn’t wear them on the day.

Like most children he loves dressing up. He loves being a superhero (I’ve no idea where this comes from as he’s never watched Spider-man in his life) and he enjoys being a fireman or policeman, but this weekend we decided to treat him to a pirate costume, again from ASDA which he is delighted with.

He will often come home from school and slip on a costume and get into character. It’s a really great way to encourage his imagination and develop his imaginative play. We turn the sofa into a pirate ship and make each other walk the plank, we sail the seven seas and our decks have been well and truly swabbed. It’s great fun. I think he’d be amazed if I slipped into costume one day, maybe that’s something to think about.

We’ll certainly be adding to his dressing up box in the future, you can tell by his face how much he enjoys it and it really encourages him to play. Anything which rivals screen time wins for me.

I tend to get most of his fancy dress costumes from ASDA because they have a good selection at a reasonable price. Next on our list is a proper fireman’s costume.

What’s your favourite fancy dress costume?

Note: We were sent a costume from ASDA for World Book Day. All images and opinions are my own.

An Ode to Bath Time

Bath time is a special part of our family day, the three of us usually gather in the bathroom, the small boy in the bath playing with his toys, we sing songs and play really imaginative games (usually involving pirates, octonauts, submarines and a range of aquatic animals). Sometimes one of us joins him in the bath, mostly these days we don’t. It’s a special time, we’re all winding down from our day, relaxed or relaxing and because we’ve always made sure it was special family time, he loves it too, even having his hair washed.

H&A and Tots100 are putting together a Bathtime Fun Squad and have asked a whole bunch of lovely parent bloggers if they’d like to join. They sent us the Bathtime Buddies Alphabet Set to try out, with the instruction that we were to “get creative”. So first off, I wrote a little ode to our family bath time…

Bath times are never drab times
Always fun times
Father and son times
Wash mummy’s hair times
Please don’t wee in the bath times.

Stop splashing, don’t splash, how many times?
Special times, funny times
Play times
Imaginative times
Ahoy there shipmates times

Wash your face times
Learn your ABCs times
Bathtime buddies, rubber duckies
Shampoo and bubbly bath times
Family times, full of love times

Tell me about your day times
Did you really wash your face times
Nearly time for bed times
Rest your weary head times
Bath times are the best times

My poetry never ever rhymes.

Then I ran a big bubbly bath and we played with our alphabet letters. The Alphabet set contains 65 letters with duplicates, sadly my tub didn’t have any A’s so we improvised with an upside down V, he did manage to make lots of words and had lots of fun trying the find the right letters and talking about the colours and sticking them on the tiles.

The letters stick very easily to tiled walls and surfaces. Just wet them and press them gently against the surface. The letters are a lot of fun and really useful for us as we’re at the learning and identifying letters stage. He is starting to be able to spell simple words by himself now, so I think he will use these over and over at bath time.

When you’ve finished playing with them, the lid of the tub has holes in it, so when you’re done you can just scoop them up, put the lid on and turn the tub upside down to drain.

The Bathtime Buddies Alphabet Set is only £3.30 and it’s available from Asda, Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Wilko. I think the set is really good value for money, a fun thing to play with in the bath and importantly, they’re educational. I’m all for learning through play these days, education by stealth is the future.

Note: I was sent the H&A Bathtime Buddies Alphabet Set free of charge for review purposes. All images and opinions are my own.

Review: Trying Co-operative Disposable Nappies

At the age of 4 my son has (thankfully) been potty trained for just over a year now. He’s dry during the day, but, although we’ve tried a few times to get him out of them, he still needs to wear nappies at night. Every child moves at a different pace, so we’re not overly concerned, he’ll get it when he’s ready. We were sent some Co-op nappies and baby wipes to try out and to see how they coped with the bigger bottom of a pre-schooler.

We were sent size 5+ which is what he normally has, they’re for children weighing 13-27kg which seems about right. We usually use Pampers and have tried nappies from most of the supermarkets over the years, so we feel we’re pretty acquainted with what’s out there. There are 20 nappies in the pack (the size we were sent) and these cost £4, or 20p each per nappy.

co-op nappies

They are of standard nappy design with stretchy sides and those sticky fasteners and stretchy leg cuffs. There wasn’t much to distinguish it in looks from the big brands, it doesn’t have a cartoony picture on it, but I never really saw much of a point to that anyway. They have a slight purple tint which is due to the plastic and I think it makes them quite attractive. They are ultra absorbent and are not bulky, they seem like an active fit style nappy, but more absorbent.

My very vocal and quick to complain about almost anything 4 year old, didn’t utter a word about them during the week or so that he’s worn them for bed each night. With other nappy brands we have experienced significant, almost nightly leaks, especially now he’s bigger, and we’ve had to strip both him and his bed. We tested the Co-op nappies thoroughly and surprisingly we didn’t have any leaks. We were very impressed by this, they obviously have a large capacity, though they’re not bulky and don’t look big under his pjs.

We liked the Co-op nappies a lot, we’re a bit sad we’d not tried them sooner, they’re very absorbent and appear to be comfortable and they’re pretty easy on the pocket too.

Next up were the baby wipes. All parents know these aren’t just for bottoms, but for a vast array of baby related spillages and unmentionable things that need wiping up; as well as cleaning virtually everything in the house and a quick make-up removing wipe. I have very sensitive skin so I always test wipes out on me first, if it brings my face out in a rash then there’s no way I’m using it on the tender parts of my child. I won’t use the leading brand for that reason. I tried the Co-op ultra soft (and fragrance free) baby wipes and they were good. Very gentle on my skin, not drying and quite cleansing. I’m happy to use these for all spillages and unmentionables now.

co-op nappies

You can find out more about the Co-op baby range on their website

Note: I was sent Co-op nappies and baby wipes free of charge for review purposes. All images and opinions are my own.