Day 1, Pond life

We started our Be Creative Challenge full of energy to have a new focus to the day. I made a plan for day 1 and ordered supplies with our supermarket delivery to create our delicious, gooey, sensory experience of a pond!

I made a speeded up video of our pond experience and am gutted to discover that on free wordpress pages I can’t share videos but hopefully you can view it via YouTube using the link below,

Recipe for a pond

• Lime jelly
• Soba noodles
• Chocolate pudding pot
• Dessicated coconut
• Mini meringue
• Red and green food colouring
• Tinned mandarins
• White chocolate buttons

Dan is gluten free and cannot chew so I chose a range of suitable foods for our pond.

For pond weed we coloured the soba noodles with green food colouring by putting them together in a tupperware and giving them a good shake. We did the same with the coconut to make grass. I cut a little bit out of the white chocolate buttons and painted them green for the lily pads. Whenever Dan eats mandarin orange segments I always think of goldfish so they had to be included swimming in our pond. We painted a mini meringue (we happened to have in the cupboard) using red food colouring and scraped out little white dots using a skewer.

Dan likes to use the mini chopper which is a safe way of chopping, he likes to press the button and feel the vibrations. I always use an extension lead to give us plenty of space and obviously make sure the lid is on securely before bringing it in reach of Dan. We blitzed the oreo style biscuits and mixed them with melted butter for pond gravel.

In a little pot we put a spoonful of chia seeds and covered with water then left to soak to become our frogspawn.

• Equipment
• Tupperware pots
• Tray
• spoons
• mini chopper
• skewer
• knife
• pastry brush

Tasting, feeling, smelling and exploring along the way we squashed the pond gravel into the bottom of our tupperware pond and then filled it with jelly. We added noodle pond weed, mandarin goldfish and topped with the chia frogspawn.

We placed the pond on a tray and surrounded it with chocolate pudding mud and then sprinkled coconut grass around followed by the meringue toadstool.

We took a quick picture before it was all eaten!

Tip for tidying up and continuing the experimenting…

We got a small plastic box with lid and filled about a third full with some warm water and some pond themed toys. We placed the box on a non slip mat and Dan enjoyed splashing in the water while I cleaned the table and used a flannel to clean his hands, arms and face.