Quiet book - garden with bee, weaving and tic tac toe

For my general thinking about quiet books, and more ideas, please see this earlier post. Most of my efforts have been double page spreads with two singles, so they can be removed as a set from the book so they can be doled out. I've described how I did this in a separate post, together with some links to other pages I really like, and other pages I'd like to have made, if I'd ever had time!

The next double page spread is a bee visiting the flowers in numbered order. The idea from this is also from Imagine our Life. (Stephanie is so prolific and makes such beautiful and elaborate pages that I can't imagine she has much time to do anything else at all!)  

I've made one important refinement compared with Stephanie's version.  I thought it was more useful have the flowers with the correct number of petals, as well as a number symbol. Stephanie's original is certainly charming, but I thought that to have numeric '3' with 5 petals and '5' with 4 petals could be confusing. Having the number of petals matching the number means children who don't yet consistently recognise number symbols can get more out of the game, as they learn to count. Even the three-year-old can tell the difference between one petal and two petals.

I tried to make this as authentic as possible, and did some research on what flowers have 3,4,5 petals etc. However, I also had to play with it a bit, or I would have had too many plain white flowers. Strictly speaking, no flowers have only one petal, as such, but several have a bell-like flower where the individual petals may be hard to discern. However, the rest worked pretty well, with, for example, poppy for 4, primrose for 5, celandine for 8, and passion flower for 10, etc.

My only problem with this one (which took days and days of work), was that I couldn't initially source thin green cord. Eventually I ordered some on-line, which took a while to arrive, and turned up the day everyone was arriving for Christmas - so I promptly lost it, and had to re-order.

The girls have enjoyed this. They don't always follow the right order, but it entertains them to make the bee head for the hive. The other thing I found, though, is that it has the potential to teach them to recognise complex arrangements. When they went to undo what they had done, to return the bee to the starting point (the leaf), they didn't always see to start with that the cord had to go back the way it came out. (Obvious to me as a grown-up.) So sometimes they entangled it even further. I look forward with interest to see how their ability to do this develops.

My method of making quiet book pages is to have one double page spread and two singles on the back. See here. For this set, the two on the back were a ribbon weaving game, and a tic tac toe game.

There are several pretty ribbon weaving games, for example, a pie with woven pastry strips on top (in felt, of course!) However, just have made the bee game which had taken mountains of work, I wanted something quick and simple. I went for a simple woven mat using actual ribbons, so little preparation needed.

The ribbons in one direction (ivory) are stitched down at both ends. The cross- ribbons (not sure which you'd count as warp and weft) are stitched at one end, and have a press-stud the other end, with the other half of the press-stud on the felt.

 I've already tried out the ribbon weaving game I made on one grand-daughter. I have to say, it wasn't all that successful - maybe Jane at 3 years 8 months is just too old for it. I showed her what to do (over and under, over and under, etc. She dutifully did the first one, the second with some cajoling, and after that was bored to bits with it so refused to do any more. Oh well! At least it hadn't taken mountains of work.

My other 'easy single page' in this set was Tic Tac Toe, or noughts and crosses. There's a little elasticated pocket to hold the felt (double-layered) noughts and crosses. I haven't tried this out on the children properly yet. I think conceptually it might be a bit too difficult to grasp (certainly in terms of winning technique).

We'll see how that goes. The problem with Tic Tac Toe always seems to me to be that children have to be a certain age to understand the concept, but about a week after they do, they then recognise the trick - if you start first you can only win or draw, and if you go second, you can only draw or lose. They can quickly see that starting strategy requires you to start in a corner (then you can only win or draw, unless you do something silly). And if you are second to go, you can't win (unless your opponent does something silly). So it ceases to be an interesting game once kids have recognised that. But it was easy to make and will maybe keep them amused for a couple of minutes.