|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
Cautionary Tales For Children
Wonderful witty poems great for reading to your children. The stories and rhymes will stay with them for the rest of their lives.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Research has shown how important YOU are to your children and how as a dad the things you do, and keep on doing, really count, whether you live with them, or you are a single dad and are only able see them once a month, once a week or more, what you do really matters. This site is dedicated to all dads but will be of special relevance to the single dad. Remember, you are half the reason your children exist and they need you whether you live with them or not. As their dad, you have what it takes to make their lives successful and fulfilling no matter how often you see them. This site is about all the positive things that we as parents have to offer our children.
|
|
|
|
Wet glues
|
 147
|
Choose the right glue for the right job, otherwise you will waste a lot of time waiting for things to dry
There are a range of glues available for use in the home. Poly-vinyl acetate or PVA glue (called Elmer’s Glue in the US)but can also called white glue or wood glue is a tough rubbery polymer. Your kids will be familiar with PVA because it is used extensively in schools. From a model making point of view, for most applications, nothing is a substitute for the power and speed of a glue gun, so in my house, the PVA glue tends to stay in the cupboard. Nevertheless, it’s still is a superb wood glue, where the water based glue vehicle can really wet out the surface and soak into the wood, to give a strong joint that is often stronger than the surrounding wood. The trouble with PVA is that it is not good at sticking polythene or polypropylene, which are the two most common packaging plastics, and used in most Making from Junk
models, and it takes ages to dry, which means that kids lose interest in the project or have to wait overnight to see the results of their handiwork.
. . .
However, PVA is still an excellent glue for papier mache projects, like the robot head which was made over a blown up balloon. To use PVA for papier mache it is best to water it down a bit (no more than half and half water) and pour the glue onto a dinner plate so the paper can be soaked through more easily. (A mixture of newspaper torn into strips and absorbent kitchen roll in strips or crumpled up into balls provide quick bulk is good for papier mache).
. . .
Doing a project like this will be great fun and very messy, so although most PVAs are washable, your kids shouldn’t be in their Sunday best when they are getting PVA all over themselves. Don’t bother buying tiny little bottles of PVA (like the one shown) go to a builders merchants and buy a 2.5 litre bottle of PVA Bonding. It’s basically exactly the same as the expensive wood glue, but even for those volumes it’s a fraction of the price. If you want a handy pack to use round the house or on little paper projects, decant some of it off into an old shower gel bottle, but remember to write on the bottle what it is in permanent marker or some one who doesn’t know what you’ve done could be heading for one gloopy hairdo!
. . .
Glue sticks and two part resins are OK but not as useful as Spray Mount and a glue gun, which respectively replace them. Glue sticks tend to be lumpy, although they are easy and safe for a child to use. Two part resins are very strong, but they take time to cure, can be very messy and do not stick packaging plastics together that well. Once they are mixed up they are very liquid and for many jobs, you might have trouble keeping the glue exactly where you want it. For just about every model making project, where a two part resin could be used, glue gun glue will work better and be easier.
Safety first
 Super glue (cyano-acrylate) is very good at sticking skin together (there are medical grades approved for closing wounds), and great care is needed when using it. Children should never be allowed to use super glue. It sticks vinyl (PVC) together very well, so is useful for mending most types of blow-up beach toys (use an old vinyl tax disc holder or window sticker as the patch), but is not suitable for most model and toy making projects because it is so thin and designed to stick broken surface together that match perfectly.
|
|
|
OR |
|
 147
|
|
|
|
|
Making stuff is fun!
|
|
I have yet to meet a child (or in fact an adult) who didn't enjoy some form of creativity. Everyone is born with an innate desire to invent, create and make things, that's why humans have been so successful. Children are the most creative individuals you can ever hope to meet, with wonderfully flexible minds and amazing powers of imagination.
Children make stories and invent games and play for hours from the most basic starting points. If a piece of paper can be an areoplane, then a scrumpled piece of paper can be a crash-landed airplane. As their dad, you are in a unique position to help develop your children's creativity and problem solving abilities using the ever resourceful child in you.
Powerful stuff
when combined with the practical
skills you have learned and mastered as an adult. Dadcando.com has loads of exciting making and doing projects. For some you’ll only need five minutes, with others, whole afternoons will dissolve away. Some of the projects need only a piece of paper, while for others you will need some old packaging junk and some basic making equipment. Some projects are easy whereas others will help you and your children develop more advanced scratch building skills.
The Project instructions on dadcando are high quality, and whichever projects you download, you’ll find that all the Project Instructions have been carefully designed to be very clear, and for the most part very cheap to make because the bits you need to make the model cost nothing or are free bits of rubbish that you would normally throw away!
You’ll find that not only are all our projects completely original, but they are all designed to be fun and relevant to kids.
The projects have been designed with you in mind. Quick easy with really satifying results, so that even if time is short you can get the most out of the time you have together.
Making and doing with your kids is about giving your children the most valuable thing you can give them, your time. Our Making projects are about solving problems together and having something at the end to keep and play with. Anything you make with your children will be very special to them because you spent the time together making it and they have something to keep that they can be proud of.
Most of the instructions come with printer patterns to make sure that all the things you make look as good as possible. Print them out at A4 or US Letter size on an ink jet or laser printer. Depending on the speed of your connection, some of them may take a little longer to download (although none of them are much bigger than a megabyte, and most are much smaller). This is because we only want you to use downloads of the highest quality, so we think that the wait (if there is any) will be worth it.
Happy making!
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
