travel, Uncategorized

Make The Most Out Of A Week In Johannesburg With These Useful Travel Tips

South Africa is one of the most exotic and action-packed family holiday destinations in the world. It comes with the promise of adventure and thrills. There are so many facets and sides to this fascinating country that for the first-time visitor, it can be hard to know where to even begin.

If you’re planning to visit the nation’s capital Johannesburg, you’re no doubt brimming with a mixture of excitement and nerves. It’s a city that’s often spoke of in legendary tones, it is rich in history and steeped in culture. If you’re heading there for a holiday and you’re not quite sure what to expect, check out our guide with the top tips for spending a week in Johannesburg.

Be on your guard

Johannesburg has long held a reputation for being a city awash with crime and social problems. While the city certainly has a checkered past, it’s no more or less dangerous than many other major metropolitan hubs. That being said, you must remain vigilant at all times. Criminals anywhere see tourists as easy and attractive targets, both for their unfamiliarity with the local area and for their habit of carrying around valuables like cash, passports, or cameras.

Busy areas like the city’s main train station, Park Station, can be hotbeds for pickpockets and thieves. Keeping your valuables in a money-belt secured under your clothes can be an effective way of protecting them from pickpockets.

Before you set off, ensure you’re covered with a travel insurance policy. For example, a travel insurance company like Staysure will cover you if your valuables are lost or stolen, as well as offering cover for cancellations, lost baggage, or medical expenses.

Where to stay

Johannesburg is an enormous city, with a metro area population of 6 million, it is the largest land-locked city in the world. It is made up of several distinct neighbourhoods and areas, each with their own unique characteristics and quirks. Where you choose to stay will depend on the type of holiday you’re looking for.

Rosebank and Melrose are probably the cities safest areas, perfect for a relaxing holiday with no worries. If you’re looking for a little more culture, consider staying in Bryanston or Randburg, there you’ll find plenty of stores, coffee shops, restaurants, and museums.

For younger people looking for something cooler, Maboneng is trendy neighbourhood with art installations, live music, and rooftop bars.

The language barrier

You will find English speakers in South Africa. However, you’ll also encounter many more dialects, as the country has an incredible 11 official languages. The most common of these are Zulu, Xhosa, and English, so it will be worth your while learning some words and phrases before you head off.

nomvula-moepya-botanical gardens Johannesburg via unsplash — *Botanical Gardens (Nomvula Moepya)*

Using the native language will help endear you to the locals in the area. It will demonstrate that you’ve made an effort and that you are appreciative of their hospitality, you should be pleasantly surprised to see that effort returned in kind.

Conclusion

Johannesburg is a city with many sides. It has been somewhat unfairly maligned in the past, deemed an unsafe, dangerous place where walking the streets is not advised. While, like any major city, it does have some riskier areas, there is so much Johannesburg can offer no matter what kind of holiday you’re going on. To make the most of your time there, choose the best neighbourhood to stay in, learn a few phrases in some of the many local languages, and be aware of your surroundings to guarantee yourself a memorable stay.

crafts, key stage 2, kids

Newspaper Crafts Spirals – Penguin on a sledge

Well, thanks for stopping by – this post has now moved to HERE:

If you want to know how to make the LONG newspaper straws and rolling them to create a FREE craft material! click here for a ‘how to’. (with a great video too from @incredibusy)

crafts, father's day, FREE printables, kids

Tin Can crafts – savings tin

How about a Tin Can Savings Tin?

With Father’s Day looming, we decided to do something a bit different for Dad and as one of his foibles is collecting coins. *Saving* £2 coins in piles around the house, particularly on shelves… So we came up with a genius tidy-up plan…

We decided to tidy up the favourite shelf for Mr.KidsChaos, our bedroom mantle piece.To assist with the tidying, we made him some Savings Tins, and they look nice too don’t you think?

Can we call this photo a #Shelfie?
Our bedroom ‘Shelf’ is often very cluttered, with our favourite wedding pressie painting from Jill Barker & Jonathan at Middlewick, and the odd pair of his daft colourful sunglasses. His collection of coins tumble constantly, as they get knocked and fall to the floor and it makes me go a little crazy!!

The kids decided he needed somewhere to save his £2 coins, and told me what the text should read on the tin cans. They picked the colours, and I designed the graphics. Bonus is, you can print these off and do the same thing too, for FREE!

Simply print them off here, and trim them out, and glue them on to your clean tin cans.

Don’t tell him, but I often BORROW the odd coin when we’re dashing off to Martial Arts club, or Cubs…. Sssh, he never reads this anyway, he’ll NEVER know. Perhaps if he saves enough, I could BORROW some of it for a bit of Bathroom DIY…watch this space!

For more FREE printables for tin cans, click here for a fun game for the summer – kick the can.

For more FREE Father’s Day Printables, try our Monster Truck card and Jigsaw Puzzle Cards.

And other uses for bean tins, and soup cans can be seen over on A Greener Life For Us, using up old paint to make plant and pencil pots click here.

Oh, and I’m on twitter.com/MoreKidsChaos too… Erm, and funnily enough on instagram, Facebook and Pinterest! Pop over to say hello x Like it? Pin it!

Ali also writes over on AGreenerLifeforus.com

cooking with kids, crafts, create, education, gardening with kids

Make a Natural biodedegradeable Dream Catcher

Making a Dream Catcher using natural, found objects and at the same time ticking the boxes of three STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths and the Arts) practices:

The Science (making dough with salt, water and flour for the beads)

The Arts (designing and sculpting the salt dough leaves, and assembling your dream catcher)

The Maths (geometry of weaving a pattern with a single length of twine)

Dream catchers with organic cotton yarm and hand made salt dough beads — *dream catchers, with natural cotton yarn and handmade salt dough beads*

This is such a fun project. And one that you could do either indoors or outside in the warmer weather – we really love a craft that all ages can enjoy – and this three sides dream catcher can be a bit of a challenge when it comes to the weaving, so we will link some YouTube tutorials at the foot of this article so that you can get acquainted with the dream catcher weaving geometry at your leisure.

Before you get started, make sure you have everything you need for your beautiful natural dream catcher – go on a nature hunt, look for feathers, acorns, pine cones, and lots of sticks!

You’ll need some cotton string, or strong yarn, and we also made some colourful salt dough beads and ‘leaves’ so that everything is biodegradable – this means you can eventually hang your dream catchers outside in the garden or the woods, for them to let nature decay them – hey, that may even be a bit of a science lesson right there too!

Salt dough leaves and beads recipe

1 part salt
2 parts plain flour
half to one part water
optional – some natural food colouring (if you are feeling ambitious – you could go as far as making your own dough dye with beetroot! hey – experiment, have some fun)

We mixed the dough into three bowls, and added three colours – subtle so that they would blend well with nature – and rolled small balls, pushing a skewer through to make a bead, we dried the beads by ‘stringing’ them onto metal skewers and propping up off the baking tray to harden in the oven on a very low 100 degrees temperature, checking on the beads after about fifteen minutes, and turning them on the skewers so that they didn’t stick.

The leaves we made by rolling the dough out to about 5mm thick, and used a leaf shaped cookie cutter and a knife to score the marks on the ‘leaves’ and push a hole at the top of the leaf to allow it to be attached to the dreamcatcher. Again, we allowed these leaves to harden, baking them at the bottom of the oven, for about half an hour to an hour, using a cooling rack from the kitchen. We made these beads and salt dough leaves in advance of our dream catcher construction to allow them to harden – word of warning – don’t let them get damp, they will go soggy!

The assembly of your dream catcher

Now you have everything you need, start to pull it all together. Make a triangle from three sticks of the same length, tying them tight in each of the three corners.

Make a ‘bobbin’ with one short stick, about 4cm long, wrap the yarn around and around until it’s full of yarn – (you’ll have to experiment, but you’ll need enough yarn to create the geometrical pattern on the dream catcher ‘web’).

Using the yarn on this bobbin, start by tying a knot next to one of the three corners of the triangle frame.

Get weaving that web

As you start to ‘weave’ your web the first row can be quite loose.
Evenly spaced, start to work the yarn around the triangle:

Pass the end of your yarn around a stick.
Bring the end under the straight part of the yarn.
Bring the end up and pass it through the eye of the loop you just made.
Pull it tighter to complete a half hitch.
Tie the hitch the same at each intersection of the yarn.
Continue around the triangle, to ‘row two’ in the same way, see diagram (and the video links below)
The next hitch is made at the midpoint of the first loop in the first row.

As you tie these hitches you start to pull each stitch in the web a little tighter. Continue around the web tying a hitch and pulling tighter on each row until you are down to a small centre hole in your web. Tie it off in a knot.

Now tie three strands of yarn from the ‘bottom’ of the triangle and attach the beads, feathers, leaves – And tie a hanging loop at the top of the triangle and you are ready to decorate the trees by hanging your wonderful dream catchers in the forest – or, if you REALLY want to catch those dreams in your web, hang your natural dream catcher up in your bedroom for a real conversation starter!

We would love to see what you create – do tag us on Instagram where you will find our new account https://www.instagram.com/kidschaos_blog/ use the hashtag #31DaysofLearning as we are joining in with KiddyCharts creative STEAM project this month.

Ali also writes over on incredibusy.
Cotton yarn: Wool and the Gang.
Shoot location: fforest, during the fforest gather workshops.

Tap here for a YouTube tutorial of the weave

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Ali Clifford [incredibusy] ™ (@incredibusy) on Jul 22, 2018 at 12:07am PDT

crafts, google+ hangouts

Easy heart print wrapping paper tutorial

Heart print wrapping paper, and gift wrap in general, can be expensive to buy, so we do make a LOT of home made paper – this heart print wrapping paper is so easy to do, and great for birthdays as well as Valentine’s Day.

We use the end of a toilet roll tube to do these (squeeze the end of the circular opening flat, and then bend in the top section to create a heart shape). Dipping the tube into the red and pink paint and printing onto the brown parcel paper, which can be bought fairly economically from office supply shops. Alternatively, we have also used metal heart shaped cookie cutters – (see photo, we used the same cookie cutter for our Plum Pie recipe) which works just as well… if a little less organically!

Using butcher’s string is another way to make the parcel look really special, particularly if you attach a home-made gift tag, which we created at the same time, using the off-cuts of the heart print wrapping paper… gently fold the printed hearts down the middle to cut a nice symmetrical heart shape and attach with the butcher’s string – lovely!

We created heart print gift tags, and greetings cards, at the same time as the heart print wrapping paper, to have a full set… and even print some extra to keep in the cupboard for that unexpected party or to use to send a pressie to Granny!

If a Plum Pie recipe is not your thing, try our Cake in a Mug, click through to Ali’s other blog aGreenerLifeforus.com

For more Valentine’s Day inspiration, try my easy to make hand in heart cards, and FREE Printable jigsaw puzzle piece crafts Valentine’s greetings cards and check out our Google+ hangout hosted by Red Ted Art, featuring Kelly from domesticgoddesque.com with her glitter heart cake toppers Lizzie with her missielizzie-meandmyshadow.blogspot.co.uk rustic twig heart wreaths and her silver birch bark candle – amazing… Plus Anthea’s needle felt hearts and Maggy’s collection of Valentines Day craft ideas.

Oh, and I’m on twitter.com/MoreKidsChaos too… Erm, and funnily enough on Facebook and Pinterest! Pop over to say hello x Like it? Pin it!

crafts, teenage reviews

How to make Porg Paper Chains

15 and 13 year olds write:

We’ve created a chain of paper Porgs by printing off this FREE template and cutting multi-folded paper strips.

It could not be easier, in fact, we’ve even made a little video for you to show you how (make sure to watch right until the end as there are some outtakes of our new naughty kitten attacking the Porgs!)

Please use our FREE template (click here).

To learn this basic paper cutting technique with paper Porgs that you can either colour in or leave as is to create your very own scene from The Last Jedi!

Print off these paper chain Porgs again and again, and glue them together to make longer paper chains. They will make great decorations for parties, classrooms and your home.

You can even get your pencils out, and copy off our Porg Paper Chain Design shapes to draw onto sheets of newspaper too – if you don’t have access to a printer – this is a great way to have fun with old broadsheet newspapers that would be going to the recycling bin…. whatever you do, please come back and tell us how you’ve had fun with these paper chains – we love to see what you’ve all been up to and we love paper crafts so if you spot any Star Wars paper crafts we’d love to see them too!

Porgs were probably our favourite characters from the Disney / LucasFilm team on The Last Jedi Star Wars film- so adorable, and just look so sweet – The Last Jedi had a lot of humour, and the Porgs were quite a surprise –

We’ve had a go at making little models with clay – more on that to come – meanwhile we can’t wait for these sneakers from Po-Zu to be delivered in April.

Watch our video here (with the naughty Kipper the kitten making a cheeky appearance at the end!)

KidsChaos.com is the Kid’s creative blog from Ali Clifford and sons…

Ali also writes at Incredibusy.com and had a hand in creating this template at the request of the boys!

For more Star Wars themed crafts click here

d here

cooking with kids, teenage reviews

Going Plastic Free

This is a paid partnership with Howdens

As a family, Plastic Free July had us thinking – what can we do more to encourage people to be more aware of their plastic use, maybe going plastic free? Can we create a cleaner world for generations to come for July and the other eleven months?!?

Firstly – let’s remind ourselves WHY we are doing this:

“Crude oil extraction causes problems like deforestation, oil spills, pollution of toxic chemicals. From the 100 million tonnes of plastic produced each year, 10 million tonnes ends up in the sea. Plastic doesn’t break down like natural materials – there’s an area of floating plastic the size of Turkey* in the North Pacific.”
*source, Greenpeace via BetterShoes.org

Our family has made several changes over the last few years, so we’ve been carrying reusable bottles, going plastic free, and also reusable cups and cutlery (we love a Spork for the name as much as anything!) for when we are out and about.

KITCHEN

At home in the kitchen, we’ve ditched the plastic and sponge pan-scourers, and started using coconut coir crocheted cloths, we order our milk and orange juice to be delivered every other day by the ‘milkman’ – and love that he collects our used (clean) bottles (he is a ‘he’ yes before we start dissecting whether to call him a milk-delivery-operative) – , and we’ve been saving the milk bottle aluminium lids to pop in the recycling kerb side collection box too – we post them into a pop can – as they are very small!

We’ve recently been given an espresso machine, which we were loath to use because of the plastic (landfill) capsules – however, you can now buy compostable plant-based capsules so that’s a winner!

Howdens have put together this helpful guide with some simple ways that you can make more sustainable choices in your day-to-day life. With the kitchen at the heart of the home, they share top tips for creating an eco-friendly kitchen and to explore how even small changes can make a big difference. click HERE

And – we’ve even extended the plastic-free policy to the bathroom, with natural deodorant in a cardboard tube, and bars of shampoos too… it’s been an interesting experiment, but so far, we are very fragrant!

And shoes, man – so many modern shoes contain PVC (polyvinyl chloride); polyurethane plastic, TPU (thermoplastic polyurethane) EVA Foam (ethylene vinyl acetate) (found this all out here: http://www.bettershoes.org/home/material-selection so we’ve even been rethinking that too – you CAN get shoes made from natural materials, like cork and organic cotton, and wool – like Po-Zu and Baabuk.

A really good read is this book, No. More. Plastic. by Martin Dorey, the fella who brought us #2minutebeachclean – it’s a really easy read, perfect for kids and teenagers and supports behaviour change and helping others habitually #choosetorefuse shopping bags, straws, takeaway containers and coffee cups – just to name a few.

This post has been written in conjunction with Howdens – although of course all thoughts and words and photographs are my own.

This is Rocket Science – Science Sparks Book review

We have known Emma Vanstone for a LONG time now, and have been massive fans of her website and social media @sciencesparks – so when we spotted that Emma had recently published a new book – we couldn’t wait to get our hands on it!

From the cover design to the spreads, this book is so visually appealing – This is Rocket Science: An Activity Guide is jam-packed with fun experiments for children and adults each designed to show how mechanical science and astrophysics work from the inside out and really does so without you KNOWING that you are ‘learning’ which always puts my kids off these sorts of books.

The book encourages the reader to use upcycle found materials like bottles, cardboard, glue and tape to build awesome rocket ships, paper spinners and mobile rocket launch pads.

We love the photography and mix of genders in the book – so important to bridge the gender gap, as it is so crucial that we get more women into science.

Watch our full review over on IGTV here or below – and purchase your own copy of the book HERE in time for Christmas!

Visit www.science-sparks.com/ for more fun science crafts.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by RedTedArt & Incredibusy (@funcraftskids) on Sep 7, 2018 at 5:14am PDT

life, teenage reviews

Our Perfect night in

Our Purrrrfect night in!

Ali writes:
Well, what could be more perfect than an autumn night in with your favourite cat and teenager right?

As these teenage boys get older, they want to spend more time apart from me – hanging out with their friends, or playing computer games and chatting online with mates. Having a kitten changes all of that – (as you will have read in other posts this year!) Kipper the cat has been such a blessing and has really brought the family together.

Once you’ve settled on the sofa on a Saturday night in to watch Strictly or the X-Factor (or both) Kipper the cat will find his way onto a warm lap and curl up and pin you down for hours!

I’ll admit, I’m pretty sure it’s cupboard love, as he’s always a bit more loving at breakfast and supper time if Whiskas cat casseroles are on the menu, but needless to say – it’s got both RB and myself back into cosying up on the sofa together to read a book of an evening – with a mug of tea and a play ‘Russian Roulette’ with a box of chocolates, (to explain, you take it in turns to eat a chocolate from the box without looking at the little diagram, which is really fun, as long as you don’t accidentally get the Turkish Delight).

We generally have refreshments on hand for Kipper too – whilst we are supping our tea, we always have a bowl of water in the sitting room for him, as well as fairly close to his food bowl in the kitchen – we read somewhere that they like to have fresh water available in more than one location – frankly, for us, it’s simply a ploy to get him to hang out with us some more, ultimately, he’s turning into a bit of a teenager…

This post is in conjunction with WHISKAS® but all thoughts are my own

#DateNightWithMyCat

crafts, create, key stage 3

My Dream Pet

My Dream Pet by Ronnie age 13

I have always wanted a dream pet which was created by my own imagination. This is why I jumped at the chance to have my own dream pet made into a real plushie.

My dream pet would always have to be some sort of a colour changing reptile or a chameleon. I have always loved chameleons because of their ability to change colour to suit their surroundings or environment which they are in.

It would sleep and live somewhere warm and comfortable because I would think that if I designed an animal, it would like to be in comfort wherever it can.

My dream pet would eat foods which are high in protein and carbs as it would be roaming free for most of its life and would need the energy to keep it healthy.

The creature would be intelligent enough to understand basic tasks and to know right from wrong to a certain extent, however, this animal is not a human so it cannot communicate with speech.

The dream pet would not need to have a collar or a lead to take on walks because the creature would be capable of finding its way back wherever it is. It would not need to be taken on walks either as it takes itself around without help from its owner (me).

Of course there is no need to get a pet anymore as we are currently happy with our young cat kipper.

You may well know that Mum finally caved in and we got a cat earlier this year who she’s sensibly covered with Pet Insurance from Petplan, but we do still like the idea of an exotic pet too. Maybe a stick insect or a lizard? Anyway delighted we had a go at drawing our dream pet, and Mum had them made into soft toys and awwww we love them!

This post has been possible thanks to Petplan, but all thoughts are my own.

Follow my mum @incredibusy over on twitter, insta, pinterest and facebook too….x