Children love a bit of messy play and this spell of fine weather gives the perfect opportunity to make potions in the garden!  Give your little ones a selection of little pots and a large mixing bowl and encourage them to find different ingredients to make a potion.  Stir together sand, water, leaves, some small stones, perhaps some flowers such as daisies or dandelions.  Look for small items around the garden that can all be mixed together.

Talk with your little one about what the different ingredients do?  Perhaps the flowers make it taste sweeter, perhaps grass cuttings and leaves help to turn the drinkers skin a green colour?  Pebbles might be to help make the potion more digestible, strips of bark from trees and a few twigs may give you strength.

Of course, stress that this is only pretend and that your little one shouldn't really drink it, but at the same time, fire up their imagination and see what they can pretend this potion is for.  Describe the different textures of the ingredients and discuss whether they make the potion easier to stir, or lumpy, or change colour and so on.  Observe the changes as more ingredients are added.  Above all, have fun!

Children learn in different ways and one of the ways in which they learn is by applying logic and deduction, essentially learning through exploring.  To nurture this approach to learning, introduce simple puzzles and toys that encourage thinking and problem solving:-

• Touchy feely: books and toys with different textures allow a baby to feel and discover how different surfaces feel.
• Shape sorters: these come in all manner of designs, from simple puzzle boards to shape sorters built into ride on toys.  Shape sorters help to encourage logical thinking as babies slowly work out how to match shapes with their matching slots.
• Building blocks: whether old fashioned wooden blocks or construction toys such as Duplo or Megablocks, children can explore how objects interact and cause and effect with physical items.

You can boost the logical power of older children by stimulating thinking with mental challenges:-

• Quizes: older children can learn by asking questions and you can encourage learning by asking questions back to them.
• Puzzles: 'spot the difference', mazes, simple word searches and small sudoku puzzles can be enjoyed by children from the age of 4 upwards.
• Obstacle courses: create an obstacle course in the garden on a grand scale, introduce challenges such as how to cross a crocodile pit or how to go from one end of the garden to the other without stepping on the ground - problem solving is all part of logical thinking.

The ability to learn through logical thining is a skill that will assist a child throughout their lives - encouraging this style of thinking from early on will create a solid foundation on which they can grow with time.

Here are a few ways to introduce the sense of touch to children with appropriate EYFS (Early Years Foundation Stage) areas of learning and development  included.

• Go On Safari... round the house to find things that feel different.  The Cool window, the smooth door, the furry teddy the soft blanket.  Have a chat about how things feel.
• EYFS: This promotes exploration and investigation, using language for communication.

• Create a textured painting... add various ingredients to poster paints and get the children to have go at painting with different textures.  Try adding flour, lentils, sand, broken spaghetti and you'll get some great results.
• EYFS: This promotes being creative and exploring media and materials.

• Touchy-Feely box... take a few items that feel different such as pine cone, washing up brush, length of ribbon, necklace, spoon etc and ask your child to feel it, describe it etc.
• EYFS: This promotes exploration and investigation and language for thinking.

• Texture Book... get some different paper, fabric or things you can stick together to form a book.  Newspaper, tissue paper, soft fabric, cotton wool, silver foil could all be stuck securely to pages and bound with string or wool to create a great book.
• EYFS: This promotes being creative and exploring media and materials.

• Messy Activity... the ultimate way to feel and touch is to get really messy!  Try doing some hand and feet painting and get the children to describe how the wet, cold, sticky paint feels!  They will love it!
• EYFS: This promotes being creative and exploring media and materials.

There are so many more activities like this at http://www.ToucanLearn.com, where learning is fun for you and your little one!

Texture - funny old word, but the world is full of different ones...everything we feel and consume has texture, and babies and toddlers are fascinated to be able to explore the world of textures around them.  Babies need little encouragement to feel different textures from an early age - they learn through touch so exploring textures is both a natural desire and an important part of early development.

Most toys and books aimed at babies and young toddlers are designed to stimulate the sense of touch - they might have bumpy, crinkly, shiny, soft, furry, rough or smooth surfaces and children will delight in feeling the different materials.

Besides commercial goods, there are lots of activities that you can undertake to encourage exploration of textures.  Collect items from nature outside - crinkly leaves, shiny nuts, spiky seed pods, rough bark, smooth stones and so on.  Hunt for as many different textures as you can find.  If the weather's poor, explore craft materials with different textures; soft tissue paper, corrugated cardboard, smooth ribbon, shiny foil, smooth plastic bottle caps and so much more.   Take your collected items and create a collage, make a picture by sticking your objects to a sheet of stiff paper.  You'll end up with a great touchy-feely picture and your babies will have learned lots about different textures along the way!