Owls Well presents: Seaspiration/Dottieshop

The year end school holidays are upon us, and I have got a really great holiday activity to share with you!

The kids were recently inspired by a trip to the S.E.A. Aquarium and we were able to support their creative outpouring using a watercolour kit sent to us from Dottieshop.

Here’s a little video I made of our adventure:

I have tried teaching the kids to paint with watercolours in the past, but lacked the know how and experience, so I found the guidance from Dottieshop’s instructions extremely useful! As you can see from the video, even 2 year old Thumper was able to paint with watercolours and bring to life his unique vision.

I really liked this watercolour kit for kids because it combined several different creative techniques to achieve the final product: the kit teaches drawing using image transfer as well as wet-on-wet watercolour blending, and provides all the tools and equipment you’ll need to make some pretty pictures. Additionally, the whole kit comes in a neat little pouch which not only makes it easy to store away, but you could potentially bring it with you anywhere for a pop-up watercolour experience!

Afterwards, the kids wanted to know more about the life aquatic, so we headed over to Youtube to find more information. I’ve created a kid-friendly playlist of our favourite ocean-related educational videos that we found – hopefully they will inspire you and your kids too!

Dottieshop also holds watercolour and brush calligraphy workshops at Artify Studio! Her next few workshops will be Christmas themed, so why not bring the kids along and make your own holiday gifts! Her Christmas floral watercolour workshops are on 6 Dec 2017 at 7-10pm and 17 Dec 2017 at 3-6pm, and there’s also a special parent-child Under The Sea workshop on 20th Dec 2017 at 10am-12pm. You can sign up for them at Dottieshop’s event pages here.

If you’d like to try out Dottieshop’s art kits or get one as a gift, just click on the picture below.

Visit the S.E.A. Aquarium here

Visit Dottieshop here

(By the way, here’s my previous review of the Dottieshop ‘Hello Spring’ watercolour kit)

Fish are Betta Pets

Now that J and Little E are both in preschool, we figured that it was a good time to let them help to take care of a small animal. They are still a little bit young to be responsible for caring for a small furry creature, so we decided to choose a relatively low maintenance, hardy pet – a fish.

The Husband and I used to keep tropical fish in a small tank when we were still living in the UK, and they are actually quite finicky creatures to look after in a cold country – we were forever measuring the temperature, pH levels and nitrate levels in the water, and making sure that our little underwater community got along well. This is why we did not think that fish would be a suitable pet for a young child.

However, in Little E’s classroom this year, there is a tiny little plastic tank containing a single fish and a marimo ball. Little E’s teacher told me that the fish has already survived one year of living in a nursery-level classroom, constantly surrounded by little children…and it seems to be happy and healthy.

This fish is Betta splendens – better known as the Siamese Fighting Fish. Little E’s teacher explained to me that the Betta is one that thrives in small amount of stagnant water in a warm environment, which makes it the perfect little aquariam fish for small children living in small apartments, who will only need to feed it once daily and change the water weekly (grownups can help clean the tank).

Inspired by this revelation, we took J and Little E on a surprise trip to the local aquarium store and allowed them to each choose a Betta fish to keep! Here they are:

GingerBomb

This is J’s Betta. GingerBomb is a Steel blue Piebald Deltatail. Ginger is a quiet fish who likes to hang out behind his marimo ball, but he comes out to play whenever J comes near the tank (which is why J liked him to begin with).

TataBob

E’s betta is a Red Dragon Deltatail and is called TataBob. He is very flashy and is a little bit of a show off. You can see him posing for the camera in the picture – he held that pose very still for nearly a minute and only wandered off once I’d put the camera away!

I’ll keep you all updated as to their progress!