CastleCourt Shopping Centre

Things To Do

  • Build a den inside or in the garden!

  • Paper airplane contest

  • Have a picnic

  • Learn to count to 10 in a different language

  • Play hide & seek

  • Make up a play or a show

  • Write someone a letter

  • Play dress up

  • Write a story and make a book

  • Easter
  • Space
  • Earth
  • Body

Easter Arts & Crafts

Easter Bunting
  1. Ask a grown up to cut out some easter egg shapes from different colours of card.
  2. Decorate each one to be a mulicoloured easter egg, a cute chick with eyes and a beak or a bouncey bunny by sticking on ears.
  3. Get a piece of string and using paperclips or clothes pegs clip each one on.
  4. Ask someone tall to hang it up to decorate your home for Easter.
Bunny Masks
  1. Get some white card and draw the shape of your bunny face.
  2. Ask a grown up to cut it out and to cut a small hole either side for the string or ribbon to go.
  3. Decorate your mask using whatever you fancy. You could use glitter or gems for a sparkly bunny or crayons or finger painting for a multicoloured rabbit or even create a wild rabbit using things from the garden.

Easter Baking

Easter Nests
  1. Heat a little water in a saucepan
  2. Put chocolate in a bowl over the hot water to melt then remove from heat
  3. Add cereal such as rice krispies, cornflakes or shredded wheat and stir to coat.
  4. Spoon mixture into cupcakes and top with mini eggs or sweets.
  5. Refrigerate until set & enjoy
Easter Rocky Road
  1. In a bowl add 400g chocolate, 125g Golden Syrup, and 125g Unsalted Butter – melt in the microwave on short bursts. (or over pan of simmering water)
  2. Mix in the Marshmallows, chopped biscuits, most of the Easter Chocolates & pour into a lined tin and spread.
  3. Melt 250G white chocolate and pour over the top and sprinkle over the last of the Easter chocolates!
  4. Refrigerate until set & enjoy

Space Arts & Crafts

Loo Roll Space Scene
  1. Ask your family to save any finish loo roll tubes.
  2. Gather whatever art supplies you have whether you want to paint or colour your loo roll or wrap in coloured paper.
  3. You could use tin foil for a shiny metal rocket and add flames with coloured paper or tissue paper
  4. Or design your own alien, you could use pipe cleaners for antenae or somethig similar. If you don’t have googly eyes you can paint on as many eyes as you want to give your alien.
Scratch Space Print
  1. Colour a page in multicoured stripes or patterns, make sure to lean heavily. Don’t use any black crayon yet just bright colours.
  2. Once the page is full, colour heavily over the whole page in black crayon.
  3. Plan your space picture, you could always do a test drawing on paper to help come up with a design.
  4. Get an icelolly stick, coin or something similar to gently scratch your picture into the black crayon.

Space Baking

Galaxy Cookies
  1. Use an electric whisk to cream 200g of unsalted butter (softened) with 200g white sugar until creamy texture.
  2. Beat in 1 egg, add 400g plain flour and mix on low speed until dough forms.
  3. Wrap dough in cling film and chill for at least 1 hr. Preheat oven to 190°C, fan 170°C
  4. Lightly flour the surface and roll out the dough to the thickness of a £1 coin.
  5. Cut out the biscuits, if you have a star cutter, otherwise you can make planets with a round cutter.
  6. Decorate – you could look up marble icing to look like a galaxy or draw planets or aliens with coloured icing.
Space Picnic

Here’s some ideas for a space picnic!

  • You could cut sandwiches into stars
  • Rocket fruit skewers
  • Space invaders crisps
  • Flying saucer sherbert sweets
  • Try making our galaxy cookies.

Crafts

  • You could decorate boxes into spacecraft lunch vessels, or plastic cups and straws.
  • If you have spare cardboard, you could make a spaceship to sit in for your picnic.

Earth Arts & Crafts

Earth Collage
  1. Gather old magazines that people don’t mind being cut up.
  2. Draw your earth on a page.
  3. Rip up pieces of blue and green card into two seperate piles.
  4. Glue the green pieces on the land and the blue pieces on your sea.

If you want you could also fill in the background.

You could also draw animals and fish to cut out and stick on top of the land and sea.

Foraging Art
  1. Gather leaves, twigs, moss and whatever else you can find in your garden.
  2. Start planning your picture and arranging the items on your page.
  3. Once you are happy with your picture sick the items down with glue. You may need to cut some leaves into a new shape – ask an adult for some help with the scissors.

We would love to see your masterpieces. Share them with us on facebook.
@CastleCourtBelfast.

Recycled Treasure

What can you make from recycled household items. Ask a grown up to help you pick what is good to use.

  1. Build a loo roll sandcastle as if you were at the beech with colourful flags.
  2. Ask an adult to cut up an egg box, Paint each egg cup and stick on a page to create a flower or in a line like a caterpillar.
  3. Create a bird feeder with a plastic bottle. Ask an adult to cut two holes on the side for birds to fit their beak it and to piece through something like a pencil for the birds to stand on just below the hole.

Decorate your bottle however you fancy to help attract the birds. Finally ask an adult to attach some string so you can hang it up and fill with seeds.

Earth Baking

World Cupcakes
  • 125g caster sugar / 125g butter
  • 125g self raising flour / 2 large eggs
  • 1tsp vanilla essence
  • Blue and green food colouring
  1. Cream the butter, sugar and vanilla extract together in a bowl.
  2. Add the eggs and flour (sift the flour in).
  3. Beat everything together until the mixture is smooth. If you are using an electric whisk or stand mixer be careful not to over mix or the texture of the cupcakes will come out too dense.
  4. Seperate the mixture into two bowls adding a few drops of food colouring to create one blue and one green.
  5. Alternate the mixture into cupcake cases and bake for 20 minutes.

Body Arts & Crafts

Finger Painting

Everybodys finger prints are different. If you get everyone in your family to do a finger print you will see all the little lines are in different patterns.

  1. Ask an adult for permission as it can be pretty messy and they may want to help make a paint zone o a bin bag outside and cover up your clothes.
  2. Layout your page and plan your picture before carefully placing your fingers in the paint.
  3. Press your finger on the page in position and continue to finish your picture, leave to dry &wash your hands.
Symmetrical Faces
  1. Print a photo of you that mostly fills an A4 page.
  2. Ask an adult to help you cut in directly down the middle.
  3. Stick the half photo on one half of another page and use a ruler to draw a dotted symmetry line.
  4. Try to copy your photo exactly to get a perfectly symmetrical face.

If you can’t find a photo of youself then draw a dashed line down the middle and draw half of your face using a mirror, then copy your own drawing on the other half.

Lung Model

You will need 2 straws, cellotape, card 2 small bags or 2 balloons.

  1. Lay your straws on the card and draw lungs around them and colour in. Ask an adult to help you cut the lungs out.
  2. Tape 2 straws gently together bending them at the bottom.
  3. Around the end of each straw tape your bag or balloon all around so sealed.
  4. You could stick a drawing of lips and nose to the top of the straws.
  5. You can now blow in to the straw and watch what happens to your lungs as you inhale and exhale.

Body Baking

Gingerbread Skeletons

Add 75g butter, 3 1/2tbsp golden syrup and 60g light brown sugar to a pan. Stir on a low heat until sugar has dissolved.

Add 175g plain flour, 1/4 tsp bicarbonate of soda and 2tsp ginger to a mixing bowl then stir together. Make a well in the centre and pour in the cooled mixture.

Stir together to form a dough. Wrap in clingfilm and chill for 30mins to firm up.

Roll the dough to thickness of a £1 coin.
Using a biscuit cutter cut out the shapes. Bake at 190°C (170°C fan) mark 5 for 10 to 12min, until lightly golden brown.

The biscuits won’t be firm but will harden when left to cool outside the oven.

Either using bought icing or make an easy Royal Icing pipe your skeleton onto the cooled biscuits.