Activities to do with your kids

My son is crazy over anything with wheels. I'm sure any Mommy with boys say the same thing. If it isn't cars, it's dinosaurs or pirates! Though Mika isn't that crazy over dinosaurs, he loves pirates yo ho ho ho ho! But most of all, he wants to be a firefighter!
Interestingly, I didn't teach Mika to like cars. It seems as if this great love for cars is natural and innate. Inez has a toy cookie monster cement mixer truck and we had to literally teach her how to play with it. When Mika was old enough to play it, he was pushing the truck all over the place and making engine sounds!
Once I observed Inez and Mika playing with cars:
Inez: I think this car is cold. Let's cover it in with a blanket.
Mika: (banging two cars together) Acdent! Acdent!

This was a year ago or so.

Nowadays, the children are into colouring. Every day, Inez will draw and colour flowers, and rainbows, sometimes, fairy princesses. Her princesses used to be stick people, but now they are getting more meat. Sometimes, Inez will draw a car or two for her brother, who is now also very much into colouring as well.

Mikael doesn't draw on his own, prefering instead to get other people to draw for him. So, every day I have to (or their daddy has to) draw cars, trucks, buses for Mikael, and the boy would take any one of his three fave colours (i.e., yellow, green and blue) and colour all the drawings in one colour! Sometimes two, but usually it's just one.

Recently, I searched the internet for Firetruck printable colouring activities and the ones Mika liked are from: www.apples4theteacher.com
This one can be printed and you can also colour online. The drawing is nice. Other things like frog and caterpillar and fish are nice as well.

If you want to make your own firetruck box toy, I'm sure the kids will enjoy painting the box and messing themselves up. Have just found this just now. So, methinks this will be my weekend project with the kids since they love sitting in boxes, pretending it's a boat or car etc.
From the same site, you can download a whole other load of activities to do with fire-fighting.

Another thing my children love is artpad on www.art.com. I got this from watching TechTV quite some time ago. You need to have Macromedia Flash player to get started.