Things to do with marbles - and the coolest spinner ever.

Ladies, grab your hot glue gun, and some of these babies:

And now, we´re going to make a real fabulous spinner.

You need four marbles, and you need to attach them with hot glue like a triangle, with one on top - like a little marble pyramid. And then...

Voila.
When you want to get them moving, just grab the marble on top and spin it - it will automatically flip into the position it has in the video. 
The boys in our school are mad about spinners at the moment, and those were really great on our trip. I made around 40 of these, with the marbles the kids picked, though I let the elder ones handle the hot glue gun on their own. They were a hit!

Did you ever try to paint with marbles?

We used an old glass casserole, just because we had it around - but I´ve done this with the lids of shoeboxes, as well. ine it with a sheet of paper, and let the marble do its job. It looks a lot nicer if you take different colors, but I forgot my box with acrylic colors in school - that´s how I am.

Did you ever think about using marbles to form groups for competitions? Take different coloured marbles (or simply draw a smiley on some with a permanent marker), put them into a bag and let the kids each take one out, blindly, of course.

And while we´re having our different coloured marbles in the sack, let´s take the opportunity to teach them something about probability - if we, let´s say, had five blue marbles, and one yellow, would it be fair if I said we´ll have it my way if we draw a blue one, and your way if we get a yellow one?

Oh, but if we´d like to have more action, Tim and the boys just made this:

 

This is made from the back of an old Ikea wardrobe (which we don´t need anymore, since Tim built us a new wardrobe), and some baseboards from the hardware store. It took them about 30 minutes, and now I hear the clicking sound of marbles all day long. I might paint it. Though, I think I like it the way it is. 

And my music for today is: 

They played this on the radio last night, when we came back from a really nice movie and another night with grandma and grandpa being free babysitters, which was awesome. I listened a lot to this kind of music when Eva was a baby, Blink, and Sum 41, all this stuff. It actually helped to bring little Eva to sleep :)