That's Enough Unicorns For Now, Thankyou

Rosie loved her day - I was utterly exhausted at the end of it. I'd made little headbands to turn the Sylvanian Ponies into Unicorns, and tied gold thread round their tails. They were all lined up to greet her on arrival. In the morning we had two unicorn stories - one which I had made up with words she could read, and then at snacktime we watched "Sugarlump and the unicorn" on YouTube [It's by Julia Donaldson, the Gruffalo author] and we did unicorn maths, and made a Unicorn-Fairy-Headband [using up some silk flowers which had been in a vase in the back bedroom] Liz - who was in on eh surprise, had made sure Rosie was in her Unicorn Tee Shirt.

In the afternoon we made a Unicorn Palace, complete with drawbridge, towers, turrets and crenellations.

On Monday evening, I had painted some scrap boxes and tubes and cereal packets with some blue emulsion paint.I cut narrow strips of card and then snipped along the length. Rosie pushed down alternate tabs and then I cut them off to make the crenellations, which we then stuck round the tops of the walls.. I don't know why children are fascinated by that word. But they are. 

I also reminded her what we learned on shapes day, and she found that the sides of the boxes are rectangles, that a tube [cylinder] can be made with a rolled up rectangle, and a cone is made using a circle which has a slit in it and rolled. We made conical turret roofs [from the cover of an old magazine] And stuck fabric flags on sticks.Our palace had a drawbridge too

TUTORIAL If you want to make a unicorn horn, like the ponies are wearing, Iron piece of lightweight interfacing onto a piece of fabric and cut out a 5 cm diameter circle. [This makes 4 horns] Cut this circle into quarters. Fold in the straight sides to the centre, roll up from left side to right and stitch down, to make a cone. Make a loop from elastic, and sew the base of the cone to that. The height of the horn will be half the diameter of the circle. I drew round a lid. I also wound gold thread round afterwards to add a bit of sparkle.

The ponies [sorry, unicorns] played happily for ages till hometime.

Unicorns have been popular since medieval times, Lewis Carroll brought them back into popular Victorian culture when Alice went through the Looking Glass, and then in the 1980s, My Little Pony's Unicorns galloped into bedrooms across the nation. In 2015, the MLP film revived interest. Little girls are fascinated by them [one of my friends actually thought the bible story in Acts 8 was about Philip and the Ethiopian Unicorn] 

Depending on what you read, these mythical creatures symbolise virtue, purity, honour, strength, courage, miracles, individuality and the right to be different.

Rosie loves them, and if it helps to get her enthusiastic about learning, I don't mind planning a day of unicorn themed activities.