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Cautionary Tales For Children
Wonderful witty poems great for reading to your children. The stories and rhymes will stay with them for the rest of their lives.
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Research has shown how important YOU are to your children and how as a dad the things you do, and keep on doing, really count, whether you live with them, or you are a single dad and are only able see them once a month, once a week or more, what you do really matters. This site is dedicated to all dads but will be of special relevance to the single dad. Remember, you are half the reason your children exist and they need you whether you live with them or not. As their dad, you have what it takes to make their lives successful and fulfilling no matter how often you see them. This site is about all the positive things that we as parents have to offer our children.
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Paint
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Use spray paint or emulsion (latext, US) paint to get a quick finish that cover mostly anything well
 You don’t have to use paint to finish your models, but paint can make a big difference to the look of a model. Not all models really need paint, but stuff made from things with writing over it or labels on will look about a million times better if the writing is covered up. In the case of the Space Rocket we used white paper wrapped round a Pringles Crisp tube and a toilet roll to give us the nice white finish, which we could then marker on, without getting our fingers wet. But then for the Floating Submarine model, spraying it with black and grey spray paint transformed it in about two minutes from a couple of old plastic bottles into something really exciting, that remained a favourite bath time toy for months.
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You can use any type of spray paint, but be careful to follow the instructions on the can. The paint is flammable when being sprayed, is bad for you if you breathe in the fumes and leaves a strong smell in your house for days. On the other hand, spray paint is ideal for quickly and permanently covering plastic, and spray paint for craft applications comes in a range of exciting finished these days.
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For quick coverage on most surfaces you can do a lot worse than standard, house decorating emulsion (Latex Paint in the US). If you don’t have any left over from your DIY projects, then you can buy tiny cans of paint very cheaply (match pots). It’s better for covering cardboard quickly, and the beauty of it is, that you can wash the brushes in water. Be careful of clothes though, emulsion dries really quickly on clothes (in about 2 minutes) and thereafter is impossible to remove.
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Acrylic paint is also very good at covering up and sticking to most surfaces, and although it is water based, it also has the benefit of being permanent (i.e. not water soluble) when dry. Acrylic paints dry very quickly and give bright satisfying colours. Tubes like the one shown here are reasonably expensive, although they are lovely to use and can all be mixed together to give a very professional finish. However acrylic paint also comes in big bottles from most good toy shops or on-line. Acrylic paint can be mixed with emulsion to tint it.
The Floating Submarine can be made in about 1 hour and easy to follow instructions are just waiting for you to download. Click on picture to go to Floating Submarine project.
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Fabulous paper planes
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For most kids (boys and girls) paper folding (origami) starts with making a paper airplane. Folded out of any rectangular piece of paper (including paper money for those rich kids on the block) the paper plane is a fantastic thing.  It's so simple, a paper airplane will only take a minute to fold up, and yet it really does something when you've made it. Like riding a bike, you never really forget how to make a paper plane, but in case you have forgotten, or would like to try some new paper plane designs, you'll find the clearest instructions on dadcando, ready for you to teach a whole new generation of kids the pleasure of areo-engineering and flight dynamics from a simple sheet of paper.
Use the awesome dadcando downloadable printables to make the coolest paper airplanes on the planet, see which design can fly the furthest, and if you have an idea for another colour pattern or even an alternative folding scheme, why not send it in to us and if it's good enough we'll put it up with the others, for everyone to enjoy. Click here to send us your plane designs.
Have a look at these fantastic new templates . . .
the RAF Tornado GR4 , the Tornado F-3 and now for the first time, Concorde . All my kids could say was... "Cool, they look like real planes!" Build them and fly them in 5 minutes. Why wait for the kids to come home, unlock the big kid in you, it’s the best kind of paper craft you’ve ever seen.
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