Willows Farm Village is having their annual Summer Spectacular event and have provided me with a family day pass to give away to one of my readers! Two adults and two children can enter on the pass.

To enter, please share your favourite thing about visiting a farm park with your children in the comments below or Tweet your entry to me @vouchermumuk. Entries must be in by 30 July and we’ll randomly select a winner to be announced on 2 August.

Willows Farm Village is near St Albans in Hertfordshire and it’s absolutely brilliant. The Summer Spectacular is held until 5 September and has plenty of events and activities to keep children entertained rain or shine.

Outdoors, there are all the farmyard animals to see and loads of activities, from Panning for Gold to Inflatable Bouncy Haystacks, Fun Fair Rides and the popular Tractor Trek. Indoors, there is plenty of fun to be had with Willows’ indoor play barn, Woolly Jumpers, featuring active play, ball pools and three exciting slides. A new activity for 2010 is Captain Chicken’s Egg Dodge where the Whites and Yolks team dodge each other’s foam ball eggs fired from the egg cannons.

Some of the Summer Spectacular’s highlights include:

• Willows farmer Andrew Wolfe has planted an A-maize-ing Maze grown completely from maize, an adventure the whole family will enjoy finding their way out of with a competition for the children to take part in.

• Willows Sports Day Races, an event exclusive to Summer Spectacular, where participants can enjoy old-school races including the egg and spoon and bean bag race. All children who take part will receive a certificate.

• Around the farm Tristan the Runaway Tractor will be telling his summer story and the popular Sing-a-long-a Woolly sessions return with Willows Entertainer Chris Beebee and Farm Village mascot Woolly Willow the Sheep, leading children in well-known nursery rhymes.

The Farmhouse Restaurant or Woolly Jumpers Coffee Shop offer a wide range of food for visitors. You can also bring your own picnic or pick up picnic supplies at the Willows Farm Shop which works with local producers to provide a wide range of goods with its own butchery counter, delicatessen, fresh fruit and vegetables, breads, cakes and drinks.

Tickets for the Summer Spectacular are £11.95 for adults and £12.95 for children. Concessions are available for senior citizens and disabled customers, and children under two years of age can enter free of charge.

I can’t wait to see your entries in the comments and on Twitter!

Financial education really is a problem. Few children received a proper education about how to manage money which means they are more likely to find money intimidating, confusing and stressful as adults. Now that we’re all struggling through the financial crisis, it is more important than ever to introduce children to healthy attitudes toward saving, spending and sharing.

I think the Moonjar financial education programme is quite cool. It is designed to encourage children to “shoot for the moon”, to not only go after their dreams and goals but to learn good money habits along the way. The programme has won several awards in the US where it was created.

Central to the Moonjar approach is a whole new style piggy bank. Instead of the old one-slot icon we are all familiar with, the award-winning ‘Moonjar’ has three compartments “that remind us of the choices we can make with our money. One each for: Saving, Spending and Sharing.”

Games, books, teaching aids and other materials round out the programme for a wide range of age groups.

 If you are looking for positive tools and resources to help teach some basic money concepts to your children this is great place to start.

Cocoboat sells the Moonjar range online. This includes:

• the classic Moonjar three compartment moneybox
• the  family kit with; lesson plan, 1 classic moneybox, ‘Conversations To Go’ about Money, ‘How The Moonjar Was Made’ storybook and two felt characters
• ‘How the Moonjar was Made’ storybook
• ‘Conversations to go’ range of conversation starters – over 100 questions in each box. Choose from; life, money or travel

To purchase Moonjar at a 10% discount please email me at vouchermum@gmail.com and I’ll put you in touch with Cocoboat.

And best for your budget, kids eat free from lunchtime to five p.m. on weekdays until “Spur on the Beach” season ends at the end of August.

For more details and T&Cs visit www.ukspur.co.uk.

Plus, Chewits are offering all VoucherMum.com readers the chance to get free kids places with a special 241 discount when you book on the multi-sports session for your child and their friends to enjoy!

Brought to you by much loved chewy sweet, Chewits, these holiday sports courses are the perfect way to keep your little ones happy and active during the school break.  Your child will love this fun and healthy sporting experience with loads of other kids in their own age group.

The day courses are managed by Premier Sport professional sports coaches and provide six hours worth of multi-sport activity for 5-11 years olds of all levels and abilities during school holiday weekdays. 21 different sports are available, including football, tag rugby, gymnastics, dance and cricket.

To find courses near you and to redeem your 241 session simply enter the following code VM/2010 on the website www.chewitspremiersport.org.

To be in with a chance of winning a place on a Chewits Sports Course near you all you have to do is answer the following question in the comments and I’ll email you a code:

Chewits Sports Courses are being run in association with which company?

a) Sport Fit

b) Premier Sport

C) Kids in Sport

To sign up for the course or for more information visit www.chewitspremiersport.org. More information on Chewits can be found at www.chewits.co.uk.

Terms & Conditions
*Sessions must be pre-booked, no drop-inswill ever be accepted, and are subject to availability
*241 codes can only be used for the roadshow session and venue stated above
*All 241 places can be used in the following way only:
1 person
- One day- No discount applied
- Two days – Pay for one day get second day free
- Three days – Pay for two days get third day free
- Four days – Pay for two days get two days free
2 people
-  One day – pay for one child second child free
*Visit the following link to find where courses are in your area underline;”>www.chewitspremiersport.org
*No cash alternative
*Children require permission from a parent or guardian to attend a course.
*Who can attend- Boys and Girls aged 5-11 years
*You will need shin pads for football and hockey. For ease these can be purchased online and picked up on the day to collect.
*Every child must be signed in and out each day by an appropriate adult.
*You need to arrive between 9.15am and 9.30am for registration
*All participants require a packed lunch

Here are a few of the best:

• london eye up to 20% off
• madame tussauds up to 20% off
• cadbury world from £11.90
• ghost bus tours from £10
• speed boat rides up to 38% off
• legoland discovery centre from £9.30
• alton towers up to 20% off
• thorpe park up to 20% off
• legoland up to 15% off
• chessington up to 50% off
• diggerland from £15

Swimsuits from Lion in the Sun are made from high quality Italian swimwear fabric and the 50+ UPF rating will give you peace of mind that your children are protected from UV rays. The UV suits, swimsuits, shorts, tops and hats are designed to wear wet and dry fast in the sun so they are comfortable all day.

Lion in the Sun have offered an exclusive voucher code for VoucherMum.com readers: you can save 15% when you use code VOUCHERMUM until 7 August.

Here are a few more snaps of the suits:

Baby boy’s first swimsuit – £15.90

Surf girl two piece – £31.90

Boy’s swimshirts – £16.95

In this first personalised Peppa Pig Book, your child stars in the words and pictures alongside Peppa Pig as they go to school, nursery or playgroup. Simply add your child’s name and then personalise the illustration including their eye colour, hair colour and style and skin colour. Choose whether your child goes to school, nursery or playgroup and even include a personal message, which appears on the first page.

The book is £14.99 before the discount.

If you’re a mum or dad of a 6-9 year old I think you’ll really like this site. The content includes parenting advice and tips with a focus on skill-building. There are sections on helping your kids learn new skills, like inline skating and skipping – two things we did a lot of last weekend! Curiously, however, there was no post on learning to ride a bike which would be REALLY useful.

There is also a section called Skillscape which is a map of the UK’s best spaces for kids to play and practise their skills, from parks and playgrounds to sports clubs. You can contribute by mapping your kids’ favourite activity spaces (the harder-to-find and more local, the better) and if you share a space you’ll be entered to win a family holiday for four. If you’re staycationing this summer Skillscape is a great place to get ideas for places to go.

You can also check out Ready for Ten’s Facebook page here: http://www.facebook.com/readyforten

We picked strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, tayberries (apparently a blackberry-raspberry hybrid) and then headed to the veg patch for courgettes, beetroot and french beans. Blackcurrents were also in season but a bit picked over and onions, spinach and swiss chard were available too.

Here is a picture of our haul:

We started out by accidentally picking off-limits strawberries (I guess they’d just been sprayed with pesticides–eek!) so we got some REALLY nice ones. Otherwise the strawberries were a bit picked over. Blackberries had literally just come in season today so we got lucky on that. We were told the best day to go is Tuesday because the farm is closed Monday.

This really is such a brilliant thing to do with your kids. Every query of “shall we pick some (insert vegetable)?” was met by “I love (insert vegetable)!” and finding ripe raspberries was like a treasure hunt. It was really fun. Maybe I had the most fun!

Afterward we went home to make jam. I’ve never made jam but this recipe by Jamie Oliver looked super-easy and they sold jam sugar at the farm. I’m just not sure we cooked it all long enough because nothing is quite firming up. The jars are all in the fridge now so we’ll see…

Here are our lovely clean strawberries.

Here they are mashed up on the stove.

And once they’ve been cooked up.

This is the mixed berry jam before cooking. I mean, YUM.

We made LOTS! I followed Jamie’s preserving method mentioned in the barbecue sauce recipe from the Jamie’s America cookery book. Submerge the jars in boiling water for 10 minutes. The lids all popped down, so I’m hoping this won’t kill us later…

Finally, we made labels.

Highly recommend!