How about some outdoor fun on this, the first day of summer?
~ Make a maze out of the outdoor furniture. Line up furniture so that the kids can climb over and through it, adding things like ropes tied onto furniture legs to add extra challenges. If you have any extra ropes or hula hoops or even tires, you can add those in as an area for the kids to hop their way through and if it’s a hot day, what about adding sprinklers and even a kiddie pool to cool them off as they go through the course?
~ What about a summer time Easter egg hunt? You can dig out those plastic eggs and fill them with little candies (pick ones that won’t melt in the heat!) or something like a marble in each one so that when they’re finished collecting them, they’ll have a whole set of marbles to play with, sparking yet another activity. You don’t even have to use Easter eggs for this – hide their toy cars or something else that would be safe outside and let them hunt for those. Or, hide a bunch of new sand and beach toys gathered from garage sales and dollar stores. Once they find all of these, you can announce an upcoming trip to the beach!
~Explore nature. Give the kids a magnifying glass and have them explore flowers, trees, and shrubs up close. Use a string to section off an area of grass in your yard and have them explore that – you could even give them a little notebook and have them record (with words or drawings) how many things they can find in that one little section. If they do this more than once, you could even challenge them to find more this time than they did the last. Turn over a large rock or a brick and let them explore the creatures living beneath. Be sure to emphasize to the children that they need to be gentle and not destroy the living world they have found. You can even dig down about an inch or so, very gently moving the dirt and see what further treasures you can find. Be sure to restore this environment back to its previous state when you are finished. If you live in an area with things such as poisonous spiders around you may want to avoid this activity or at the very least, to use great caution when moving the rock. Teach your children a healthy respect for these spiders as they observe them!
~Take a penny hike through your neighbourhood. Go for a walk but make sure you take a penny (or other coin) with you…I always made sure I had additional change in my pocket when I did this with my daughter in case we encountered the Dickie Dee (aka ice cream vendor) along the way! At each time you reach a corner, flip the coin – if you get heads, turn right and if you get tails, turn left. You can simply enjoy the adventure or you can add to it by taking a camera along and challenging yourself to find something interesting to photograph in each and every block. Look up, look down, take a closeup of one section of something – whatever catches your interest. Or take some paper and something to write/draw with and create a map of what you find as you go along. My daughter was obsessed with maps when she was little and she loved to map out the neighbourhood! We would sometimes then take the photos we had taken and the map we had made and put them together in a “tourist brochure” for the area. You can do this in city neighbourhoods, tourist areas, or even just your own property. Let the kids then play the part of tour guide and show someone around this area or videotape a tour of it! You can also use these hikes as a way of reinforcing learning about the difference between right and left and as a way of teaching safety rules.
~ Give the kids time to explore the backyard – encourage them to look around at EVERYTHING really carefully! When they’re finished, go out and collect a few items from the yard. Place them one at a time in a bag and have the child reach into the bag without looking and try to identify what the item is by touch alone. Encourage them to use as many descriptive words as possible while touching the item – this is a great opportunity to develop vocabulary!
~ Have your child be a naturalist for the day or for the week (do you know that was the very first thing I wanted to be when I grew up? – it was because of the fabulous summer vacations we had at Fundy National Park!). Give them a little book – or have them make one – to use as a log book and record what and how many different types of birds and animals they find. Yes, cats and dogs count too! They could take it further by recording the activities of the animals – are they looking for food? What do they appear to be eating? Are they engaged in some other activity? What kinds of places do they seem to prefer? What kinds of things do birds use for their roosts? Where do insects like to hide? How do the animals blend in with the environment or otherwise protect themselves? You could even get a field guide for animals and birds in your area from the local library so the kids can look them up and learn more about them.
~ How about using one of these hot sunny days to your advantage and make some sun prints? You can buy sun print paper at many educational and toy or craft stores as well as online but you can also do something similar with dark coloured construction paper or fax paper. Lay the paper down and then top it with some items with strong outlines and distinctive shapes. You can even place down letters that you’ve cut out to spell out something – just make sure that whatever you use won’t blow away. Leave this in the hot sun all day – at the end of the day remove the items and you should see that the colour has faded in all the areas exposed to the sun and is still dark in the areas that were covered (or in the case of the fax paper, any areas exposed to the sun generally turn a yellowish colour). http://www.stevespanglerscience.com/product/sun-sensitive-paper
~ Around here, in the winter, you’ll see lots of kids making snow forts but what about during the summer? Well give them some old sheets or blankets and let them turn outdoor furniture into a summer fort/tent. These help to provide a shady spot on a sunny day and give the kids a place to hide out and read books, play with their toys, and use their imagination. They can even make telescopes and binoculars from toilet paper and paper towel rolls and pretend they’re defending the fort, watching for invaders! Want something more permanent? Here’s a tent made from pvc pipes that the kids could use all summer long: http://www.prudentbaby.com/2009/12/handmade-hanukkah-day-7-super-easy-diy.html
~ Let your child take a colander or a sand toy sifter out into the backyard and do a little archaeological excavating! I did this with my young students and they loved it. We would use string to mark off areas in order to keep track of them. Then we would learn how to gently dig, brush dirt away with old paintbrushes, and sift through the dirt to see what “treasures” we could find. Sometimes we would record these in log books and other times we would take a few little items (non-living of course) that we found and use them to make a collage or a mini sculpture. With older kids, I would save up bones from dinners I had made, clean them really well and then sanitize them with bleach (I called the health unit and this was what they advised would make them safe). I’d bury these and let the children dig for them. Then we’d use plasticine or some kind of clay or glue to assemble what we found into some kind of imagined creature’s skeleton.
~ Take advantage of all the shadows being cast by the summer sun and have the kids try perfecting their shadow puppetry skills. You can even turn it into sort of a charades kind of game by taking turns making some sort of animal with the shadows cast by the hand or body shapes they make and then having the others try to guess what it is. Or how about a game of shadow tag? Whoever is “It” tags people by stepping on their shadows or by touching their shadow with his/her own.
So there you have it. Ten great ideas for outdoor summer fun! Stay tuned all this week for many more ideas and a special announcement coming up!
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