Summer Activities

A blog called The Long Thread shares a plethora of summer craft activities you can share with your children or yourself. I am drawn to blogs like this since I am now teaching preschool. Little Philip is a glutton for arts and crafts and anything involving books. Helen wants to tag right along, despite her tender age of 15 months. Thankfully, we are past the point of eating craft glue so she is able to join us with most projects.

Here are a few projects or activities we plan to do this summer, all gained from the above link but specifically linked in each project (former BSC Honor Council members, please note my effort to cite sources):

We seem to go through the store bought sidewalk chalk like toilet paper around here, so we will be making our own sidewalk chalk. I have an enormous four year old container of plaster of Paris I bought to make Little Philip's first feet impressions. However, the cute little tin I bought to put his cute little footprints in turned out to be too little since I gave birth to a son roughly the weight and size of a Thanksgiving turkey.
We will be making our own sidewalk chalk paint but will not be using Mommy's beloved silicone pastry brushes. Daddy has some perfectly good paint brushes in the garage that has seen their last latex painting days. Since we can't afford to fixed the horribly cracked concrete driveway, I'm devising a grand sidewalk chalk mural that will disguise the cracks for the little ones to complete one day.
Because Little Philip loves to read and has discovered the Dr. Suess section at our local library, we will be making oobleck. I have not read this book, nor do I know what this stuff is but it looks a like like Flubber and getting ooey-gooey is quite a treat for my little ones. On a rainy day (if there will ever be one!) we will be making kaleidoscopes:
And one more project. We will be making our own bubble mixture which basically consists of dish washing liquid, water and unflavored gelatin. For all my couponers, remember those $4 off any one Knox unflavored gelatin coupons that resulted in about a $2.50 overage to spend? I have about ten boxes of that stuff that have just been sitting waiting for a use like this.

And the good news? All of the above activities will cost us nothing since we have all the required materials or ingredients already on hand!