Tag: summeractivities

Let’s Take a Walk Together

The days of summer are slowly coming to an end, though the temperatures here this week have felt very warm! Let’s take a walk in nature together and see what fun things we can find. I call this “finding joy in nature and in the simple free things in life”. If you have a camera or a cell phone with a camera, take some pictures of the interesting things you find. Kids love to take pictures of special things. 🙂 I’ll show you some of the cool things I found on my walks in nature lately.

It can be fun to see how many different colors of wild flowers or weed flowers you can find. Here is a light blue flower that grows along the roadside where we live.

You can also make a note of what size the flowers are that you see. For instance, these little yellow flowers are very small.

While the yellow flowers on this plant are quite large.

Here we have a little feather that I almost missed seeing, but look how pretty and soft it is!

This is a dandelion whose days of being yellow are gone and all that’s left are the seeds. But look how pretty and perfect it looks! Some people call these “wish flowers” because they pick the flower, make a wish and then blow all the seeds and their wishes into the air.

These tiny, tiny pink flowers are on a weed, but they are so delicate and pretty!

We even found a little friend hopping through the grass!

We added another color of flower to our list when we found this purple weed!

And who do we have here? Why hello, there, little caterpillar! You can make up a story about where the caterpillar came from and where he is heading now. Why is he running so quickly through the grass? 🙂

These flowers were also growing along the roadside but they look very much like the Black-eyed Susans that are growing in my flowerbed.

Keep an eye out for butterflies! We have lots of these little ones flying around our house. I think this might be a Great Spangled Fritillary butterfly. So pretty!

You never know when you might spot a man raking hay… 😉

Taking a walk in nature can be so refreshing and calming and gets you away from screen time and gives you quality time together. You can take it a step further and print out your pictures and make a scrapbook together. I hope you’ll take a few minutes out of your busy last-of-summer days and enjoy some time outside. 🙂

A Shaving Cream Treasure Hunt

Ok, that title sounds rather crazy, doesn’t it? Well, it just might be! Lol I saw this idea in a magazine a while back, but we just tried it out today. The most important thing I can tell you about this activity is…#1.) Do it outside and #2.) Put swimming suits on the kids first! Ok, now that we have that out of the way, here’s how it works:

Grab a dishpan, some little washable toys and a can of shaving cream.

Put a little shaving cream in the bottom of the dishpan, then add some of the toys.

Add more shaving cream, then more toys until all the toys have been added. Make sure to end up with shaving cream on the top.

Now comes the part where you go outside! Have your water hose handy! Haha! Tell the kids how many toys are in the tub and let them go digging for them. (This will be the shortest time of the whole activity!) 😉 Let them wash the toys off with the hose.

The next part is where it can get a little crazy so it’s your call just how far you let this proceed. Kids and shaving cream just kinda automatically lead to shaving cream finding its way to a lot of other places besides the dishpan.

Haha! If we had thought of the swim suits earlier, we could have just hosed them down when they were done playing. 😉 But that’s part of summer fun, right? Making messes outside and playing in the water when you’re done! A special thanks to this sweet, tolerant mama for letting her kids try my crazy ideas! I hope you’ll give this a try! Your kids will be glad you did! 🙂