water walls

 

The Supplies

We got this idea from The chocolate muffin tree. We had been saving water bottles for a while and came across their idea and were hooked!
Tools needed: water bottles with the bottoms cut off, pipe cleaners, baby gate and of course water
Daylan helped me design a path for the water to flow down. Then the rest was exploring how the water went down the bottles! We tried sand too!
Pictures to follow.

Catapult

Using the shovel to clean the driveway this morning turned into an hour of catapulting fun for the boys. Daylan discovered that placing a stick on the handle and then jumping on the shovel made the stick go flying. What fun for boys shovels and flying sticks? We added a little measuring and graphing by putting the number of inches in a line from 0 to 300. The boys circled where their stick landed and wrote their initials. Finding out whose stick when the farthest was the boys favorite thing. This was good exposure for Daylan with numbers greater than 20 and good practice writing letters! I always try to sneak a little education into his daily play. This activity was so engaging to the boys be austere initiated the play and I just added to it. Play is always more fun for the kids when it's explored through their big minds first! Pictures to follow.

Umbrellas aren't always for stormy days

The neighbor boys were hiding from the sprinklers with umbrellas, so of course Daylan had to join in. It became a 30 minute 'you can't catch me' game. I love to see the boys playing and inventing new ways to play with ordinary toys. What else can you do with your sprinkler, besides keep cool?

DIY waterslide

Typical Daylan finding ways to scare mommy. At Random Lake beach they have a bumpy slide, which in itself is a rough one, but when you add a bucket of water; its a superslippin slide. The fun is just so endless when you spend it out at the beach and quite plainly anytime outdoors when the sun is shining.

Habor Fest Cardboard Boat Regatta

This was our first year at Harbor Fest with Aunt Joan! Daylan crafted a cardboard boat out of recycled art supplies. Him and Jo raced them down the 'lake'! As always Daylan's won. At the Fourth of July celebration they have an art armada where people have the chance to build their own cardboard boats and races them. One year I will get the ambition to build one.

compliments of the sheboyganpress

Nursery Desgins

I needed a change to Adelyn's nursery already. Above her crib I painted her name on 6 canvases and hung them above her crib. That got old very fast. So I repainted them all pink and decided on a tree design. I stenciled it out and cut on canvas in half and away I went painting. I used command strips to hand them and voila. I found some vinyl shelf liner at Michael's for 1.99$, what a deal! I used my circuit and cut out her name and date of birth and stuck them on the wall. It added such a personal touch. What have you used vinyl for?

Summer Sunflowers

 We purchased a sunflower kit at Target. Daylan moistened the dirt and put it in the pot. Then he picked out the perfect sunflower seeds and buried them in the pot. He added just the right amount of water and waited for them to grow. We have been keeping a science journal to practice the art of observing. I let him tape a seed in the notebook and illustrate what the planting process looks like. Every week or so we observe changes to the sunflower and journal it. Have you ever kept a log of observations?
Great books to combine with sunflower growing:

 

Eve Bunting always has a way with words in her books.
Ford is an easy read about the basics of planting sunflowers.