Summer Needs a Little Pinterest

We have on break from school for about a month now. I believe in letting kids have a break with to be "bored". In the month of June, T participates in our neighborhood swim team which competes with other teams throughout our city. He is still a beginning swimmer when it comes to competing but he has been improving over the last two seasons. He now knows the back, breast, freestyle and butterfly strokes but he needs to work on his speed and form. The team practices every M-Th morning so we have been starting our days early all summer. Days seem longer when you leave the house before 8am and have very little scheduled activities.

I'd like to share some of the recent projects the kids have been working on over the last two weeks. Most of the creating was done by T (or me) but both T and B enjoyed playing with the finished products.

Our first pintrest adventure of the summer was Sponge Balls. I have had this pinned for over a year and kept thinking we should try it. I don't normal use sponges at home so we never had the materials on hand. Once I finally bought the sponges we were able to make these very quickly one afternoon while B was napping. T helped and then they both played with them after B woke up. I don't have any pictures of B because she was less than thrilled with her brother throwing water drenched sponges in her face right after she woke up from her nap, so I was busy being a referee.

SPLASH!

He really enjoyed smashing it into his own head

If you'd like to give these a try, they are super easy, cheap and fun. There are tons of different blogs with instructions so I will just link you to the one I used. I will say that string did not work well for us, it just didn't hold it tight enough. We used large rubber bands instead.

Sponge Balls

Next we tried a super simple and quick DIY super hero cape. This another one of those pins I've had pinned forever. It took about 5 minutes to make two of these capes. You only need an old tee shirt for each cape and a scissors. For my 8 year old, I used an old adult tee, for my 2 year old I used one of my son's old tees (size 5T). After they wore these for about 15mins, they decided they needed some emblems on the back so I cut them out of sticky backed craft foam and just stuck them onto the back of the capes. They ran around with these capes for hours (and for several days).

**WARNING** your child MUST be supervised while wearing these capes. They are definitely a strangulation hazard if left as is. I am considering cutting the collar and adding velcro to make it safer but haven't yet. These capes are only worn with supervision and put away where they can not access them alone.

Super B and Super T!

Super Hero Capes

For some reason, super heroes need forts! T grabbed two moving boxes from our garage and made himself and his sister a fort. They were basically boxes with windows and doors cut out of them, but they loved them. No pin here, just use your imagination. If you want some inspiration, Ive really enjoyed Fort Fridays at All For The Boys

Super T's fort

Super B's fort

Lastly, some super hero power crystals. I didn't actually have this one pinned, I was just browsing a favorite blog and came across it. T noticed it on the computer screen and insisted they needed to make them. The tutorial calls them Wire Wrapped Stone Necklaces, but ours needed more power. T raided his rock collection for some pretty polished crystalline rocks. B got a purple on and T got a greenish one. We wrapped jewelry wire around the rock to keep it from falling out and then make a simple twine necklace. We found that we needed a lot of wire to actually keep those stones in place and the wire we bought was too soft to stay how we made it. I would recommend not using jewelry wire for this. They were fun for a while, but they didn't last. Again, if you have a small child, these would be a strangulation hazard, please supervise small children with necklaces.

We had fun working through some pintrest projects and I think we'll keep looking for more. Some were better than others but they were all fun as an activity. None of them cost more than a few dollars and they all provided hours of fun for the children.