Family Picnic Variations

I have always loved the extra celebration packs MGT adds to many of their monthly curriculum boxes.  This month was a family picnic, full of ideas for games and treats.  I find them very inspiring and usually end up coming up with some of my own ideas using the materials provided.  I thought I'd share some of those ideas today.

The spinner that came in the packet can be used for lots of different things.  I came up with a spin-off of the pasta salad game using it.  I didn't have plastic ants and didn't want to go buy any since we have little things coming out of our ears right now.  Instead, I used some of the foam shapes I've collected from previous month's boxes and added it to a bowlful of expired penne I found hiding on the top shelf of my pantry.  Using tweezers from another month of curriculum, the girls would take turns spinning and then pick out the corresponding number of shapes from the noodles.  You could also use little sticky notes, draw shapes on them and place them over the number for another variation.

After they finished that game, we continued to use the spinner and the pasta.  I cut long pieces of  yarn, made a tape "needle" on one end and tied a piece of pasta to the other.  They then took turns spinning and threading the corresponding number of pasta pieces onto their yarn to make a necklace. Miss M made a nice ABC pattern.

We then took our magnifying glass (from last July's nature box) outside and started looking for things in nature.  Originally I was going to have them observe some of the ants that live at the end of our patio but those little suckers were super fast so we settled for closely examining our roses and lavender flowers as well as the honeybees visiting them.  The girls then drew chalk pictures of what they saw (I see this as a precursor to nature journals, which I'd like to start with them next summer).  We talked about the different parts of the plants, the colors, smells and how they felt.


Daddy joined us outside and came up with a fun but definitely adult-supervision only activity.  Being a boy and former Scout, he decided to show the girls how to use the magnifying glass to concentrate the sun's rays and melt crayons onto a piece of paper.  We talked about safety as well as why the crayon was changing from solid to a liquid.  They had fun swirling the melted wax and drawing with the stubs.

Those were my variations to some really fun activities as we end the month of August.