A Day at the Beach

So this isn't exactly instruction on a specific topic, like I usually do in my blogs. This week is mostly a creativity exercise with math and reading add-ons and summer survival tips. Anyway, without further adieu...

I have been watching my girls at their gymnastics classes this summer.  Every week has a new theme – the Olympics week, horse riding week, etc.  What is interesting is that the activities they do don’t really change. On Olympics day they were vaulting for the Gold medal and got Olympics rings stamps and coloring pages. On horse riding day they were vaulting onto a horse, etc. Regardless, each week my girls were excited anew about their unique experience that day.

The reason that I was reflecting on what made these same activities seem new is a situation that I think many parents (if not every parent) of preschoolers can relate to.  We have a Toys R Us’s worth of toys in our house, but “nothing to do”.  Usually my girls are in school for half a day all week and then weekends are jam packed with birthday parties, sports, and playdates.  I thought that my kids needed some time to decompress from the school year frenzy so into our packed summer plans I built in two weeks with no formal activities – no blogworthy, Mommy lead activities, no playdates, no camps. Beyond that, we have morning camps but no more than one playdate per week in the afternoons. Weekends have a life of their own so we are still in gymnastics, birthday parties, and travel frenzy, but oh well.

I have come to realize that isolation and boredom is a dangerous combination if I plan to have all three of us survive the summer (and Daddy/Hubby too).

So this week we have 2 days free of activity/camp/travel/playdate, mostly because of the change of date for our family reunion, but the first week of isolation has taught me that I can’t just sit down at my computer and say “Go!” to the kids and expect them to entertain themselves all day. I’m taking a cue from gymnastic summer camp today and creating a theme to our fun.

I start the morning by telling the kids that we are going to have an imaginary day at the beach today. They are quick to get in character even though our real beach and pool days have left the swimsuits in the wash today. Gymnastics leotards are an easy substitution.

They even sunblock themselves, though I plan to stay indoors.

We start with a bowl of beach sand (ie granola) for breakfast. We pour the water on the sand (or milk on the granola) and get the beach into our systems.

Then I teach them a new game that I purchased at a Cash Mob (which, by the way is a great way to support local businesses. Google it!) over the weekend - Go Fish. The cards are cute and have adorable pictures of fish and sharks and other sea creatures so Briana and I have a blast playing four rounds, with her winning three of them.  Before those four rounds, we played a hand with Abby.  After her round Abby took her fish to the ocean (playroom) and swam them around, uninterested in our subsequent rounds.  Every now and then Abby surfaces and trades one of the fish in her hand to “Go Fish!” and carries one of our cards off to the ocean.  It is less disruptive to our game than it probably sounds. 

Bree takes the game very seriously. (Don’t mind the background mess…Abby’s fish were somewhat of a tornado…we’ll clean it up later.)

  

Then Abby decides that she needs us to help her make an ocean and a beach so we leave Go Fish for more beach fun. When the beach is constructed with a red fire pit, blue water, yellow sand, and green grass, (all out of floor mats) and a big halogen light sun, we enjoy our day at the beach.

Sometimes laying out,

Sometimes swimming,

Briana even insists on yoga on the beach, which is funny because we’ve never done yoga on the beach, but it sure does sound nice.  I turn on the kids’ yoga cd and we do the sun salutations song and the Namaste song. 

Then the kids want a snack. I pop popcorn, and the kids decide that we can pretend to be digging for seashells instead of kernels.  I want the popcorn to be a campfire because I popped it in one of those Pop Up Bowl bags, but I’m told that it is not nighttime at the beach yet.

I can’t waste this obvious skills reinforcement opportunity, so while the kids are pulling out their seashells, we count out ten seashells and then count how many we eat at a time and subtract to see how many we should have left. We count to make sure our math is right.  Then one of us grabs a couple more and then we have a contest to see who can tell Mommy first how many should be in their pile if we added the new ones to theirs.

For example, Briana starts with 10 kernels. She eats 4. 10-4=6. Abby has 10 and eats 2. 10-2 = 8. Then Abby grabs 3. We each do the whole math problem. For Bree 10 take away 4 is 6 and then add three more is 9.  For Abby 10 -2 = 8 + 3 = 11.  Whoever correctly solves their equation first gets the 3 new kernels and we go another round.  Abby gets to count hers out for the subtraction but she has to do the addition in her head to win. Bree has to do it all in her head. (Different ages, different rules…Bree’s 4.5 and Abby is 3 now). Abby wins a couple of rounds and I realize that we may be having a blog about sportsmanship soon. Bree recovers and usually wins the next couple in a row, trying as hard as she can to make sure her baby sister doesn’t beat her again. When the competition heats up too much, and the girls show that a tie breaker may be handled by hair pulling we stop our beach volleyball match (what Briana has chosen to call the game when I say we’re stopping our math game) and go back to just digging for seashells. At least the competition of it is stopped – the girls keep adding up their pieces, popping some in their mouth, saying how many they have left and counting to verify.

  

And what day at the beach would be complete without reading on the beach? When the girls finish their snack, and I vacuum while they rescue poor princes who can’t swim. Then we curl up together on the mats and read a couple of books. I read one called ‘Pinkalicious’. Briana reads us one of her 1^st level readers, ‘Cinderella, Countdown to the ball’ and Abby tells us the first letter on each page and the sound it makes of her chosen book, ‘If You Give a Pig a Party’ (she’ll be reading soon enough, but she just turned 3 so she’s not quite there yet). If the letter is repeated, she tells us the letter name and sound of the first letter in the next word so that she gets practice with more letters.

Before naps we have lunch. We roast a pig in the moonlight – or bake a turkey breast with the oven light on if you want to be a realist - and eat it by the water (or with noodle soup).

A day of doing “whatever” around the house, when organized around a theme, turns out to be a day of fun. I think we’ll head outside for some actual water fun after naps – popsicles and slip ‘n slides.

Good luck navigating the dangerous waters of summer!

<3 Pedigreed Housewife