Pirate Week (Simple Summer Theme #5)

So although summer is officially over, the busy end of our summer meant we never fully got to finish sharing our Simple Summer Theme weeks. We've shared before that we're huge fans of pirates, so of course we needed a Pirate Week!

We enjoyed as much of pirate week outside as we could as it proved to be one of the nicest weather weeks of the summer! 

Castle Week (Simple Summer Theme Week #4)

As I let Big Brother help come up with several of the themes for our Simple Summer series, some of them have made me stretch my imagination a little. It's been interesting to see what I can think of that sticks to the point of our simple summer weeks, yet still matches his theme idea. Castle Week was a bit of a stumper, but I think I came up with some good activities.

Castle Week was another week where I had several different aged kiddos, my two boys plus two visitors, so I had to think of activities that were approachable for all the kids.

Vehicle Week (Simple Summer Theme Week #3)

We're still really enjoying our Simple Summer Theme weeks even though summer is quickly passing us by. It's no secret we love playing with cars and trucks, so Vehicle Week was a lot of fun for the boys!

Week Three: Vehicle Week

One of my favorite things about this week was that we already own so many of the materials we needed. It also encouraged us to get out some of the transportation toys we already owned and hadn't used in a while. 

Bug Week (Simple Summer Theme #1)

As I mentioned earlier this week, Big Brother thinks it would be fun if each week of our summer vacation had a "theme." Most of our summer will be spent at home, and I love that he's thinking ahead like this. With extra kiddos here off and on during the summer, it would make our times with them more fun too.

But, I really want our summer to still feel relaxed and flexible, and well, like summer vacation versus summer camp. So, with that in mind I'm trying to honor his theme idea but in a low key way. We'll try, on the days we can, to do at least one simple project, snack, or activity that matches our current theme. Here on the blog I'm calling this "Simple Summer Themes." After the week I'll share a brief round up of different ways we celebrated our theme.

Our First Week: Bug Week

Our first week was "Bug Week," and as it was also our first week of vacation, we definitely tried to keep it simple. But even keeping it simple was still a lot of fun!

Clothespin Dragonflies

Big Brother has asked me to organize "theme weeks" this summer, which makes me laugh as I'm starting to think he might be a future teacher in the making. Or, at least a camp counselor. I'm trying to approach our weeks with enough projects and activities to make it seem like a theme to him, but also enough freedom to make it still seem like summer for me.

Our first theme was "Bugs." We did several simple bug explorations and activities, but one of my favorites were these adorable clothespin dragonflies.

Pirates' Gold Number Play

We've been exploring Pirate Week here at our house. We all love pirates; in fact I realized I've never shared this picture from this past Halloween of our whole family in their pirate wear. So when Big Brother asked for a "Pirate Week" I couldn't resist.

Beyond reading some pirate books, wearing our pirate costumes, and talking like a pirate this week I wanted to create some fun learning and crafting opportunities around pirates. I've been thinking for a while about how to turn Big Brother's love of pirates into a math activity. Using some rocks, gold spray paint, and number fun here are two different activities we came up with. 

Pirates' Gold Number Play

Quick Pick & Project of the Week: Dinosaur Stomp Painting

We're still putting together posts on the fun we had recently with our dinosaur week. We absolutely love the book Saturday Night at the Dinosaur Stomp and it leant itself perfectly to our Quick Pick and Projects of the Week series.

What we love about this book is the rhymes, the use of the actual dinosaur names, and the idea that they are all celebrating somewhere together. It's really upbeat and fun to read aloud. We've gotten it out of our library several times. 

To create our dinosaur stomp paintings we used our collection of toy dinosaurs. Most of our dinosaurs come from an awesome Learning Resources play set we purchased a few years ago. They have different shaped feet, so it made the painting fun because there were different prints. 

Shortbread Fossil Cookies

We love tying snacks into our new weekly themes, which led us to create these yummy shortbread fossil cookies. Not only did they fit in with the dinosaur fun we've been having, but they are perfectly delicious too!

I've seen a couple of recipes like this before, but we based ours on a buttery shortbread. For this recipe I did most of the prep work and cooking while Big Brother helped with pressing in the images. This is a very soft dough, and as it was a very warm day that made the rolling and cutting of the dough a little trickier. 

Ingredients:

2 sticks of unsalted butter (softened to room temperature) 

1/2 cup white sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

2 cups flour

1/4 tsp salt

1 tsp cinnamon

1/4 tsp nutmeg

Homemade Dinosaur Bones

We've definitely been feeling a little frazzled here between the hot and humid weather, a sick toddler, and several days cooped up in the house. Luckily, kicking off our dinosaur week is proving to be a great distraction.

Dinosaur books are something I've been collecting for a while now, so we officially kicked off the week by reading several different dinosaur books. Later this week we'll be creating a dinosaur bone excavation, and while I had planned on creating the bones, I realized it would be much more fun to get Big Brother involved.

Homemade Dinosaur Bones

These homemade dinosaur bones were easy to make and are proving to have more than one way to use them.

3 Ways to Play with Shells

Last week we had the chance to get away to the seacoast for an overnight. We all loved being on the beach, both for an evening picnic and a morning playing in the waves.

But our two small trips definitely didn't feel like enough time there. Everyone was rather bummed to return home.

So we decided to try and recreate some of the ocean fun here at home. Last weekend we started exploring some ocean fun and we've decided to extend it into this week too.

Our first three activities have all been sensory play based around shells!