In my last post I covered some of the changes I had made to our outdoor play area. I mentioned that I had built a new roof over the little house in the corner of the yard and that moving the bus benches here made this a favourite sit spot all summer. However, I did not have a picture to include in my last post – but I do now;
I also promised to write more about some of our summer activities so that is what this post is for. Although International Mud Day occurs before my summer vacation, I never write about it until after. I didn’t write a dedicated ‘Mud Day 2022’ post but I can’t have a summer activities post without at least a couple mud day photos. This particular group was highly motivated to wash muddy toys so much of the activity was ‘mud on, mud off, repeat’.
The building area of the yard was popular all summer – surprisingly more popular than the water area or the climbing wall. Often, we had all eight of the children wanting to play here at the same time though they still preferred to create separate small ‘homes’ in a ‘town’ rather than work together on a single, large structure like other groups have in the past.
The gravel/digging area, of course, was always popular though usually only for smaller groups at one time. It was interesting to note that, no matter what the activity was, these two were always choosing to play together. The oldest and the youngest in the group – nine years difference in age – but they played so well together all summer. Observing friendships like this is one of the things I like best about having a mixed age group.
We also started a collection of ‘nature stuff’ to use to make mandalas. Some of the children only liked the ‘collecting’ part, others preferred simply sorting the items that were collected on our walks. Only a few actually seemed to enjoy creating the mandalas though.
As usual, we went to parks almost every day to play tag or other group activities that require a big open space that we can’t do in my yard. I almost never take the children to playstructures but we do love the climbers they have at St John’s Park.
Whenever the basketball court was empty, the children always wanted to play line tag.
Some of the children tried cutting tree cookies. Even though we only used small branches this was a surprisingly difficult/time consuming activity. The children who were persistent enough to cut all the way through were very proud of their achievement – so was I 
Fantastic Summer!
