Happy first day of Summer Vacation everyone!! I'm so excited to be starting this blog as summer begins. I have a lot of really fun things planned for my kids and I can't wait to hear about what everyone else is doing too. We can all share ideas and make this the best summer ever for our kids.
I have 2 projects today that I think your kids will love. We're going to be making Summer Jars and Summer Journals. They're both really simple to make, and all 4 of my kids love them. That right there is HUGE in our world!! We've been making them for the past few summers, and it's really fun to look back on them during the rest of the year.
I have 2 projects today that I think your kids will love. We're going to be making Summer Jars and Summer Journals. They're both really simple to make, and all 4 of my kids love them. That right there is HUGE in our world!! We've been making them for the past few summers, and it's really fun to look back on them during the rest of the year.
A summer jar is like a memory jar full of little things from the summer. If we go to a new restaurant we'll grab a business card or a napkin and throw it in the jar. When we go to an amusement park or a movie, we'll save a ticket stub for the jar. The kids save all kinds of things for the jars and they get pretty creative as the summer goes on. From pretty beach rocks to wrist bands from water parks to carnival game tickets, if it's something that reminds of you of something that we did over the summer, we save it for the jar. We've been doing this for the past 7 or 8 summers and we love opening the jars up from time to time to see what's inside.
This year's jar is just a plastic container that I got at Walmart. I used to use pretty glass ones, but ever since the kids started wanting to open them on their own I switched to plastic.
The sticker peeled right off of the container and I just printed out a label that I made in Photoshop and then wrapped some twine around the top of the jar!! And there you have it... a professional summer jar!! One year I had all of the kids write messages and picture on labels and then they stuck them all over the jar. That's an easy way to make it into more of a project to keep them busy too!!
So far we don't have anything in it, but I know it's going to fill up quickly! They're always so excited all summer long to fill it up.
We've also been making Summer Journals for the past few summers as well. I just buy inexpensive composition books and we cover them in construction paper and decorate the covers. These are the books that I bought this year. I think they were about .75c at Walmart!
They spent awhile decorating the covers and we even cut Cole's down to make it pocket sized. I almost ruined my counters and came this.close to cutting my finger off, so I would recommend not letting the kids do that part!!
They turned out pretty cute.
Then they spent a long time writing in them and decorating the pages and getting them all ready for summer memories.
Obviously the amount of writing that they do in their journals depends on their age. Kendall (who's 11) keeps track of what we do every day and the funny things that happen. Kelsey (who's 5) usually writes a few words and mostly just draws cute pictures of things that we do. I love looking at all of them at the end of the summer.
I hope you and your kids have fun making these too!!
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