A Few Ideas for Driveway Fun

I'm a New England girl.
We have beautiful sunny days all summer and I have to force myself out of the house to enjoy it but as soon as it hits below 80 you can't keep me in!

So the other night I was trying to find things that would keep the kids entertained outside as dinner time approached and they started to get wrestless.

Enter sidewalk chalk.

I've been working on letter sounds with CJ, letter recognition of lower case letters, and recognizing numbers and decided to make it a "teachable moment".

Though the excitement wore off quicker than I had hoped, I had him on the hook for a little while and used that time to get him moving and see what he knows.

I wrote the letters of the alphabet in a circle and called them out for him to run to and scribble over once he got them right. Next time I'll be more purposeful about mixing up the letter order (I didn't think of that until half way through) and I will only use lower case letters since he's got the upper case down pat.)

We did the same with numbers and now that he seems to be figuring out 6 and 9 we I'll go up to 20 and not just 10.

A friend shared the idea of giving drawing prompts which she found on, where else?, Pinterest and that actually proved to be more fruitful than I expected. It may not look like much but getting CJ to draw without help is incredibly difficult. This time I drew a house and asked him to fill it. He promptly asked me to draw a garage on it. What a guy.

I didn't forget Miss Mak. She is starting to recognize her name when she sees it written so I wrote all of our family member's names on the ground to see if she could pick hers out.

I also gave her gross motor skills a workout by drawing a path on the driveway to see if she could maneuver her tricycle around. I was pleasantly surprised that she managed to stay on it for the most part. I'll make it more challenging next time.

CJ came up with a game of his own too. It's his own version of basketball but he hasvarious strictly adhered to rules and requires that you dribble the ball for at least 5 minutes before you can shoot. Rules or not, this keeps him happy for a while.

Bean, of course, crawls all over the place and, in a very cat-like manner, will occasionally stop and look pretty just for me.

So whether you let them run amok or try to make it a learning experience, the driveway can be lots of fun with just a few basics. 

Happy Weekend!