Play It Smart Inspiration & Round Up

Play It Smart has been a great week of fun learning inspiration!

Here's a recap of the week:

Play It Smart with Chalk : Six Simple Ideas

Dry Ice Bubble Experiment with A Lemon Squeezy Home (free science journal printable!)

Play It Smart and Have a Ball - more fun learning games

Ignite a love of creative writing in your kids with Sew A Straight Line















I rounded up some more ideas from pinterest and from you (thank you for your comments!) that I want to try this summer as well:

Sources top to bottom, left to right:
Erase Sight Words game - Mom to 2 Posh Little Divas
Bathtub Letter Fishing (do this in a kiddie pool instead!) - Pigtails and Tutus
Dice Math (great for travel) - Spoonful.com
Balloon Learning Games (would be great for the sight words ball too) - Inner Child Learning
Sight Words Hot Wheels Parking Lot - New Mommy Rant 
Sight Words Hop Scotch - Mom to 2 Posh Little Divas
Marble Races (time different sized marbles, make graphs, discuss basic physics) - Home Spun Threads
Popsicle Stick Chain Reaction (so cool!) - Frugal Fun 4 Boys
Roll a Six and Splash! - Toddler Approved
Chalk Counting - Buzzmills
Lego Building Challenge (Legos are always math and learning activities in my eyes)- Lego Quest

Need more ideas?

I Am Momma Hear Me Roar has an ongoing Mommy School Series. Go HERE for a list of those posts.

Another great blog is Kids Activities Blog...go HERE. (They have great Lego ideas as well :)).

And one more idea that a reader shared...

Jennifer said that her kids pick a topic to focus on for the summer and then they learn all about that topic. This summer they are doing the solar system. I might totally be head over heels for that idea.

I hope this series has inspired you to make learning fun and play smart!

You can see my Child's Play Pinterest Board  anytime for more kid fun inspiration (some learning some not).

Please keep adding links and comments to this post if you wish. I would love the comments section to be a source of inspiration as well.

Have a smart happy summer!

Play It Smart with Sew A Straight Line

Today, my guest is Sabra from Sew a Straight Line!

If you've been following Project: Sewn you'll know she sewed up THIS awesome number and one look at her blog will show you amazing thing and after amazing thing she's sewn. Her blog is replete with sewing techniques, see HERE for a huge list of great technique tutorials (be sure to pick up your jaw after clicking over). But now onto, kid activities!

She is an awesome mom to four adorable kids, three boys and a girl. She is also the other half of the amazing Science Camp blogger mom duo. She and Christie take their kids on a camping trip full of science, learning and fun every summer!

You can check out her detailed recaps of the science camps they've done the last couple years:

HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE. (they are similar but not identical to Christie's)
She also does fun science activities throughout the year. Check out this awesome mad scientist birthday party HERE, and how she turned making meringues into a lesson about tasty polymers HERE. So smart.

Plus, she is just a really cool mom who sews up fun things like THIS Nacho Libre Luchador costumer and THESE cool costume accessories. She is the queen of making awesome costumes for her kids.

I am super excited for what she has in store today. She is using toys and imaginary alter egos to inspire stories, and in turn, use those stories to encourage more imaginative play.

Cute stuff right? Go HERE to check it out!

Play it Smart and Have a Ball

Today for Play It Smart, I kind of have a mix and match of ideas, but let's start with this...

Sight words ball:

I just took a $1.50 ball from Walmart, wrote sight words all over it...

And let my boys toss it back and forth. When they caught it, they had to say the first sight word they saw (or the first one they recognized in the case of my four year old who is still learning them).

This next one is also geared toward the kindergarten age range, but is fun for any age.

It's catch again but with a rhyming twist:

Simply toss a ball and see how many rhymes you can come up with. Of course, this yielded all sorts of nonsense words and laughter, but it there was good rhyming happening too.

That is... when a little ball thief wasn't trying to take advantage of missed catches. :)

*Note: We did these activities last weekend. I have since played the ball games again with Reid and more learning definitely happened when I played with him. ;) Probably because he took it more seriously with me.

Eventually, we ditched the balls and played a version of Red Light, Green Light or...

Odd and Even:

Instead of red and green we used odd numbers for stop and even numbers for go. It worked great. They picked up the change in rules without missing a beat. It also got violently competitive though, so maybe this isn't one for siblings? ha. :)

I think it would be great to do nouns and adjectives this way for older kids. Oh, or vowels and verbs!

My last idea is for the pool. How about a little...

Diving Ring Math:

We are lucky enough to have a community pool to go to this summer (that opens next week - too excited over here!). So I bought some dive toys to use. The rings are from Walmart and the squids are from The Dollar Tree.

I am sure there are more clever things you could come up with (throw out a bunch of numbers and have them retrieve only even numbers for example...), but I simply encased a worksheet in a plastic, zip top bag, you may need to trim it down to make it fit, and assigned the answers to the dive toys.

You can use masking tape or washi tape and a permanent marker. That makes for a lot of waste though.

So, I tried using a dry erase marker. If your child can avoid touching the writing, it works really great! Even after taking a dunk in water, as long as the numbers weren't touched, they remained.

You can achieve this same effect with the dive rings by looping some packing tape around a ring. Write the answers on the packing tape in dry erase marker and then erase it as needed.

Or loop the washi tape around the rings. Most preschool worksheets have the same answers over and over again, so you won't have to change out the tape that often.

Then, have them dive for all the toys and then match the answers to the plastic protected work sheet problems. Easy! :)

Oh and I didn't try it yet, but later found this dry erase crayon. I bet it would be a little more touch resistant and definitely water resistant.

That's all for today. Come back tomorrow for a great guest and super fun creative writing exercise (I can't wait!).

And as always. Please comment and/or leave links if you have some great fun learning games to share!

Play it Smart with A Lemon Squeezy Home

I am super excited to have Christie from A Lemon Squeezy Home with us today!

Christie is a mom of three beautiful children and has another little girl on the way in just a matter of weeks!

Although she mostly sews on her blog (check out this bike basket tutorial or this diy stuffed animal net), she also shares some great stuff that she does with her kids.

My favorite thing that she does is science camp. She and the awesome Sabra (who will be my guest on Thursday - yay!) take their kids away for a week filled with science experiments, learning moments and camping fun every summer. Talk about great moms. See HERE, and HERE for all their science camp adventures. Be sure to scroll down, because there is a series of posts for each of those links.

She also hosted a cousins sewing camp (I mean come on - so cool), see HERE for that. And a Mad Scientist Gift idea. What boy wouldn't love THIS.

She makes cool things for and with her kids.
Crayon Art she pinned. Homemade butter. A bunk bed fort. A week of fall kid crafts.

And the fun parties she throws? She's done a Ninjago party, a butterfly party, Star Wars party...just to name a few. They are all AMAZING and totally geared toward kids and what they'll like. Go HERE and scroll down to see them all.

She is a great mom, full of wisdom and always an inspiration to me.

Today, she is talking about the states of matter with this really fun science experiment.

I can't wait to do this with my boys!

Go HERE to see the experiment.