Summer Fun

It’s my turn in a couple of weeks to plan a read-aloud at the homeless shelter.  As I was reading my friend Gary’s post yesterday about his kindergarten class’s top 10 picks for this school year, I suddenly decided to make “summer fun” the theme.

There are so many things these kids have never experienced.  Most of them have probably never been to the beach or seen the ocean.  They probably don’t get a lot of chances to just play in water of any kind.

So my plan is to ask the powers that be at the shelter if we can meet in the back yard and have the children wear either bathing suits or shorts and shirts that can get wet.  

We can read books like the #1 pick of Gary’s class, Otto Goes to the Beach by Todd Parr.  If you go to Gary’s post, you will notice that two of his authors left comments.  How cool is that?!

For activities, I thought we would play with water balloons, tossing them back and forth until someone fails to catch the balloon.  I also have 30 pounds of very white sand left over from making yoga sand bags.  I’m hoping we can add water and let them make sand castles on paper plates.  Do  you think this will work?

As a snack, we could have grilled hotdogs with lots of ketchup and lemonade.  What could be more summertime than that?  Maybe some slices of watermelon as well.

Each child will take home a book of his/her choice (as they do each week) and a jumbo piece of sidewalk chalk.

The way I see it is if you can’t go to the beach, you can at least bring the beach to you!