August 2017

What’s New?

Welcome Friends! The summer is more than half over. We have kept up being busy as the constant rain has finally let up a little bit. The children have continued to work on their summer activity list, and accomplished many new things. In our last newsletter – which came out the week of the 4th of July – we continued with creating fireworks in jar. Many other activities have followed. We had a day of ice cream art and ice cream for snack. Another day was spent making lemonade and selling it at the kids’ lemonade table. Several days the kids have ridden their bikes and scooters to the park. On one particularly rainy day the children spent the morning creating an obstacle course, and later a pillow/blanket fort. The younger boys in particular enjoyed crawling inside the fort with the girls. They made orange juice popsicles. They built their own grocery store; reinforcing money math skills. Other games that we’ve enjoyed include Skip Bo, Pen the Pig, Trouble, Mickey Mouse Yahtzee, Guess Who, and Go Fish. This week we’ve been back into painting with splatter art and puffy shaving cream paint. We also finished up a week of Hollywood activities in which the girls and toddlers put on a rock/dance concert, made microphones, posted an article about being Hollywood stars, and made their own Hollywood star block. Recently the girls made it a point to cross off several activities in one afternoon; just to see how many they could complete. These included Simon Says, playing catch with a Frisbee, I Spy, and finally Charades. But we aren’t finished yet! The girls and toddlers have been memorizing the song they learned at vbs “You Can Trust God”, we’ve made gas science with fizzy balloons, made wind chimes, and used homemade playdough to make mini volcanoes. This last week we finally got to go blackberry picking to add fresh fruit to our menus. They can’t wait to bake a blackberry cake of their own. Just don’t hold your breath because we still have over 40 options on our long summer list to choose from as we wind down the last three weeks of summer.

Our drowned garden never recovered, and it’s been a bit of a struggle fixing up the playground after all the rain. We’ve mowed again, and planted new grass seed. The mud has been washed off the outside toys, and they’ve been stored in the green house. I’ve purchased a large blow up pool to move around the yard. It’s been filled with several toddler toys so they can play safely without being covered in mud. The best news is that our numbers our growing again, as we now have a 2 ½ year old enjoying spending time with us also. We welcome him and his family joyfully. The next big thing our older kids are looking forward to is the Child Evangelism Day Camp that is running next week.

Shout-outs!

To my mom Cathy Madden for the donated sheets for our playpens and nap mats.

Important Information

Monday August 28th, 2017 is the first day of school for Susquehanna Community.

Happy Birthday’s

None this month

Expectations

I plan to accomplish the first of my four trainings this month – Making Friends, Building Social Skills.