Mimi's Summer Day Camp begins! Day ONE -- Jungle Animals

Today began year 4 of Mimi's Summer Day Camp! John and I look forward to this every year.  We get to keep the girls for Tuesday and Thursday all summer long!

After Jeff dropped the girls off early this morning, we started with breakfast - Monkey Muffins! A banana muffin mix, some nilla wafers, candy eyes, chocolate icing and you're done!  Joss liked them better then KT (she's a hard sell!) but they were cute anyway.

Next the girls made a diorama with some little jungle animals and lots of natural material - gravel, big and little rocks, colored stones, sand, glass beads, moss, fake trees, and some homemade playdoh.

Most of these things I bought at the Dollar Store, so it was pretty inexpensive. They had several hours of fun adding to and taking away from this project - they even painted the playdoh some to make it look like rocks.  As a matter of fact, they both kept going back to this project most of the day - it's something that they can change and move around all day long.

 KT's

Joss's

We pulled out the story rocks next - pulling 5 stones out of the bag and making up a story to go with the stones that we chose.  This project was for KT's benefit, but I think Joss enjoyed listening - I started out to give her an idea and she took over and did the next round.  She did a great job! 

This was such a good exercise in imagination.  John even took a couple of rounds.  Joss enjoyed peeling the stickers off the rocks (ha!) and she identified the different animals and plants.  

Next -- off to the library! KT is an old hand at the Lakehills Library and enjoyed showing Joss where everything is.  We picked out books about jungle animals for each of the girls to bring home, worked on some puzzles, and played with some of the library stuffed toys.  Before we left, we went through and looked at the artwork that was being displayed in the library this week that was done by a homeschooling group.  Very interesting work.

Home after the library, we ate "anacondas" for lunch! Cheese hot dogs, filled with more cheese, wrapped in crescent roll dough, and the girls loved them! We dabbed on some ketchup for the tongue. Delicious. 

We had an hour of rest after lunch so Joss could have her nap, and KT just filled her time with creative play using my supply of yarn.  She amazes me.

Time to change and hit the pool! Joss isn't a fan of cold water, so it's an interesting time to get her into the pool - she's not afraid of the water as much as the cold, so she likes to sit on her floating alligator most of the time.  KT on the other hand jumps right in. We swam and enjoyed the pool for about an hour, then had some Popsicles!

There wasn't much time afterwards to do much more, somehow the time got away from us, so we have a few other jungle animal projects to keep for Thursday.  Hopefully we'll have more time then!