the celebrities hot action: Summer Scholar Sunday #4

Each week, I will feature an activity found in the Sun Scholars Summer Program and share some highlights from our Summer Scholar Families. We'd love to have you follow along. If you like what you see, and would like to learn more about my Sun Scholar Summer Program, click HERE.

Beach Bucket Cake

Subjects: Life Skills & Math

Time: 15+ mins

Supplies: Yellow Cake, Plastic Bucket (that holds 8-9 cups), Vanilla Pudding, Graham Crackers (1 cup crushed), Chocolate Shells, Plastic Shovel

this is from Week 6 - Beach Party of the Sun Scholar Summer Program

What a fun way to celebrate summer with your children! This cake in a bucket is SO easy to prepare, you can practically leave the kitchen to your child. This is sure to be a crowd pleaser!

Directions

1. Give your bucket and shovel a good wash before use.

2. Tear (or cut) the cake into 2” chunks. Place a layer of cake chunks in the bottom of the bucket.

3. Spread a layer of pudding over the cake chunks.

4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 until all the cake has been used, ending with a layer of pudding.

5. Sprinkle the crushed graham crackers over top to create the ‘sand’.

6. Add some chocolate shells (and perhaps a plastic crab?), your shovel, and dig in!

Tip: To crush your graham crackers, place them in a Ziploc bag and gently roll over them with a rolling pin until they look like sand.

What have the Summer Scholar Families been up to?

Amy

This week we chose Mice, Cookies & More. We love the Laura Numeroff books and read them over and over. So I knew the kids would really enjoy this week's activities.

The activities we did this week were:

Story Time: If You Give a Mouse a Cookie

Chocolate Chip Math

My Family Portrait Retell the Story

Crazy Crayons

Homemade Cookies & Milk

Chocolate Chip Hunt

Story Time: If You Give a Pig a Pancake, If You Give a Moose a Muffin & If You Take a Mouse to the Movies

Mouse Scavenger Hunt

Write Your Own Story

Color Changing Milk

This was such a fun week for us. The kids loved all the activites, especially those involving chocolate chips. The Crazy Crayons were a great way to use up all our broken crayons, which we always seem to have plenty of. We are going to use the rest to make the Colorful Crayon Sun Catchers today. A great rainy Sunday afternoon activity.

Hopefully the sun will come out to shine through them when we are done. Princess is a budding artist/author/teacher/doctor, it depends on the day, so she really enjoyed the Family Portrait and Write Your Own Story activities. The Scavenger Hunt and Homemade Cookies & Milk were a big hit with my younger boys. Smash & Dash easily found the items they were looking for thanks to the pictures on the cards.

Handsome thought the Color Changing Milk was amazing and they all did this project over and over. Good thing I had extra milk on hand!

I had a great time this week, all the activities were fun, but I loved the Retell the Story activities. My older two are advanced on their reading levels but really need to work on their comprehension. So, this will be a great activity to use year round. Thanks for the fun week!! We're hoping the weather cooperates for outdoors or beach week next time!!

Melissa

This week for our Summer Sun Scholar Program we used the Unit called Animal Fun!

Story time: We read a story called GORILLAS. It was a non-fiction book that gave us A LOT of details we did not know about these amazing primates! It surprised the children to know that Gorillas have thumbs and fingers just like we do. One exercise that I had them do was try to pick up a pencil and write without using their thumbs. It was FUN, hard, but FUN! They also banged on their chest like Gorilla's do to ward off other animals. They knew that they could never have a gorilla as a pet.

Lost Pet Poster: For this assignment they had to pick any animal that they imagined as their pet and create a poster to hang up as if the pet was lost. Molly picked a Cow and called it Molly. Zachary picked a Cat (our cat) and called him Jobbie (long O sound - our cat). They created the posters using large sheets of paper, although there are templates in the program to use. They came out cute! I put all the "info" on them once they did their animal pictures.

Learning about Animals: This week we studied Ants. While Ants are technically Insects, we used them for this exercise because they already had knowledge of the Ant. The described the ant by labeling the parts of the ant on a worksheet. We talked about Fire Ants also and they drew pictures of the fire ants and their nests.

Movie Party Planning: This was a fun activity especially since I had already planned on showing an outdoor movie on our big screen for Memorial Weekend. I gave the kids a few movies to pick from as our "Now Showing" movie. They picked Toy Story. We talked about how many children will be inviited and how many bags of popcorn we should make up for them. Zachary suggested we also have juice boxes available. We made a shopping list of what is needed and we will go on Saturday morning to get all our supplies. (look for pictures to come on this Sunday Morning on our blog)

Additional Story Times: In addition to the Gorillas we read inthe beginning of the week, I pulled out some simple readers by Scholastic for Zachary to read TO US and show us the pictures. He read several books on animals to us.

This unit was fun and I can see us doing the Movie Party Time assignment over and over several times this Summer!

Heather

Can you believe, I get a note from Heather telling me she had her baby girl last Tuesday, got home Friday, and was hoping to have something to send to us this week? Oh my goodness..... ha ha. Heather, I just want to say CONGRATULATIONS to you and your family on your new addition! Every mom out there will completely understand if you are dedicating your time to your new baby and your family's needs before sending us updates. We hope you and baby are happy and healthy!

Emily

Homemade Cookies & Milk. We started the week out by my daughter and son making cookies for the family. It was a so sweet to see them work together and it was the first time they had cooked all by themselves, I was in the kitchen cooking dinner. I was able to help out a little, like what a tsp was.

Chocolate Chip Math. The kids had fun counting the chocolate chips and eating them. We got a bunch of different kinds, so the kids could add the dark and milk together. We did this a couple of times this week. When the kids were getting bored and needed a treat we would count again.

My Family Portrait. It was fun to see how the kids see our family. Each picture was so different and loved how they named all the people. In one picture, I was the smallest person. I guess size is in the eye of the beholder.

Learning about Mice. I really enjoyed the fact sheet that was included in the printables. I learned stuff I never knew and my sister and kids thought I made it up.

Chocolate Chip Hunt. This was an afternoon treat, and it was super fun. When my kids had made the cookies they got to choose what to put in them. So they choose three different flavors. It made fun tasting cookies, but the hunt was more exciting then it would have been if I had made the cookies. :)

Color Changing Milk. My kids really loved this and they asked to do it again. I was surprised by the reaction of the soup and colors but it was really fun.

This week was fun. We read “If you Give a Mouse a Cookie” and also “If you give a Moose a Muffin.” We love the moose one more and then the kids wanted to do some of the activities that were in the book. So we had to have a puppet show.