Ya Know It's Summer When...

...creativity runs wild EVERYWHERE in our home!

     We finished our school year on Friday, and our activities so far make it very evident to me that we are on summer break!

Musical Creativity

     On Friday evening, Brittany and her piano teacher, along with two other piano students and their family, came over for dinner and a piano recital!

     Brittany, Aurora, and Ashley all played songs that they've been practicing and working on during the last several months.  Their teacher allowed them to use their music, and I think since they were fairly nervous, they were thankful for that!

     Brittany played a three-movement sonatina, another couple of classical songs, and an ol' time jazz song. 

     While I did sporadically teach her piano four years ago for about 12 months, I wasn't consistent with her lessons, and when she began playing the violin, I decided to have her stop playing piano with me and instead, focus on the violin.  This helped her learn the names of the notes better.  Well, at least the treble clef!  She's still working on the bass clef.  After a 3-year hiatus, she is now back to the piano and is really enjoying it a lot!

     Dinner and a show!  This was a nice way to spend the evening with friends.

     Wish I could show you an actual photo of Brittany playing on the piano.  That particular SD card is currently MIA.  Oops!

     This morning, after Brittany had finished her morning chores, she not only composed her own teeny-tiny sonatina on the piano, but she found a sheet-music-creating website on the internet and printed out for me the sheet music for her song!  I was impressed.  How cool is that! 

     Kelsi, on the other hand, used most of today to find musical scores from one particular movie and write down the music so she can easily play it from sheet music.  She literally worked on this and played her violin with the music most of the day.  Whoa.  I wonder if her arms and shoulders are going to be tired tomorrow?

---

Computer Creativity

     Brittany spent about an hour with me today, teaching me how to develop a private forum for my own website here.  If we are able to finish the details on it in another week or so, you'll see this as an option here on Joy In Our Journey.com!  Wow - it's amazing to see my girls learn such neat techniques and skills as developing websites and doing graphic design. 

     If you are on the main page of my blog here, you'll notice the shaded green buttons with the pink flowers, saying "About Julieanne" or "Subscribe to My Blog", etc.  My oldest, Kelsi, designed those for my website here.  Those girls are learning so much these days!

---

Photography and Video Creativity

     The girls have been taking photos like crazy! 

     It used to take about a year to need to replace the camera batteries, but we have now learned that we need to replace the batteries around every 1,000 photos or so.  And the way the girls take photos these days?  It doesn't take them very long to get that many photos onto the camera card!

     Kelsi's trying to come up with solid, excellent photos to submit to the fair for their Photography 4-H Club.  Yes, they have lots of photos to go through in the next month or so, to narrow down what they will enter in the fair.

     Brittany's also been making stopmotion videos with the camera, by taking tens or hundreds of photo clips and combining them into a video.  Whew!  That takes patience!

---

     Brittany has also been using her video camera (Kodak PlaySport - 2nd Generation) to make little videos with her American Girl doll and other dolls.  She has made miniature accessories to go with the dolls, and they are very realistic!  Laptop computers, food made from Sculpey clay, furniture, you name it, and Brittany's made it for her vidoes.

---

Active Creativity

     Brittany wants our family to be doing more together in the evenings this summer, so she spent nearly two hours on Sunday afternoon and evening designing a backyard carnival for our family to enjoy!

     She made a schedule for us, and she asked us to write down the specific foods we'd like to eat that evening.  We could choose from Trader Joe's Uncured nitrate/nitrite-free hot dogs, homemade coleslaw, almonds, and a few other things I'm forgetting, as well as homemade smoothies and snow cones for dessert.

     I chose not to slow down the evening by taking photos of the carnival games she designed, but we enjoyed...

...a toss game using different sizes of buckets and containers and hard foil balls to toss

...Frisbee throw - she set up cans and bottles on the bed of the pickup truck, and we had to stand back and throw the frisbee to knock down as many items as we could

...three-legged race - it was Dad and Brittany against Kelsi and me.  My team won, even after Elmer cheated by attempting to pick up Brittany and carry her to the finish line!  (He's quite competitive when it comes to games of any kind!)

...octopus tag - "it" is an octopus with waving arms, and the octopus states what the other people need to do while crossing from one end of the yard to the other, while trying to avoid being tagged.  We laughed so hard on this game!  We hopped across the yard, pretended to be swimming, ran backwards, and lots of other ideas that we came up with.

...Mine Field - Brittany had arranged a layout on the grass.  Dividing up into teams of two, one team member on each team was blindfolded while the other team member was trying to beat the clock while verbally describing how the blindfolded person should be walking across the yard to avoid hitting any "mines."  Oh, my.  My team would have won (Brittany and I), but Elmer wanted to try it ONE MORE TIME - and he came up with a great technique that helped his team get their time down to 28 seconds...or something brilliant like that. 

     It's been a busy four days since we finished our school year.  And I haven't even mentioned the "spur of the moment" sleepover the girls enjoyed with Ashley and Aurora at our home after the music recital, nor the Hawaiian luau we attended for Elmer's uncle's 79th birthday on Saturday. 

     And I know that it's summer because today, I was able to clean and sort and organize a couple of areas of our home that really needed some TLC! 

     What different types of activities do you notice your children enjoy doing at home during their free time in the summer?

---

---