Camp Mom: Day 11

[My son's summer-camp this year is a do-it-yourself affair with a couple of friends from his special-ed class hanging out at our house. I'll post a run-down of our activities daily, for others who may be looking for ideas. If you're doing something fun, too, please share it in the comments.]

We started out the day playing with paint, but not in the way I expected. My plan was to have them do a craft that involved blowing paint with straws, but at the last minute, with a vague vision of what my son could do with forced air and splashy paint, I set out some foamy shapes from a set of Pattern Blocks to use as stampers.

Turns out, that's all they wanted to use, and as smearers more than stampers. The straws stood in mostly as paintbrushes; fingers got in the act, too. It was messy but attention catching and time-consuming -- a success, I think, although my son threw both his paintings away before I got a good look at them. His friends' work (pictured) is still drying in my kitchen.

After that, it was homework time, then lunchtime, then game time with a rousing round of Bingo. The kids split up to play on computers, watch TV, and put together a jigsaw puzzle, then gathered back in the kitchen to write in their journals.

To kill a little time at the end of the afternoon, I pulled out a book called Articulation & Language Activities that has a speech activity for every day of the year. We went through today's exercise, and the kids liked it so much I went through a number of days already passed. This will definitely become part of our daily routine, if only to get a return on my investment in all these speech materials!

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