Hover craft, Friendship bracelets, Paint War... another fantastic day!

My boys started the day by watching the movies they got from the library yesterday.  They watched The Sandlot: Heading Home and How to Train Your Dragon.  I was a bit annoyed with all the movie watching, but I just kept reminding myself that it's summer.  A time to be a bit more lazy and relaxed, a time to enjoy life and have fun.

We were planning to make balloon and cd hover crafts today so we started by super gluing our pop top bottle caps onto the CD and then we set them aside to dry.

While waiting for the CD/ glue to dry we started on our art projects.  We used clear glue and dripped fun designs onto watercolor paper.  While the glue was still wet we covered it with salt.  Just using ordinary table salt-- we then set that aside to dry.  I have to say, even with just the salt on the glue my boys already liked this project.  The salt made the glue look all shiny and like giant crystals.  We couldn't wait for it to dry enough to use the watercolors with it!

We read The Doorbell Rang and I gave each of the boys counters.  We stopped before turning each page so they could figure out how many cookies everyone would get for some simple division practice.

We then went on to read The Giving Tree and Carl's Summer Vacation.

The boys reminded me that I had promised to show them how to make friendship bracelets using embroidery floss.  I made these as a kid and I needed a quick refresher before showing them so I looked it up and found an easy to follow set of instructions on Ehow.

This was a bit challenging for them but with some help from me untying knots and setting them straight once again they were soon going quite well and figuring out how to fix any mistakes they were making.  I hope they don't get frustrated or discouraged and quit before they're done since they are looking very nice.  I keep reminding them it can take days or weeks to get just one bracelet done.

The glue projects were mostly dry so we started painting our salt painting with watercolors.  Its' neat to watch the colors spread throughout the salt as you touch your brush to them.

The hover crafts were a huge hit!

We never did feel like the super glue totally dried so I brought down my hot glue gun and re-glued the pop top onto the CD.

• Keeping the pop top closed we then blew up a balloon and stretched the end over the bottle top.  
• Once in place you pull up on the pop top and as the air leaks out it pushes the CD up off the table a bit and makes it hover and move around.  

They excited yelled out about air pressure and force and talked about how it works.  They kept blowing the balloons back up and watching them hover around the living room rug (on the hardwood floor).  They talked about taking them outside and running a science experiment to see if the crafts would hover over the water (and they did!! For the most part anyway; as the balloon got to the end of the air they started to sink).

I had told the boys I'd let them have a paint fight today, just for fun, and I was hoping to finish by the time our company showed up.  I was in the midst of filling up the paint containers with very watered down tempera paint when our company showed up.  They joined right in.

We did have a few rules though--- stay in the yard away from the house, cars and furniture, stay away from the adults (who were still in their clothes and not in their bathing suits), and keep paint away from each other's faces and eyes.

They had a ball!

Alec did get paint in his eye and face a few times so he cried a bit and had to jump in the lake a few times to clean off, but other than that the kids all had lots of fun.  Their clothes and skin were quite colorful by the time we ran out of paint!