Busy Playing and Learning: Fun at the Beach

Today's way to beat the heat was a trip to the beach.  If you aren't lucky enough to live in a coastal state, you could always visit a pond, lake, or river nearby.  With temperatures upwards of 90', the ocean breeze and water was a perfect way to spend the day.

Most of the times at the beach, we dig holes and build sand castles.  Today, we skipped the sand castle building and instead drew pictures and practiced writing.

You can use your finger:

Or be creative with a sea gull feather (it was the first time my nephew was ever excited to write- I foreshadow tons of feather pens making their way into my sister's house):

You can use your hand as an "eraser":

We skipped the name books today and went straight for the sand:

I drew the ABC's and had the kids fill the letters in with rocks (we didn't get to the end before the tide rolled in):

Nathaniel was very excited to have lots of space to draw his room filled with 1,000,000 video games and lots of prizes and he was even more excited to explain it to me- in fact, he told me it was the most fun he's had at the beach all year.

You can play dress up at the beach too ;)

And of course, there was lots of swimming and wave hopping:

Something else I thought of (on the way home of course) was to use rocks to create life sized dot to dots for your child to trace - how fun would that be?