Cut an orange in half and add eyes to your half.  The eyes can be drawn on or glued on.  Then, use pipe cleaners as the tentacles by sticking them into the flat side of your orange half.

Cut some sponges into about 1 inch wide strips.  Combine about 8 of the strips (in different colors to add pizzazz), and tie them together by adding a rubber band to your batch at their centers.  Next, dunk your sponge bomb in water and throw at one of your unsuspecting children.  It's better than a water balloon, AND it's reusable.  

Color a paper plate yellow, add eyes and a smile.  Then, cut orange and yellow construction paper into triangles to add around your plate as the sun's rays.

You want equal parts tempura paint and water, so you may need to mix it up before putting everything into your water gun.  Once ready, load the gun, hand it to your kids and let them start spraying colors a their paper.  Multiple guns, multiple colors create quite a painting!  Just make sure everyone wears clothing that can have paint sprayed on it...and do the activity outside.  It can get messy.  The paint, if using tempura, is washable.

When you can't go fly a kite outside, making this craft comes in a close 2nd.  Cut out your kite shape and decorate it however you wish.  Then add your kite string coming out of the bottom end.

Cut a paper plate in half. Color the plate part red and the rim green.  Then, add some black dots sporadically throughout the red portion as seeds, and you have a watermelon slice.

Trace your kid's hand on a pink piece of paper, cut the tracing out.  Add pink clothespins (or in lieu of pink, use red ones like we had to) to create the legs and neck/beak of a flamingo!

Take the beverage of your choice (aka your kid's favorite) and pour it into Popsicle mold.  The next day, you'll have Popsicles the kids will really enjoy!

Paint the kids' hands red.  Have them stamp a piece of paper with two hand prints, in opposite directions with palms overlapping.  Add googly eyes for eyeballs.  Then, add a line of glue across the bottom and sprinkle sand over top the glue OR crush some Cheerios to make fake sand and sprinkle that over your glue.  Your "crab" will look like it's walking around on a beach.

Just in case it hasn't already been hard enough for your kid to keep the words "pine cone" and "pineapple" straight...throw this summertime craft their way, and they may never be able to separate the two.  Either way, you'll end up with a cool craft that makes a pine cone look like a pineapple by painting the edges of the pine cone yellow and putting some greenery (made from green construction paper) at the top.

​

​

​