Celebrate summer as a family with these summer solstice activities for children.
Celebrate summer as a family with these summer solstice activities for children.
Colour, paint or doodle this sunshine mandala summer solstice printable and celebrate the turning of the year!
Here’s a sunshine play dough recipe idea that’s great for sensory play for summer and the solstice.
Click play on the video above to see our playdough masterclass.
This video gives you everything you ever wanted to know about play dough: how to make homemade playdough with quick and easy recipes; the benefits of playdough for children; and lots of sensory play activities using play dough including playdough math activities, playdough literacy activities, and playdough fine motor skills activities.
Plus find out how to get printable playdough recipe cards and printable play mats. It’s an excellent beginners guide to play dough!
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We never need much excuse to bring out the play dough and as we’re learning all about the solstice this week we thought we’d make some play dough sunshines. To start, we mixed up a batch of our favourite easy play dough recipe and added in some yellow food colouring to make it nice and sunny.
Then we raided the craft shelves to find some yellow, orange and gold materials. We found drinking straws, buttons, foil shapes and sequins, craft sticks and some glittery paper strips.
Play dough is a fantastic sensory material for children to explore and it’s always great to add in some extra textures when you play.
To get some inspiration we did a Google Image search for ‘sun art’ and the children enjoyed clicking through to see the sun pictures and got some ideas for how they might make a sun with their play dough. They especially liked the mosaic artwork – an idea for a future art technique to explore!
Then the children set to work. One of the best things about play dough is that everyone can use it, from babies to grandparents! It’s an open-ended material and so versatile, and today the children all had clear ideas about how they were going to use the materials on offer to make their sun.
Every sunshine turned out different… and glorious!
You know when your children make something and there is a buzz in the air because they’re so pleased with what they’ve made? This sun weaving which we made as a solstice crafts was one of those moments. The children loved the whole process and the end result. Here’s how we made them.
Flower crowns are a lovely nature craft and forest school activity. You can use them on a nature walk to explore the plants you discover along the way and tell the story of your walk through the treasures you find. Flower crowns also make a lovely spring flower craft and a great headdress for a Beltane celebration.
There’s going to be an eclipse of the sun on August 21st, which will be visible in the USA. It’s a fantastic opportunity for children to experience the relationship between Earth, our moon and the sun, and see and feel how they interact together.