Summer Fun List

It is hard to believe yesterday was already the first day of fall. Oh, glorious fall! We are so glad you are here! Before we dive head first into our favorite season, we have a few end of summer highlights to share. One highlight was our summer fun list. Boy, did we have fun this summer!

We sat down with Isla at the beginning of the summer and brainstormed all sorts of fun summer outings and activities we wanted to enjoy during the season. We knew we wanted to display our list, and thought it might be fun to use the Thankfulness Tree we created last fall. This lead us to dreaming up different ways to utilize Isla’s Thankfulness Tree year-round. We are so excited to share more as the tree evolves throughout the seasons! We’ll be sure to outline all the steps we took, in case your family would like to do something similar.

Making a Summer Fun List Tree:

So, after we created our summer fun list, we made a basic tree out of butcher paper and marker. We then taped the tree to Isla’s door, since it is a spot we see often. Next, Isla applied a simple watercolor wash using varying shades of green to a few sheets of watercolor paper. When the paintings dried, we ran them through my silhouette machine to cut out the simple leaf shapes. You could easily hand cut the leaves as well. Next, we wrote down one item from our summer fun list onto each leaf. We are very fortunate to have a Daddo with some sweet hand-lettering and doodling skills, so he took over during this step. The leaves certainly don’t need to be this fancy. Had I written them, they would not have looked this good! Lastly, we put the leaves up on the tree.We didn’t end up doing everything we had dreamed up for this summer, but we did enjoy most of the outings and activities from our list.

The leaves are such a fun visual reminders of the time we spent together this summer, and we will keep them up until October, when we begin transitioning back to thankfulness leaves. I’m actually really excited about that transition because we plan to incorporate a daily reflection activity as we swap out our summer fun leaves with our fall thankfulness leaves. We’ll share all about it next month!