The Brandleys: Summer Games

In the spring I had the idea to have a fun "Summer Games" day over the summer break. Seeing as we only have just over a week before school starts, it was about time that we did it! I have been thinking about different things we could do, but hadn't really made a plan for the day. So this morning Louis and I sat down and came up with a list of games we could do with the kids, then we went around the house gathering the things we'd need for the day.

We let the girls pick which parent they wanted on their team. Mary picked me, and Avery picked Louis. Our first game was the football throw! We hung a hula hoop on a branch of a tree and we had three throws of the football each. Each time you made it through you earned your team 5 points.

For our second game we had 6 cups and some plastic golf balls. Each person got 6 balls and got to try and get their balls into the cups. For each ball they got in they got 5 points for their team.

Our next game was one of my favorites of the day. We had a big cooler full of water and two ice cream buckets sitting about 20 feet away from the cooler. As a team we had to take turns filling a cup with water and transferring it to the bucket. Avery and Mary took the first run down to the ice cream buckets and Mary put her cup of water into Avery and Louis' bucket! We cleared up her confusion and started again!

Thinking back about it, this next game actually might have been my favorite! It was also Avery's favorite. Sack races! The kids had never done it before and they did great! Ethan even tried it out. Which was adorable.

Then it was onto 3-legged races! We talked out our strategy and then hobbled along around the trees!

Mary and I won, but Louis may have let us.

Ethan wanted a turn after our race was done

After the three-legged race it was onto an obstacle course! What we did was we timed how long it took for one team member to go through the course, slap their partners hand, and for their partner to go through the course. Step one was to walk with a ball in between your legs making your way over to a piece of PVC pipe. Once you got to the pipe, you dropped the ball and hopped back and forth over the pipe. Then you walked across a balance beam, did 5 jumping jacks, and ran around both trees. After that you went and grabbed a balloon from your partner and had to pop it either by stepping/jumping on it or by sitting on it. The obstacle course was also a lot of fun and we all enjoyed it.

Our next game was hopscotch. During this game I learned something new about Louis, in elementary school (1st grade I think) Louis won a hopscotch competition! What we did for this game was throw a Frisbee onto the hopscotch and wherever it landed we had to skip that square. If you fell off you didn't get your 5 points, but if you stayed on until the end you earned 5 points for your team.

We were almost done with the day, our next competition was a spoon race.

Mary surprised us by doing really well with this one!

This next one was Louis' favorite of the day, cup flipping. He liked it because the kids had to keep trying until they succeeded, not just throwing something and either they got it or they didn't. We each had an upside down cup hanging off the table a bit, we had to flip it with one hand until it landed up right side up.