Summer 2021: Enchanted Forest Week

 Week 2 of 8: Enchanted Forest Week

Laumeier Sculpture Park

As I write this, I am nearing the end of my summer and "Enchanted Forest Week" is definitely one of my very favorite weeks we did. It was simply a wonderful theme with tons of options for destinations and activities. Much like Rainbow Week, I think this is a theme I could revisit again and again with whole new itineraries. 

Destinations

While Laumeier Sculpture Park might not immediately come to mind for an Enchanted Forest Week, it really was an amazing fit for the theme. There is a gorgeous area set back into the woods with some wooden structures where the kids played for HOURS. It set the scene for pretend play, running, and fun nature lessons. Once we were ready to move on from that area, we explored the sculptures in the fields and discovered some great forest-related pieces like a shimmering tree and giant deer.

A more obvious (but still super fun) destination was Lone Elk Park where we ate lunch in a forest setting and then drove through the park looking for animals.

We also visited two playgrounds. Sugar Creek Park is very small and probably geared more towards younger children, but it was very close to home and the kids still had tons of fun. The equipment has a woodsy theme and provided a lot of

opportunities for role playing, climbing, and meeting new

friends. We also checked out Veteran's Tribute Park which has a stream-like water feature and a tree-height structure that gives you a birds' eye view of the woods and park.

Alternate Destinations: The Butterfly House, The Missouri Botanical Gardens, or Powder Valley would also be a great fit for this theme!

Crafts & Activities

We had so many great things to do this week to keep the kids entertained and engaged. We made rock candy, we grew magic trees (bonus points to this activity for providing almost instant gratification for young kids... Once you color the trees and place them in the solution, crystals start to form within half an hour and the full tree grows in a matter of hours), painted rocks, made flower crowns, and the kids' most favorite activity of all: built a fairy garden! I will say that weeks and weeks later, the kids still love their flower crowns
and enjoy wearing them/playing with them. I think the fun of the fairy garden wasn't just that it set the scene for imaginative play, but I also took the kids to the local Farmers' Market/Garden Store and they each got to choose 2 plants/flowers to plant in the fairy garden. They had so much fun looking at all the options and choosing which ones they wanted. We bought a fairy door and a few accessories like fairy benches and figures and little mushroom figurines and put everything

together in a little corner of our landscaping. They still love to stop by and see how the plants are growing and rearrange the furniture and figures.

Special Treats

This was a fun week for making forest themed edibles. The only tricky one was making rock candy from scratch which involved some special-order ingredients (like candy flavors, wood sticks, and a ton of extra sugar). Even the recipes I found to follow were basically like "only so many will actually turn out" so we made quite a few to make sure we had enough actually form. The kids enjoyed it but this one requires patience since it takes a few days for the candy crystals to fully form. The other activity/edible this week was making Jello Dirt Cups from a kit I got at Aldi. The kids loved mixing up the pudding and making their own cups for that day's snack. For snack on a different day we had acorn Hershey kisses... I just used a little peanut butter to attach a Hershey kiss to a mini vanilla wafer and also a small chocolate chip on the top for the stem.

I also made three cute and easy breakfasts: Cinnamon Roll Snails (refrigerated cinnamon rolls and breakfast sausage links with bacon antenna), Toadstool Muffins (banana & chocolate chip muffins with red icing and white chocolate chips for the spots), and Butterfly Pancakes. The pancakes were a little trickier to make, but they were the clear favorite of the week, especially since the kids got to pick the colors I used. 

All in all, I think we had a special forest treat almost every day.

Entertainment

Some weeks I was struggling to come up with some shows and movies, but this was NOT one of those weeks. We watched Fern Gully, Strange Magic, Pocahontas, A Bug's Life, and Epic. 

Fairy Garden