One of the best things about summer is to be able to spend time outside. Warm air, sunshine and longer days are perfect to start outdoorsy projects that will keep your children entertained and make them love the outdoors as much as you do. You don’t need to be Martha Stewart to make something beautiful, you just need to be creative and think outside of the box. So roll up your sleeves and take note of these cool backyard projects to do with the kids.
Make a butterfly feeder
Who doesn’t love butterflies? They are pretty and colorful and bring life to any garden. Attract them to your backyard with this easy project that even the youngest children can do. The easiest “butterfly food” to make is overripe fruit. Moths and butterflies love it and all you have to do is wait a bit for those bananas and strawberries at home to turn a bit mushy and soft. Get a ceramic or glass plate or a terra cotta plant saucer, any dish with a sloping rim will do. Ask your kids to decorate it however they want with paint or gluing pieces of ceramics in it to create colorful designs. The brighter the better and if they feel like gluing silk flowers to the rim, that’s great too. Now suspend it using flower pot hangers or a macrame holder, hanging it from a tree to keep it under the shade. It’s better if you can easily see it from your house or your patio chairs and it will work best if you hang it a little bit higher than your tallest flowers. Place the slices of overripe fruit on it and wait. If it’s dry out, sprinkle them with water or fruit juice. Replace the fruit when it’s too dry or it becomes moldy.
Build a fairy house or garden
Bring some magic right to your garden by building a house (or a tiny village!) for fairies. The best part about this project is that you can be as creative as you want to use the space around your garden. If you have a big tree with flowers around it, for example, you can add a tiny wooden door to the base and put up tiny windows or decorations of any sort. You can turn rocks into fairy houses and even create a tiny village from scratch on a patch of your garden. Tree stumps are fantastic fairy buildings and old bird feeders can be filled with soil, small plants and colorful rocks to make a fairy garden as well. You can make it as detailed as you want and you enlist the help of your older children to make a surprise for the younger ones. It is really difficult to stop believing in magic when confronted with a whimsical miniature village right outside of your home.