Rylan's End-of-Year Party

Rylan has school through this Friday, but we had his end-of-year party last Friday.  I had signed up at the beginning of the school year to help with this party.  No one else really stepped up to plan it so I took the lead.  Someone else though decided we should have it at Granny White Park (which is about 5 minutes from Otter Creek), but I pretty much planned the rest.  Unfortunately Carter's field day at Clovercroft was the same day so I had to miss it (but Brian played hooky from work for a little bit and was able to go - yay!).

Usually the kids just got to the park to play and picnic.  I decided it would be fun to add in some field day games as well.  So the kids played on the playground for about an hour while we set up the games.  Then they had lunch under some trees on beach towels.  The pavilion had already been reserved and there were a couple of other preschool parties at the park.  Brentwood Middle also ended up having their field day on the adjacent soccer fields so it was pretty crowded at the park that day.

After lunch, Ms. Melissa handed out the kids' end-of-year t-shirts they had all signed the back of earlier and they posed for a group photo.

Then it was time for the games.  I met with the other parents after dropping off the kids one morning and brainstormed ideas for the games.  We decided to have five games which would allow us to split the kids up into groups of four which could rotate through the games.

Water Bucket Challenge - Each relay team of two had a large bucket of water and a sponge.  One person from each team soaked the sponge, raced it to another bucket, and squeezed out the water.  That team member then raced the sponge back to their teammate who did the same thing.  The kids raced for a couple of minutes and the team with the most water in their team's bucket won.

Spoon and Egg Race - This is a classic!  We used large serving spoons and golf balls.  This was Rylan's favorite because he won each time he did it :)

Three-Legged Race - Another classic!  The kids were not so good at this but extremely funny.  We tried to teach them to say "inside - outside - inside - outside" to work as a team but they'd just say the words and still be just moving however they could.

Rylan did a little better when paired with Mason ...

Corn Hole Board Toss - I was helping another group and got back to this game after the boys had already started just tossing the bags around.  They seems content so we just let them play around.

Water Balloon Toss - We wanted to keep the kids cool so we had another water game.  Here the kids just tossed water balloons back and forth until the popped them.  Simple but fun!

Rylan had a fun little group that included Hudson, Drew, and Mason.

After the games, there were popsicles and a little more free time before heading home!  We had beautiful weather on Friday and it couldn't have been more perfect!