spring – Positive Life Principles

Three children and an adult sitting on a blanket in a forest making crafts with leaves, pinecones, and paper

“Nature is a volume of which God is the author.” – Harvey

Need some fresh ideas to keep the kids or grandkids entertained this summer? When my kids were young, I started a fun summer plan called “Theme Weeks.” The concept is simple – when we had a week free from camps, trips, and VBS, we made our own fun by focusing on a theme. I used ABCD as our guide.

A stands for activities
B stands for books
C stands for craft
D stands for devotional

Here’s an idea of how you could plan out a Nature Theme week.

Day One: Bugging Out

Activities – Make or buy bug catchers and go on a bug hunt, visit local natural history museum or university, rent a bug movie, chase fireflies in the evening, look at bugs through a magnifying glass.

Books – The Grouchy Ladybug, The Very Quiet Cricket both by Eric Carle, Ms. Spider series by David Kirk.

Crafts – Create your own antennae using a headband and pipe cleaners, make tissue paper butterflies, make and decorate bug catchers using plastic jars and netting.

Devotional – Consider the Ant, Proverbs 6:6-11

Day Two: Flower Power

Activities – visit a garden or nursery or arboretum in the area. Purchase seeds and plant a small garden or plant flowers in a pot.

Books – Planting a Rainbow by Lois Ehlert, My Backyard Garden by Carol Lerner

Craft – Paint and decorate flower pots and visors, make tissue paper flowers, color or water paint pictures of a garden, make ice cream treats with ice cream in clay pots, use chocolate cookie crumbles for the dirt and put a plastic flower on top. Add a gummy worm for effect!

Devotional – The Four Soils. Mark 4:1-20

Day Three: Super Skies

Activities – Visit planetarium, lay down outside and cloud watch talking about the different shapes that you see, star gaze at night, look through a telescope.

Books – The Cloud Book, by Tomie de Paola, It Couldn’t Just Happen: Fascinating Facts About God’s World by Larry Richards.

Crafts – Make drawings of both the day sky and the night sky. Use glitter for stars on the night scene and clouds for the day.

Devotional – Creation Genesis 1:14 – 19, The Heavens Declare the Glory of God. Psalm 19

Day Four: Amazing Animals

Activities – Visit the zoo, local farm, doggy park, rent or go to movies about animals, dress up like animals using face paint and making ears using felt and headbands.

Books – Anamalia, by Graeme Base, Animals Born Alive and Well, by Ruth Heller.

Crafts – Make animals out of clay or foil or recycled items. Bake and decorate animal shaped cookies. Draw pictures of the zoo and Noah’s Ark. Put together photo album of animal pictures from magazine or from the zoo.

Devotional – Creation Genesis 1:20 – 25, Noah’s ark Genesis 6,7

Day Five: Tremendous Trees

Activities – Take a hike through a forest, visit a wooded area and do bark rubbings, collect leaves, plant a tree.

Books – The Legend of the Three Trees, by Angela Elwell Hunt and Tim Jonke, The Giving Tree, by Shel Silverstein.

Crafts – Create tree bark rubbings by holding paper on the side of a tree and rubbing with a crayon to get the impression (collect several and compare different barks), draw a forest, make a collage from items collected on your hike, preserve leaves between wax paper or clear contact paper, write a poem about trees.

Devotional – All of creation sings God’s praises Psalm 96:11-12

I hope these ideas spark your thinking and give you some fun ideas to make it a memorable summer. Other possible themes include: farm week, prince and princess week, music week, or art week. You get the idea. My purpose in sharing the concept of theme weeks is to encourage you to spend time engaging with your kids or grandkids this summer. Stay tuned for more summer fun in the weeks to come.

Check out my bestseller, The Power of a Positive Mom, for summer reading and additional creative ideas.

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Spring in Dallas just doesn’t make sense to me. On any given day we may have a freeze warning at nightfall and 80 degree temperatures by the very next afternoon. It’s crazy! They say if you don’t like the weather in Texas, just stay around for a couple of hours and it’ll change.

One March morning several years ago, I stepped outside to get the newspaper and was hit with blizzard-like conditions. Well it may not have been that extreme, but it was one of those take-your-breath-away cold fronts that felt like a blizzard to this thin-blooded Southern girl. By mid-afternoon of that very same day I was sitting out in the garden reading and enjoying some good ole Texas sunshine.

Personally, I love to be outside and love to read, so when I can find the time to enjoy both it is a happy afternoon. On this particular spring day, my personal reading agenda was the book of Philippians in the New Testament of the Bible. Written by the apostle Paul while he was a prisoner in Rome, one could easily assume Philippians would be a real downer of a book. On the contrary it is quite a delightful and uplifting read. In fact, the theme of joy sort of oozes through the pages from this unlikely author.

As I relaxed and tried to picture how Paul could possibly write such a positive message from a prison cell, I glanced up to see a white butterfly dancing around our garden. It was amusing to watch this fluttering creature touch a flower here, then off again to another flower there, then here, then there, then back to where it started again. It never stayed in one place for more than a few seconds as if it were pursuing something it would never find. Just as quickly as it appeared in my garden, it was off to the next field of flowers.

Observing the illusive dance of the white butterfly made me think about how illusive life’s pleasures can be. Just like this flitting creature, I realized how easy it is for me to flit, flutter and fly from one activity or person to another trying to find sweet nectar to satisfy my longings for significance and joy. I’m guessing you have felt those same feelings a time or two as well. The pursuit of happiness is common to us all. The question is where does the chase stop, or does it? Are we fooling ourselves into thinking that there is something out there that will enrich our being and fill the hunger of our souls?

The irony of my butterfly encounter on the Spring day in Dallas, was that I was sitting there reading a book which highlights enduring qualities which transcend shifting circumstances and fleeting feelings. Paul (yes, from his prison cell) described a resilient joy, a consistent contentment and a peace which passes all understanding in his letter to the Philippians. Unlike the flitting butterfly, Paul taught the early Christians how to experience a true satisfaction of the soul.

So we must ask ourselves, “Does God call us to pursue happiness or to pursue Him and His purposes in our life?” I am convinced that our pursuit of Him leads us to experience a heart full of joy and true contentment as we live out His purposes in our lives. I want to encourage you to read the book of Philippians this week and consider what God teaches you about Himself.

“To seek God is to desire happiness; to find him is that happiness.”

Augustine

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