Simple Summer Fun | Ice Bowling with LEGO

I’m so excited to be joining Toddler Approved‘s LEGO week!  All this week several bloggers have been working together to share fun ways to learn and play with LEGO.  Kristina has made a landing page for all the great LEGO posts in one place that you won’t want to miss! I couldn’t miss the opportunity to be part of this awesome project, so I gathered up pictures from when we went ice bowling with Lego to bring you some simple summer fun!

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One of my goals this summer is to set up and create simple summer fun for learning, exploring and sensory play. If your children are anything like mine, they need a mixture of both open ended and directed play ideas. When we were getting ready for our Simple Sensory Play Series with Ice, we originally thought we would do the series with LEGO, because we love LEGO so much! We soon realized that while the activities were simple, we could have just as much fun with just a bag of ice.

This is one of seven activities that we have planned and can’t wait to share with you over the coming weeks, but for now we are so excited to share this super simple summer fun idea which can be great for tactile and vestibular input.

Materials

LEGO DUPLO Bricks
Ice Balls (We used our favorite Ice Mold to make ours)

We froze our Ice Balls the night before to be ready for ice bowling when we woke up. If you do not have an ice mold, you can do with with just a ball, but we did think the added ice made it really fun for the hot summer weather!

Setup

The first thing we had to do, was create LEGO bowling pins. This was a great sorting activity for the boys (ages 6 & 8) as they sorted by colors and then built pins of varying sizes.

You need to make 10 pins and then set them up in a triangle formation just like bowling pins. We set ours up at the end of our sidewalk and put the ice balls at the other end.

How to Play this Simple Summer Fun Activity

The play was simple. The boys both took turns bowling their ice down the sidewalk. They each got two turns each to try to knock as many pins down.

We experimented with different distances to start from on the sidewalk and different colored ice balls. Each time the boys had more and more fun.

I loved watching Bones. His form was really good and each time he got better and better at knocking down all the pins.

I am not sure if they had more fun playing the game, or if I had more fun taking pictures. It was so fun to try to capture the ball as it went through the pins. We really had a lot of fun and we can’t wait to try this again soon. In fact, we have ice balls freezing in our freezer right now.

Fun LEGO MATH Extensions to this Summer  Activity

To add in a bit of math you could keep score. Depending on the age of your children, you can count the numbers of pins or you can have them count each individual bricks  and add or multiply the totals.

I have also gathered a few of the posts from LEGO WEEK that are all about math to give you some fun ideas to extend the learning fun.

LEGO Word Problems | Frugal Fun for Boys
LEGO Count and Move Math Game | JDaniel 4’s Mom 
LEGO Game: Race to Twenty | Playdough to Plato
Learning Symmetry with LEGO and Butterflies | Fun at Home with Kids

As I mentioned before, this is part of a week long celebration of all things LEGO over at Toddler Approved. She and a group of us bloggers will be sharing LEGO ideas on our blogs and Facebook Pages all week long!

I will be sharing, pinning and collecting all the great posts from the week. You can follow along by following my LEGO LEARNING board on Pinterest.

Follow Dayna :: Lemon Lime Adventures’s board Lego Lessons on Pinterest.

Do you have a favorite LEGO activity? What are your favorite simple summer fun ideas? I would love to hear! Connect with me on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram or subscribe by email. I can’t wait to hear your ideas.