Sparkler art, glow balloons.....extremely cheap and fun!

It has been hot out lately... I mean, really hot. Summer sure did start off with a bang didn't it? With all this heat, the motivation for house cleaning is not really there. We've taken a little bit of a break and decided to have some fun. This night of fun for the family cost $6.20 in all and the kids had a blast. I have known about sparkler art for a while but finally got to try it out with the boys. Sparkler art is when you put your camera on a slow shutter speed and take a picture of someone drawing something with a lit sparkler. I found that on my canon point and shoot that the firework setting worked fine. This was part of the Gamer's art. He wrote his name out and it came out great. Here is his O :) Pretty cool huh? He sure thought it was!

Spaz loved the pictures but being true to his nickname he was too spastic to do something other than wiggling really fast. Either way, he was extremely happy with his art as well.

Lil Riot caught on really quickly and jumped right into making letters. He did like wiggling around too which made the sparklers look like fireworks. Here is his O. For a 4 year old that is pretty darn good!

For $1 you can try this out too. Just grab some sparklers and if it's just you, put your camera on a tripod, make sure your shutter speed is slow and put a self timer on. Get in place and draw away. Lots of people like to do hearts around them and their other half or something cute like that. Just google sparkler art and see all the creative things you can do.

The other activity we did was to get glow sticks (we got the cans with 15 of them in it at the dollar store) and we put them in balloons and blew them up. Although it didn't turn out quite the way I thought, they still were kind of cool and the boys definite had fun finding the balloons glowing in the tall grass and popping them. We also got the spinning glow stick toy but if you come across these... the glow sticks themselves are better and shorter ...great for the balloons but the spinning part is a joke and does not work well at all.

What cheap and fun activities have you done for summer so far? I would love it if you shared with us!