Boys' Birthday Invites - Sneak Peak

My boys have birthdays that are one month apart.  Sometimes we decide to combine their parties into one shindig and meet in the middle.  This year is one of those years.  School starts back this week (on my oldest son's birthday as a matter of fact,) and my boys have been hugely fascinated with going fishing this summer, so in order to change it up this year we are renting a lake house somewhat locally and having family up for a little birthday dinner.  The boys have been allowed 2 friends a piece to come fishing with them for the day.

Today I sat down with my Silhouette to finally get the invites finished since the party is next week.  I am seriously not into waiting to the last minute like this, but there were a few issues getting the reservations nailed down, so everyone was given a tentative date for the party and now that it is confirmed the invites will be delivered (some by hand.) 

This is a little sneak peak at what you might expect from their party.  I'll post pics sometime next week of some of the other details. 

I hate wasting paper, especially cardstock, so I mixed up the invites and used the cut outs, and the negatives of the design for the cards.

The back of the envelopes.  Every invite has a different fish (and what is fun is they are all fish that my kids can identify as fish they have caught or have seen someone catch.)

Paper Airplane Races

Do you remember flying paper airplanes as a kid?  Folding them different ways and seeing who could come up with the best airplane?  Well, me and the boys checked out a book from the library that taught us the physics behind the fun.  Today we thought we would have a little paper airplane experiment and learn the different ways that lift, thrust, drag, and gravity effect the flight of the airplane.  Of course they don't remember them quite in those terms, but they did learn what makes the airplane go higher or nose dive, what makes it loop and what makes it go straight.  Elementary physics - check. :)

Just in case you can't remember how to fold a paper airplane here is a little refresher in pictures.  I think I missed one step in the pictures, but hopefully this will get you on track so you can have your own paper airplane physics lesson fun.

Note, the pilot in my son's plane?  They also learned about how far he could fly before autoeject takes place.  :)

We made our planes out of heavy duty cardstock because we wanted to anticipate the nose dives and hopefully save the plane for a little while.  After doing several run throughs with the plane folded like the above pictures we made a few modifications including adding a paperclip and trying it closer to the nose versus middle versus rear; folding up the sides of the wings; and cutting slits in the back.  We tried the rear slits folded up and folded down for different effects.

Cheap, easy, educational fun at its best.

**Dragonfly Designs Giveaway ends 8/2!  Don't miss out.**