Badges of Fun: The Backyard Fun Badge!

Family Fun is my favorite, favorite magazine for LOADS of ideas to do with the kiddos, and they’ve added a really cool feature for the next year…

Badges of Fun is a year-long celebration of the magazine’s 20th year and a way for families to have more fun together while earning badges! And those badges could turn into prizes for you too!

The program kicked off with their June/July issue and “The Backyard Fun Badge!”

Family Fun sent us a fun supply package to get us started on this badge – s’more ingredients for a campout, a flashlight for  twilight games and several other things.

We were a little slow to get around to this badge, but completed our Backyard Fun Badge yesterday during art with some oven-bake clay from our package!

The activity was “Enchanted Clay Toadstools!“

The boys haven’t used clay much so this was a great new experience for them!

See our cute toadstools at the bottom there? The boys helped roll the clay into balls and flatten out the mushroom tops. I helped with the stems and putting it all together!

And Big J had to add his own creation – a spaceship!

Then we baked them all in the oven according to the package directions and…

decorated our front yard tree with our cute little toadstools!

Apparently they looked real enough to freak the hubby out a little when he pulled up from school, but the wood skewers gave them away!

And here is our earned badge!

As a homeschool bonus, we talked about mushrooms and why and how they grow! Art, science and a badge – great afternoon activity for us!

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The August badge is “The Hit the Road” badge, and although we’ve already completed our big road trips for the summer, we’ll be doing some of these fun activities and maybe a recipe or two to earn this badge!

Check out the Badges of Fun program and join us in the adventure!

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Disclosure: I received a supply package and magazine from Family Fun for the Badges of Fun program, but was not asked to blog about it or compensated in any way. I just love Family Fun and this fun program idea!