Celebrating the first day of summer

We begin our celebration of the first day of summer with the reading of The Sun Egg by Elsa Beskow.  This is a delightful story of a little elf who finds a mysterious orange egg in the forest.  At first the elf and her forest friends are convinced it is an egg dropped by the sun.    Eventually they discover that it is actually a deliciously sweet and juice-filled fruit.

After reading the story, we cut open some oranges and try to drink the juice out of our very own "sun eggs".  Then, we bake orange pound cake.  Everyone's favorite part of baking orange pound cake is zesting the oranges and squeezing out the orange juice.

---

We never get tired of painting wet-on-wet watercolor suns.

We end our first day of summer celebration by staying up until the sun goes down.  We roast marshmallows over the fire and make s'mores.  The day's finale is catching fireflies after dark.