Beating the Heat: Cool Activities for Summer

Body painting
Body painting is an activity that all kids enjoy in the summer. This group activity can go on for a couple of hours. It is ideally played in the afternoon. You should have enough space for kids to jump around and play during this activity. Be prepared for a lot of squealing and screaming. See that there is nothing around them that may get soiled. Cover up the furniture, cushions or bedspreads with ordinary cloth or newspaper.
Be ready for a lot of mess but it can be easily cleaned up. You can get a lot of strain off yourself if you make the cleaning up activity into a game also.

Preparation:
Dress the kids in minimal clothing. Boys could wear just shorts with their chests and backs bare.
Prepare bowls full of color using vegetable pigment. Some of the colors that could be improvised at home are as follows:
You could use beetroot juice for dark pink color.
Turmeric paste will give a dark yellow color.
Rice powder paste will give a thick pasty white effect.
Mash up some cooked rice and add some water to it to make it sticky enough to be used as body glue.
Collect all sorts of tit bits that could be stuck on the body with the rice paste. You could use colorful buttons, feathers, leaves, small light weight coins etc.
You could also use edible colors mixed in water.
If you don't mind you could spare some inexpensive lipstick and mascara for the special effects.

Instructions for parents:
Give them a demonstration of what they could do and then leave them alone.

Some ideas for a fun summer party

Animal carnival:
The kids could paint themselves into animals of their choice.
Zebra:
Using the rice powder paste they could paint stripes across their face and body in various angles. With the mascara or a non-toxic black poster paint, paint black stripes adjacent to the white ones.
Tiger:
Use the turmeric paste and add a little red color to get the orange effect. Paint the orange stripes across their face and body. Use mascara or black poster paint with the yellow stripes to get the tiger effect. The tiger boy could let some rice puffs stick to his upper lip to look like his fierce teeth.
Panda:
They could pat their face with a thick coat of talcum powder to look white. Using mascara they could paint black rings around their eyes. The same idea could be used to paint a bandicoot or a raccoon.
Dragon:
Painting oneself as a dragon does not require any specific color but yellow and red combination gives a good fiery effect. The dragon could eat some beetroot to get some frightful red teeth.
Aliens:
The kids could also pose as aliens using cooked rice paste as glue and sticking coins and buttons to form weird patterns. They could also stick up small pieces of torn paper to get some really unearthly skin.
They could spice up the game by painting each other and adding weird highlights to each others' make up.
The game could be ended with a nice splash in the bathroom or in the garden with a hosepipe.
Remember the fun is in the process.