Thursday, June 25, 2009

Oh, What do you do in the Summer Time? Traditions? Do tell.

What do you guys do for summer? Any traditions, good ideas? A good friend of mine does what she calls "Pioneer School" where she "orchestrate activities, chores, play days, reading, and school work to keep them entertained and on track so they aren't idle and bored for the summer." Sounds good to me. Another friend is preparing for "Theme Days" such as Hawian day, backwards day, fire safety day. I thought that sounded pretty good too.

Kyanne and I are doing a parented sewing class with 6 other moms and little girls, but I'm still looking for more ideas. Please comment away, anything you've heard of or do.

6 comments:

MARTHA said...

http://www.chartjungle.com/chores/chorechartwithnopics.html

I use this chore chart (link above). The kids get a folder and decorate it with who they want to be, usually some animated character. They fill their charts with stickers shooting for a goal later in the summer like Chuck E. Cheese. The more stickers you get the more tokens you get.

The basics are on there, like "brush your teeth",chores, and challenges, and I always include "What can I do to help?"- They're essentially asking me what else they can do to help me.

If I have a group of kids, like you, we start "Pioneer School" with the flag salute and then move from one activity to the other.

Good luck! Just some ideas.

whitney said...

I'm lazy. We swim, spray park, and have picnics at the park. Walks and bike rides every day. No traditions, just summer stuff.

Carrie said...

Oh dear. Guilt. You're making me wonder if I've got this all wrong. Am I supposed to have a PLAN for summer? I guess we're all about "wake up and do what we want to do" around here. Although today my kids painted baby wipe and diaper boxes so their stuffed animals would have a snazzy place to sleep. That's got to score some points somewhere. I'll definitely be checking back to see what fun ideas you come across.

Christy said...

When my kids are on summer break, that means I AM TOO! I just go and do whatever comes up (zoo, beach, calaway, picnics, etc) but I definately don't really want to be scheduled... sorry no help here.

Stephanie M Larsen said...

I like to have things to look forward to. So, I'm diggin' on the idea of having theme days that I can CREATE as everyone know I LOVE to create. So, I get to look forward to creating and planning and the kids get to look forward to the event. I'm sure most days will just be laze-fair but, I'm still on the hunt for creative ideas.

So, one I just heard about from Stacy was an advent calendar idea with ice cream cone shaped papers with ideas for the day on the back. That sounds like a cute summer tradition we could all look forward too.

Kristen said...

I'm afraid I'm with Christy, though I do have a month's worth of travelling already planned. I'm all about hitting places that are too hard to do in the winter: the zoo, Calaway, the lake, we like to go park hopping through out all of the communities around here and finding reasons to spend time with friends.
Bubbles, sidewalk chalk, kites, bikes, wagons and the grass all become good friends.
Good Luck.