I am now a few weeks deep into my first official summer break since college (too many years ago to count!). Instead of planning pub crawls and road trips I have spent some time now preparing for 8 weeks of activities for my 6 and 2 year old. I wish I could say we plan to just enjoy each day and lounge, but I know that none of our personalities are geared towards that so my "producer" brain requires I have a plan. We had a 2 week trip planned and 2 week long camps which left me with just a few weeks of idle space to fill.
After first grade orientation and conferences with teachers it became apparent that having a little extra education throughout the break was definitely not going to hurt, so I used that as my foundation. I took a bunch of the suggested guidelines from our first grade teachers summer recommendations and then scoured the Internet for others. Have I mentioned yet that I am obsessed with Pinterest? No? You'll soon see how deep that love affair goes. I then bought all my supplies at the Dollar store to make it look less "school". Another plus in my house (most days) is that my 6 year old always wants to teach her little sister, so I created activities that have her "teach" her little sister without (hopefully) realizing she is learning something too. Hopefully my kids will continue to underestimate my sneaky-ness for many years to come. They still don't know about the banana's in their waffles.
So far the biggest hits have been the measurements and the writing journal, but we are starting science with Dad this weekend which I think will probably take the cake. How can you go wrong with rockets and volcanoes?
Despite my constant urge to keep everything consistent, I promised myself I would not make this an "mandatory" event each day and there are a lot of days we don't consult the bucket for ideas. However, whenever it gets a little too quiet or too loud we have something to do! Each subject has its own little bag and inside it an index card with the task. Most of the materials are from around the house or the dollar store. I figure if this works, even half the time, I will build on it each summer adjusting the activities to each girl's upcoming grade level.
Here are some of the projects I included -
SCIENCE
With each project she has to enter her guess of what will happen, observations and final report of what occurred with each experiment into her journal. On the schedule are building and launching a rocket to see how high it will go, trying to decide which bugs our chickens like to eat most, the ever standard (and favorite) baking soda volcano and rainbow water/celery test.
MATH
So far the biggest hit has been the scavenger hunt. I gave Peanut a ruler and sent her and her sister on a hunt throughout the house to find objects that were as tall as each inch increment up to 12 inches. Then we lined them all up, re-measured, drew pictures of them and labeled them with their name and height. This took ALL morning with a few breaks. Other activities included creating a summer countdown calendar to her camp events, baking muffins, sorting my change and doing dot to dot puzzles I downloaded free off the Internet.
READING
We read a lot in our house, so the big treats from this bag are going to the library for new books and doing scavenger hunts in town to find words on signs. I found this really cool idea that I thought we would try too!
http://pinterest.com/pin/435934438901154590/
WRITING
This was actually the easiest group of ideas to come up with for Peanut. She loves to sing/dance/draw and tell stories. so most of these activities involve writing her own books, writing letters to friends, write a song, create flashcards for her sister and my favorite is writing out all the family names so we can make our own family tree.
Every night before bed we read and then talk about our day. I ask the girls to tell me something that made them sad, and something that made them happy. On evenings that we are home in time, Peanut and I now sit and write out these thoughts in her journal so she can continue to practice writing her letters and building sentences. It also gives us a chance to reflect on our day and talk about any bad choices we might have made so that we can learn from them.
So I'll let you know how it goes when we are back in school. We definitely won't do all of these, and some may be a bust, however I figure we can keep them around for those weekends the words "I'M BORED" are uttered.
