How to Survive Summer With Out of School Children

If you have the opportunity to stay at home with your child for the summer vacation, you need a plan of action to survive. Sure, summer is meant to be breezy and relaxing. Try not to over organize and add unneeded stress to the summer vacation. Some thinking ahead though, will make the summer beneficial for all and will keep your kids from sleeping away 3 whole months of their lives.

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• a plan

1. 
   Come up with lots of ideas and pick the favorites

   At the beginning of the summer vacation sit down with your kids and brain storm ideas. If you start this as a summer tradition when your kids are small, they will want to continue doing things with you as they grow older. Once a child turns 13 it is hard to incorporate new traditions into their life.

2. Encourage your children to think in categories. Try a fun activity, a learning activity, a continuing education activity, a free activity, an active activity, a community or service activity etc.. You don't have to have everything every day or even one thing a day. Try a different theme for each week and do small activities every day.

3. 
   Find fun ways to encourage reading

   On the continuing education week, go to the library or think of things that your children learned this past school year. This way it won't be so hard to get back into the school year. Retaining what they learned over the summer is especially important with small children learning to read.

4. 
   Spend some time learning to give

   A service activity may include cleaning up a road, or volunteering at your church. You might help an elderly person get ready for a yard sale or clean up their yard. Working activities can be made into fun activities with a little Frisbee tossing or stopping for ice cream on the way home.

5. 
   Cooking includes management, reading and math skills

   A great learning activity is teaching your child to cook. Have them research a menu, make a list of ingredients they need. Take them shopping for the rest and teach a budget and coupon clipping class.

6. 
   Reinforce your child's love

   If you have more than one or two children, another goal for the summer may be organizing time alone with each individual child. Me and Mom days were quite popular at our house. The timing has to be right for Dad to keep the rest or trade with another Mom who is trying for the same thing.

7. Summer always seems to go by so fast. Keeping work, play and events all balanced gets harder and harder as your children grow. Planning ahead, but not freaking out when the plan is rained out, is a great use of a summer vacation.

Tips & Warnings

• Having something to look forward to is a great incentive for getting help with summer chores and gardening.
• Don't hold these events over your kids head as leverage.
• Your kids should do chores without an ultimatum.

[coachniquenya]

on 6/6/2009 I love the idea of themed weeks and also incorporating learning activities to keep their small minds fresh and active. 5*