My year serving with AmeriCorps is basically over as I have completed all of my required hours. In order to continue my living stipend for the next month I just have to log 5 hours a week of volunteer time. So that means I am now officially home with my kids again! I took the summer semester off from college courses, so I went from working 40 hours a week and having additional homework, to being able to focus on my beautiful children and (unfortunately) housework.
So now that I am home, after used to being on a go-go-go schedule, I thought it would be a good idea to come up with a plan to keep our summer going smoothly. Past summers have gone by so quickly, much of the time in front of the TV, leaving most of us feeling that we missed out on a lot of opportunities. So, for starters, we decided to extend our screen time rule to the summer with a bit of a change. During the school week, we would allow a half hour of screen time for each child, with weekends essentially being free, within reason. This summer we are allowing one half hour of computer and one half hour of television time, but they may be combined either way. We do this only Mondays through Thursdays and the rest of the weekend is free. What I love is how much time this opens up, and since it is a concrete rule, they don't even try to weasel more time out of me! Amazing....
Our summer schedule, as seemingly opposite as those two words seem to be, consists of very loose "themed" days that basically just the kids get excited about something to look forward to. My girls helped me name them; they are as follows:
Mad Science Mondays.....these started out as Magic of Science Mondays, but after our first experiment of messy goop and crazy kids, we all decided MAD was much more fitting!!
Artistic Tuesdays
Water Wednesdays
Take-a-Trip Thursdays
Free Fridays....which basically means that I just don't want to plan something for every day of the week.....kids need to be bored sometimes, right?
Before school was out for the year, I had the girls help me brainstorm and searched the internet for lots of ideas we could use and categorized them for the different days. I bought most of the materials ahead of time, much at the dollar store, so it would be ready in advance; because after all, I want this to be EASY and enjoyable for ALL of us! Now, on those days, we decide in the morning which project we feel like doing and have at it. We are halfway into our second week, and I'm still going and not even feeling sick of it, so that's a huge success for me!
I will post some of our activities very soon so you can see what we've been up to. In the meantime, here is the link to my Pinterest board that has some of the ideas we'll be getting to soon.
http://pinterest.com/traciedawnlee/this-summer/
Enjoy!
No comments:
Post a Comment