With a baby coming right at the beginning of the summer break, I knew that I didn’t want to have to worry about planning while trying to manage a newborn and I certainly didn’t want the kids spending a whole bunch of time on their iPads again after being cooped up so much last summer. With that in mind, I decided to make a weekly summer activity schedule with different fun themes for them to learn about.
I had a few requirements as I went about planning all of this…
- It had to be accessible for a range of ages. It needed to be fun for the 3 year olds, 5 year olds, and 7 year olds that I know. It should include activities that they can all participate in and understand.
- It needed to be something that I could do relatively one handed. If it needed a bunch of parent involvement, it probably wasn’t going to work. The good news is that I’m always working on getting my kiddos to be more independent when they do projects!
- It needed to be predictable. You know how it is with a newborn – one can easily lose track of days when your nights are broken up into 3-4 hour chunks. I wanted to be able to look at the calendar and know that, since it’s Thursday, we would be doing xyz within the theme.
- It needed to have supplies easily found around the house. Let’s be honest, with a newborn, sometimes there isn’t a lot of planning ahead time. We lose track and wake up one morning realizing we forgot some supply or ingredient. The more things that could be just collected around the house, the better!
- Last but not least, it had to have parts that were out of the house. Not only is mama going to need time out of these four walls, but after the last year, we are all craving more time in a variety of locations. We want new sights and smells and things to do!
So with all of that in mind, I created the following schedule…
Week 1 – Animals
Week 2 – Gardening and Plants
Week 3 – Oceans
Week 4 – The Bible
Week 5 – America the Beautiful
Week 6 – Colors and the Rainbow
Week 7 – Planets and Stars
Week 8 – Dinosaurs
Week 9 – The Weather
Week 10 – Music
Week 11 – Cooking
I planned it this way basing it on my kid’s first week of summer being the week of Memorial Day and lining up The Bible week with when our church will be doing VBS (Vacation Bible School) and America the Beautiful week leading up to July 4th. The nice thing is that these weeks can be rearranged based on your schedule, needs, and desires!
The weekly schedule for each theme is as follows…
Mondays – Explore in Books
Tuesdays – Science Activity
Wednesdays – Fun Outside/Field Trip/Excursions
Thursdays – Science Activity
Friday – Craft Activity
In no way will each of these activities take up the whole day or even necessarily the whole morning. My hope is that this will be something to link their days in the week while also providing time for working on other things in preparation for the new school year. And it will give me a little consistency while I manage 3 little ones.
I hope y’all can do these activities along with us, and I can’t wait to see all the reading time, science experiment results, and crafts along the way!