Looooong Summer Vacation - What to do?

It is summer vacation now. What do we do with our children? They can't be watching TV all day long or playing nintendo DS and Wii all the time!

We should help them plan something in order for them to have a quality holiday. Apart from enrolling our children to some non-sleepover or sleepover summer camp or perhaps finishing up the holiday worksheets, there are many other ways to keep our children busy. I found some websites which can be of useful guide to help us plan an eventful summer break for our children.


1. Kids Goals.com @ http://www.kidsgoals.com/kids-summer-goal-setting.shtml.

In this website, there are some good reference of recipes and kids crafts we can do together with our children. The one I particularly fond of is the making of the Summer Holiday Memory Book. I think this forms a good start towards an eventful summer break.


I made the Summer Holiday Memory Book together with my daughter. We used recycled stuff like old magazines, old calenders and empty carton food boxes to make the book. It turns out to be quite nice. We will try to fill up the book with something everyday. There is also a link to a pre-designed template specially for this Summer Holiday Memory Book which young kids can easily fill it up with least assistance.

2. Hands On Crafts for Kids http://www.crafts4kids.com/projects.htm

This is another website that gives many ideas what hand crafts can do together with our children. There are just too many in there that you may need to spend quite a lengthy of time to search for something that really interests your kid.

3. About.com : Fatherhood http://fatherhood.about.com/od/activities/a/summervacation.htmg ives general ideas of some productive summer vacation ideas that may be going round in the community. Hence, it takes a little effort of us as parents to make some enquiries if there is any useful camps, reading programs, field trips that our children can participate in.

The other inexpensive way of spending the summer vacation is getting our kids to help up in the house chores. I made a template out of a party plate. I divide the party plate in 8 segments. Each segment carries a different type of chores that comes with a little wages. The rule of the game is they will only be entitled to the wages if they carry out the chores from start to end.

The idea is to build their responsibility to complete a task, to understand the importance of making and saving money, most importantly it helps to improve their aritmatics too.

Other ideas to consider may be visiting the National Library or the largest bookstore in town.
Make a day trip to some nearby places of interest which we may not have been visiting since we were kids.