Filling Your Planner with Summer Fun!
If you’re a parent then you know the familiar feeling when summer rolls around. With kids home all day, there’s often lots of time to fill and little to no schedule. In short, summer can often feel overwhelming. However, with a little bit of planning, summer can not only be refreshing, but dare I say, fun! Here are some planner pages and how to utilize them with your more open schedules and slower-paced days to maximize summer fun!
The Bucket List page is perfect for creating a Summer Bucket List. Sit down with your kids and write down every activity, service project, craft, etc. that they’d like to do this summer. Do they have a special recipe they want to try or an animal they want to learn about? Put it on the list! There’s a spot for notes, the intended date, whether it happened or not and even a place to rate how much they enjoyed it.
Start prioritizing your list and letting your kids get in on the fun. What are the must-do’s? This planning session has the added bonus of teaching compromise, teamwork, and helping them feel like they have some ownership over their summer!
Using the Month at a Glance page or even just your weekly calendar layout, start penciling in the activities, that way you can plan ahead for ingredients, getting others involved, advertising, etc.
The Event Planning page is another good one to help when planning a summer get-together. Maybe it’s a BBQ, an outdoor movie night, a pool party, or even a lemonade stand. Letting your kids use the Events page can help them feel like an official event planner, which only adds to the fun and enjoyment of planning.
Maybe your child’s goals are more geared toward how many books they can finish with all their free time. The Reading page is perfect for that child! They can make a list of all the books they’d like to read, mark off when they complete it and then give it a starred review. If you’d like to encourage summer reading, this would be a great place to keep track of what they’ve read and then reward them!
And finally, while maybe not fun for your kids, chores are helpful and often necessary to keep the home running smoothly throughout the summer. If you’re like me and prefer the fun to follow after a little bit of work, then the Home Care page is a perfect way to assign chores. There’s even a chart that’s perfect for stickers if you’d like them to earn or work up to some of the previously mentioned Bucket List activities.
While this was geared toward parents, there’s nothing to say that the above pages/steps wouldn’t work for all types of summer activities! Swap out the zoo for a concert and you’re good to go! However you choose to do it, there’s lots of fun to be found this summer with just a little bit of planning!