Fighting Summer Boredom

I have been around my kids almost 24 hours a day, seven days a week for a solid year now.  Homeschool.  It can drive you bonkers.

We now have the summer ahead of us, and I don't want to hear "I'm bored" on the first day.  So here's my plan of attack:

1.  Chore chart.  Each kid has a list of chores that must be completed in the A.M., prior to any outings, dvds, computer games or friend encounters.  The list also includes a 30 minute reading assignment every day as well as a simple math worksheet to keep their brains on "go" for the summer.

2.  Outings.  I've researched library shows with magicians, jugglers, and cowboys.  I've found a local Community Rec Mobile that does a three hour activity once a week with any kids who show up.  I have a zoo membership.  I know where a lot of good parks are.  We find new library books once a week.  We have a camping trip scheduled.  We'll find things to do a lot of days.

Which brings me to #3...

There will be a lot of days when we have nothing going on.  And gone is the era when you could send your kids out to play and remind them to be home in time for dinner.  So.  I've decided that each of my kids needs to choose at least 2 goals to work towards this summer as well as a minimum of 2 projects.  This will give them something to do to fill their time.  And these goals and projects are things that are meant to take several weeks to complete.  For example:

Cameron has finally decided that he likes reading.  Can I get a HALLELUJAH???!!!  So I suggested that perhaps a good goal for him would be to read a Harry Potter book by the end of the summer.   He's thinking about it.

Cameron has decided to plant a garden.  He's out there beating submission into our backyard with a rake right now.  Power to him.

Cameron also wants to build a birdhouse.  Great!  He'll have to research what kind of birds live in our area, what kind of house would suit them, then design one, and finally build and paint it.  I can get two weeks out of that, right?

Ethan is a little more difficult.  So far the only thing that has really gotten him excited is the thought of inventing his own cookie recipe.  I have no idea how that will turn out.  Could be fun, though.

And now I come to you good people - if there are any of you still here.

Got any good project/goal ideas for a ten and eight year old?  I could use some creative juices if you've got any to spare.

Thanks much!

The Unexpected Joy of Weeding

Today was Andrew's day off, and we usually try to get a thing or two done around the house. For some reason, we were especially ambitious today and decided to tackle the yard and the garage.

Boy, you should see the inside of my house right now. It's amazing what one day of neglect will do.

We started on the yard at about nine-thirty this morning. Yeah, we're that good. Andrew mowed and I got to work on a patch of weeding that I'd successfully ignored since the snow first melted, (which truthfully wasn't all that long ago). I purposefully ignore this spot every spring for as long as possible because there are spiders and bugs in that particular area that are so grotesque that the thought of my gloved hands touching them makes my skin crawl.

Thanks to weeks of my slovenliness regarding this patch of earth, there were so many weeds that I hadn't even made a dent in it by the time Andrew finished the mowing.

I was almost discouraged, but then two things happened:

1: I decided I didn't care if it ever got finished.

2: I found an Easter egg.



Yeah, an Easter egg. A camouflage one, no less. Three guys hid eggs for me on Easter Sunday, and it is now obvious to me that neither my husband, my brother, or my brother-in-law know me well enough to know that hiding an egg in that spot could mean it would never be found because weeding is at the very bottom of my to-do list.

It falls right after shaving my bikini line and shredding my tax documents from 1998.

So finding that egg today was like a big reward for making it so far into the jungle. It was a sign that I could quit, because there was no way I was going to find anything else in there as good as an Easter egg filled with one plastic soldier and one box of Nerds.


Maybe I'll get to the rest next week.

And yes, there is a bush under all those weeds. See it? It has yellow on its leaves. Everything else has to go.

Serengeti Plains (That's a grassland, you know.)

About a week and a half ago, Cameron brought home a bright yellow packet of information from school. The third graders were learning about habitats and each child would be responsible for making a diorama of the ecosystem they had been assigned. Parents were to help them gather supplies and send them to school by March 2nd. Today, in other words.

The teachers wanted the dioramas to be the child's work, not the parents, so they will be constructing the dioramas at school. The same theory applies to their animal reports. Parents here seem to want their kid to put the other kids to shame with their brilliance, so they "help" their child with the report by building a robotic replica of a raccoon that is wearing the skin of the poor animal that they sped up to hit with their Land Rover last week, and then all the learning opportunities for the child have been sucked up and swallowed by the self-serving parent. But I digress.

That bright yellow paper that Cameron brought home from school said that "every project should be the student's best work, so please plan ahead and don't leave it until the night before."

So last night we were frantically running from store to store, gathering supplies for this diorama. Cameron was to make a grasslands ecosystem depicting three living animals, three specific plants, three specific non-living things, (rocks and dirt are specific non-living things, right?), and one food chain including a producer, a consumer and a decomposer.

While the dioramas were to be constructed at school, the elements within them needed to be ready to go. So last night at nine o'clock Cameron began painting the background, gluing the ground base and sculpting animals from salt dough.

I have to say that I'm pretty impressed with his work. My only contribution was kneading the salt dough. He did the rest and feels confident that all the other kids will be jealous of his completed project, which is fine with me, because he owns it from the pipe cleaner trees to the model of the bloody impala.