Someone told me last week that her kids were halfway through Summer break (from school). That genuinely surprised me. I learned last year that Summer was the perfect time for us to homeschool pretty consistently, so we’ve still been going (with the intent to use our breaks more in the Fall and during the holidays). And knowing we’d still be schooling, I’ve had some Summer activity ideas brewing in my head since before the season started that fit right into our Summer of learning. But these are great activities for anyone not homeschooling and just looking for a little more structure or even just some random suggestions for things to do. As usual, I’m late to put my thoughts down on paper (or digital notepad). But here I am at the halfway point (for at least some) finally doing it. Not too, too late.

Anyway… I created this schedule with flexibility in mind. Take a trip on Thursday instead of Tuesday, Build stuff on Friday. Make something on Mondays. Or just do one or two of these things in a week. You get the idea. It’s just inspiration.

I also created this schedule knowing that having set days for certain activities is helpful not only to me, but also the kids. They enjoy knowing what to look forward to and can make plans in their heads better with that knowledge.

So, here’s the schedule in written form with a bit more detail than the graphic:

Monday - Build Something

There are really so many ways to bring a building day to life. Use a specific type of building item, theme your build, race to build something, have a building challenge, work together to make something awesome, and so much more.

The suggestions I put in the graphic for building items are LEGO, magnetic tiles, wooden or unit blocks, dominoes, a blanket fort, and a stick teepee. A few other suggestions are Lincoln Logs, a marble run, something with cardboard boxes or popsicle sticks, and a building kit (like this one my kids loved).

We’ve invested heavily in LEGO and magnetic tiles (Picasso sets are our favorite, but we have a few different kinds) since my son was old enough to start playing with them. They were birthday and Christmas gifts from us and other family members, which made it easier to enlarge our collection. So it’s really fun now to have a lot to use to build!

For unit blocks, I’ve found that Jenga blocks are absolutely perfect for building! My kids have reached for them more than anything else recently. They build mazes and castles and pretend wars and forts and lots more! They’ve even used them to make indoor putt putt courses. They have 2 sets each that I purchased when on a BOGO sale at Target.

Several of the other items—like dominoes, blankets, and Lincoln Logs—I’ve collected through thrifting. The dominoes double as pretty decor in a glass container!

Tuesday - Take a Trip

My suggestions are pretty common, but they are easy to do in a day without much (or any) planning. I’m going to divide them into free and paid options below.

FREE - park, nature hike, library

PAID - zoo (a membership is typically totally worth it if you live near one), museum, lunch out, indoor activities (like ice skating, roller skating, a trampoline park, indoor rock climbing, Top Golf)

Wednesday - Play a “Game”

I used the word, “game,” here a little loosely because I couldn’t think of a better term. But basically I just mean anything that challenges the mind a bit without a lot of mess. So things like:

Board Games - A few of our current favorites are Sequence, Blokus, and Sorry. Card Games - We LOVE Play Nine and Skyjo! Puzzles - I pick these up at thrift stores if they’ve never been opened, but also occasionally grab a pretty or seasonally appropriate one elsewhere. Activity Books - Our absolute favorite activity books for a couple years now are these 1,000 dot-to-dot books. They’re frame-worthy once completed! Coloring Books - We’re partial to more detailed coloring books. This Audubon one is on our wishlist right now. Paint-(or Color-)By-Numbers - We’ve done a few of the Mondo Llama brand paint-by-numbers in the past year, and they’re good (not tooooo overly detailed).

Thursday - Create Something

A painting, a drawing, something with air dry clay, a Perler bead creation, a sewing or knitting or embroidery project, an outdoor chalk masterpiece, and more. So be crafty, yes. But you could also take this in a whole different direction and do a science experiment!

Friday - Have a Party

Make this anything you want! Bake a cake just because. Have a cute little tea party. Plan out a fun charcuterie board for lunch. Have an ice cream celebration and make it extra fancy or super simple…I’m sure it’ll be well received either way! Or do a book party where you read a book, make a craft, and have some sort of related food item. There are so many options here. And anything you call a party is sure to be exciting for everyone!

Learned about and watched some dock diving yesterday!

I had no idea it was a real dog sport. Fun to see!

My husband has recently started doing weekly round-ups, so I’m taking his format and making my own monthly round-up. With more photos. Because that’s what I like.

GARDENING

My garden was a huge focus in April (it is a lot of other months too, but especially in April). Planting transplants, putting in more seeds, purchasing other plants. I love it all so much.

Pictured here: Swamp Milkweed, Spoon Tomatoes, Craspedia, Sage, Jalapeños, more Sage, Bachelor’s Buttons, Beefsteak Tomatoes, Borage, and Four O’Clocks

I’ve also been reconfiguring a few of my garden beds. I’m making two from three. And they’ll match two in front of them, so it looks a little more symmetrical. I’ll also be able to add another arched trellis (like in the photo below) for some climbing plants (and beauty).

I let the kids take over one of these new beds, and they have been excited. They’re currently growing (everything from seed) beefsteak tomatoes, jalapeños, bush beans, sunflowers, borage, sage, and swamp milkweed. All with minimal help from me.

So far, I’ve harvested about 30-something Sungold cherry tomatoes, several handfuls of strawberries (the birds have enjoyed way more than we have this year), and 2 banana peppers. And there’s a lot that’s looking good and should be ready to pick pretty soon.

OTHER PLANTS

Outside of the garden but still in the outdoor plant realm :), I’m probably most proud and excited about my Louisiana irises and Peggy Martin roses. They were beautiful this year. My next project is going to be attempting to propogate some new Peggy Martins.

I have 3 of these roses climbing on their own 16 ft. cattle panel trellises secured to 3 t-posts with UV resistant zip ties.

BASEBALL

My son is enjoying playing coach pitch baseball for the third season. And I thoroughly enjoy (with some nerves mixed in) watching him learn, grow, and have fun doing it. We all do. He was invited to try out for an all-star team again, but we decided to pass on that as he’s only 8, and we’re not ready to have baseball completely take over our lives. I really don’t know when we might become more involved, but now just isn’t the right time.

HOMESCHOOL

We’ve found a pretty good rhythm in our homeschooling lately. Getting done earlier in the day has always helped, and we’ve actually been able to consistently accomplish that.

We’ve also had a really great semester with our co-op. Our topic this semester was animals by location (so there was geography mixed in). There was a lot of great learning opportunities. And most weeks included some sort of a craft or hands on project. Simply because I love how all of their creations look in a group, here are a few of the things they made this month.

We also had some pretty cool field trips. Just a couple of weeks ago, we met a fellow homeschool momma and her daughter at a park and learned all about showing goats. Milked goats and fed the kids too. But the highlight was definitely baby goat snuggles!

MY GRANDPA TURNED 90!

My Pop, my last remaining grandparent, turned 90 at the beginning of April! We took a trip to North Louisiana to see him and celebrate with a lot of other family.

Some impromptu extra “school” time outdoors this afternoon: Finding tracks and identifying them 🦝 + picking dandelions, etc. and watching a timelapse video of how they morph from bloom to seed.

Did a sort of Icelandic Christmas Book Flood at our co-op today (we’re diving into a Christmas Around the World study for the next few weeks). The kids drew names a few weeks ago and found the perfect books for each other, many of which were thrifted. It was simple, but so special.

I documented the activities we did at our co-op last week while learning about the Olmec ancient civilization. Decided I’d do the same thing again this week.

To recap the quick details of our co-op: It is small-ish. Nine families. Eleven kids, ages 5-12. Five of the moms rotate lessons for the semester. Most lessons consist of several rounds of sharing information pertinent to the day’s topic and breaking between each sharing session to do a related activity.

This week was my lesson. I was really excited about it because, as I mentioned in my last related post, my family and I recently saw Sight & Sound Theater’s live show, “Daniel,” streamed in a movie theater. Babylon is the location of the entire production. Seeing it inspired me to dive into my lesson early, and I started researching and reading. Even after the lesson now, I still plan to continue reading more. I appreciate the Babylonian Empire’s role in our world’s history, but the connections in the Bible are what completely intrigued me. Spending just a short amount of time (in the grand scheme of things) preparing for my lesson, I learned so much. One of my favorite perks of homeschool. It really is fun to learn WITH my kids.

As for the lesson itself, I opened with a short video that somewhat cheesily summarized the Babylonian Empire and its’ inventions and key features. We continued that “overview” discussion after the video, then began to talk a little more in depth about King Hammurabi and his Code of Laws. After that, they made their own “stone tablets” by cutting out the shape on black card stock and “inscribing” a similar picture to Hammurabi’s Code and their own law with a pencil. I mentioned making the law they chose to write fair (in terms of proportional punishment), which was a characteristic of many of Hammurabi’s laws. They wrote most that way, and though some were silly and fun, it was interesting to see what was important to some of the kids.

Knowing we had a couple of projects that would likely take up more time, I chose to go a little more simple for this project…although, it translated even better than I thought. Had we had more time or multiple days to work on it, I might would have decided to make a clay tablet, inscribe it using a bamboo skewer or sturdy toothpick, then paint it black.

…

The next discussion/project combo centered around the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. A bit elusive due to the fact that there is no physical evidence they existed. But there are written references. And it is considered one of the Wonders of the Ancient World. The thought of it is intriguing. I explained where the name came from, then proceeded to give each kid supplies to make their own type of hanging garden. I really wanted to do a fun project with egg crates and more garden-ish materials, but I knew we wouldn’t be able to complete it in our allotted time. So, instead, I gathered items for them to create a hanging potted plant as a symbol of the Hanging Gardens. I used these pots that I already had on hand and punched two holes opposite each other near the top. I got a tropical-ish selection of flowers and leaves as well as a couple of packages of moss and a couple of pieces of floral foam from Dollar Tree. I cut the foam to fit in each pot ahead of time and gave everyone a pot, the flowers to arrange, moss to glue on top (regular school glue worked just fine as long as it had a few minutes to dry) and a piece of string to tie in the holes so that the pot could hang. (I wish I had taken a picture of the pot actually hanging…whoops.)

…

The last big point we hit on was about King Nebuchadnezzar II. We discussed who he was, when he reigned in Babylon, and several stories related to him. Things I was (and the kids were) familiar with through the Bible like the Fiery Furnace and the dream he had about the statue that Daniel interpreted. But also things I wasn’t as familiar with like his incredible military strategy and the Ishtar Gate that he had built.

Our last project centered around the Ishtar gate, which was made of blue-glazed bricks and had various animals throughout glazed in brown and gold. I found this post about making a mosaic of the Ishtar gate, but never got it to load correctly. So, I made up my own. The supplies were a piece of white card stock as a base, various colors of blue card stock that I precut into small rectangles, and a piece of yellow construction paper with a lion printed on it. The lion was one of the animals on the gate, and it actually was representative of the goddess, Ishtar, so that’s the animal I chose to include in our craft. I made a document in Canva with 4 lions in a striding motion like on the Ishtar gate, then cut some yellow construction paper to 8.5” x 11” (because that was easier and likely quicker than figuring out how to adjust the printer’s paper tray and settings and such) to print on. I just cut each sheet into 4 rectangles so that the kids could cut out their lions. I used clear Elmer’s school glue to make the example, and it worked well. But some chose to use a glue stick in class, and that worked well also. The mosaics came out really nice!

That was all for class time. But I know ourselves as well as some of the other families are reading Story of the World, Volume 1 alongside our weekly meet-ups. It is a great additional resource for studying ancient civilizations.

Last couple of quick things to share: This collection of resources for homeschooling through ancient civilizations and my Ancient Civilizations Pinterest board

Yesterday was our co-op day. We’ve been studying Ancient Civilizations this semester. Our focus this week was the Olmecs.

If you are not familiar with this group of people, they were an ancient Mesoamerican civilization believed to have thrived along the Mexican Gulf Coast from approximately 1200 to 400 B.C.

Our co-op is small-ish. Nine families. Eleven kids, ages 5-12. Five of the moms rotate lessons for the semester. Most lessons consist of several rounds of sharing information pertinent to the day’s topic and breaking between each sharing session to do a related activity.

This was not my week to teach, but I wanted to share my kids’ work, perhaps as inspiration, and definitely as a keepsake for myself to look back on here.

The first project of the day was making stone heads out of air dry clay, which was representative of the giant stone heads the Olmecs were known for creating. The kids were shown several photos as inspiration and given toothpicks and popsicle sticks to use to carve and shape.

She was so proud of the helmet.

Hers and his. He was slightly less enthused with the project, thus putting much less time and energy into it. But he still did it and knew what it represented.

The second project was patiently wrapping rubber bands around a wadded up piece of paper to make a bouncy ball. They used the small rainbow loom bands. This activity was meant to correspond with learning that the Olmecs were the first known civilization to use rubber.

The last project for the day was constructing a pyramid with homemade Rice Krispie treats and vanilla buttercream icing (so, so yum…our resident baker was the teacher, which is always exciting 😋). This was a nod to the Olmecs building pyramids or pyramid-like structures like most other ancient groups of people.

His. I took a photo of hers–which was wider and flatter than her brother’s–but some of the other kids were in the background, and I wanted to respect their privacy so chose not to post.

The Olmec lesson may sound somewhat simple, but doing projects with 11 kids can take up a big chunk of time. And some lessons are shorter or less involved than others. It’s so wonderful that each week is similarly structured, yet approached from a different mind. And we’re always encouraged to dive deeper into each topic.

Next week is my second lesson to teach for the semester. I’ve been excited about it since watching the Sight & Sound Theatre’s “Daniel” last month when it was in theaters on Labor Day weekend. So much to unpack and learn.

We had a Christmas in July event with our homeschooling community a couple of weeks ago. I brought supplies to make pipe cleaner snowflakes. It was super easy to put together and relatively inexpensive. And it went a long way for a large group craft (we had close to 40 kids).

I got a pack of 200 white pipe cleaners. Kept to just one color to keep it simple. And picked out 6 bright, Summer-y colors of pony beads. I picked up those supplies at Hobby Lobby on a week when the beads were half off. But even when not on sale, I’ve found Hobby Lobby to be the most cost effective place for those particular items.

Creating the snowflakes is pretty easy, but younger children might need help combining three pipe cleaners to make the basic snowflake shape. I just twisted every other short stem tightly around the middle.

All these photos are from snowflakes we made at home before and after the event, so they are a few different sizes (and we used a few different beads than the original 6 colors). But for the group, I cut pipe cleaners in half (a small pair of beading wire cutters is super handy for that). That way only 5-7 beads was needed per stem. I saw multiple ways to finish these off on Pinterest and gave the kids the option to finish it however they wanted. A lot chose to use more beads and wrap the very end of the pipe cleaner around itself to keep the beads from falling off. In that case, the ends were just straight. Some, like myself and my children, chose to add one or two extra small pieces of pipe cleaner to the ends for more of a traditional snowflake vibe.

This was an easy and pretty quick craft. And it was fun to do with the “Christmas in July” theme to change it up. My kids and I have made 3 or 4 each, and I’m actually planning on us putting together several more and making them into a garland for real Christmas season!

PS - If you’re doing this at home or in a smaller group and would like a book to go along with it, I recommend Snowflake Bentley.

Co-op Tuesday

Learned about minerals and rock characteristics.

Also did some rock painting with these cool acrylic paint markers (pictured) and got free basalt stone arm massages from our in-house masseuse (aka a homeschool mom). 🙌🏼

On Monday, a precious homeschool group we are part of met up for a Donut Shop Valentine’s Party. A family in our group owns a donut shop, so they invited everyone to come see the process of making donuts on a large scale, and then, the kids decorated mini donut king cakes (‘tis the season in Louisiana). It was so sweet (in more than one way) and special!

After the tour and decorating fun, the kids all exchanged Valentine’s cards and little gifts. Side note: homeschool kids still get to do all the fun things! I kind of had an idea of what Brigsby would bring, but didn’t make a final decision until the night before (with his help). Honestly, that’s usually how I roll.

His gift and Valentine’s card came together sooo cute, and I was proud because I created it myself. Super easy. So, thought I’d share. And bonus: IT’S NOT CANDY!

I searched Pinterest a week or so ago for some Valentine’s exchange ideas. Found some cute things, but not a combo of anything I liked (or wanted to pay for). In searching, though, I came across these cute shuttle pens! I ordered them just in case since Amazon returns are pretty simple.

I moved on from them thinking we’d do some cute stickers with a card that said, “Stuck on you.” But the night before, Brigsby and I decided we preferred the pens for the exchange.

So, Monday morning, I quickly (which isn’t usually the case) pulled up a flash card template in Canva, deleted everything except the layout, and made these “cards” that say, “You color my world.” Perfect for the colorful ink in the shuttle pens! I printed them on card stock, and they came out so nice!

I should’ve pulled out my paper trimmer to probably speed up the process a bit, but it actually didn’t take long to cut them out. And I would’ve had to do the rounded corners (which I think make things look extra nice!) with scissors anyway.

After I got them all cut, we stuck the cards in the pen clip, and voila! Homemade, purposeful, and not super cheapy Valentine’s gifts!