Summer {Fun} School—Birds

We have successfully completed our first week of summer fun school at our house!  Here’s a glimpse of what we did!

For the first week, we chose birds.  No rhyme or reason to it, just did…

For math, I found a large open bird clipart online.  I copied it to a word document and enlarged it to fit the whole page.  I added color words at the bottom in a text box.  Then I assigned each color a number.  For my 7 year old, I wrote subtraction sentences in each space of the bird, and did addition for my 5 year old. 

After they answered the math equations, they looked at the answer and colored it according to the number/color at the bottom.

For science, I googled “how do birds fly?”.  We found a couple of websites all about how birds fly.  One even had a visual breakdown.  It was actually quite cool, and the boys kept doing it over and over!

We did a science/food experience in one.  We made rice crispy treats with colored marshmallows.  We hypothesized as to what color the marshmallow goo would turn out to be in the end.  None of us were right.  (It turned out pink-ish.)  The yummiest science experiment ever!  Then we shaped the treats into bird nests, complete with marshmallow eggs.  (We were wishing Peeps were still available!)

For our art project, we got out paint and tried to paint something that had to do with birds.  The 7 year old painted a nest in reeds, the 5 year old painted a tree with a bird nest and bird in it.  The 3 year olds just painted—their first painting experience. 

Our fieldtrip was pretty easy.  We live near a bird refuge, so we went there.  There’s a museum that we explored first—they had a lot of fun hands-on things.  We also got a visual check-list of some of the birds that we’d see at the refuge.  They have a 12 mile drive around the marshes to see birds up close.  We went on that and saw some pretty cool birds!  (Though since we live in the country we see most of them by our house anyway.) 

That is a great blue heron flying away from us.  Pretty cool!

I also did a few other activities with the kids when they wanted to do more school.  We have these fun white boards and I have the kids practice writing whatever they need to work on.  To make it more fun, when they’re done they get to circle their very best looking number or letter when they’re done. 

Also, my 5 year old needs practice cutting, so I made an easy fun cutting path paper on the back side of some junk mail.  (And yes, he wears his Spiderman suit almost everyday.)

When school is done, we all get a small treat—sometimes it really helps motivate them!

Summer {Fun} School

I decided to do “Summer School” with my boys this year.  I’ve always been somewhat relaxed during summer, but now that they’re getting older, I feel it’s important to keep their minds active and engaged. (As well as keeping their skills up.)  I wanted it to be more of an educational fun though, so we’re calling it “Summer Fun School”. 

To start off, we thought it’d be fun to do a theme a week.  So we came up with a list of 20 themes, then grouped some of them and cut the rest out.  (Maybe we’ll do those next summer.)    Next, we picked weeks to do each theme—we did this by marking it directly on the calendar so we could work it into things we are already doing.  We scheduled “Oceans” the week we are going on vacation to Washington where we will be seeing a lot of ocean time, and “Farm Animals” the week of our county fair.

Next, we made up a schedule of things to do each day.  Monday is math and history, Tuesday is science and service, Wednesday is a food experience, Thursday is art and music, Friday is a review of the topic using any activities, and Saturday is a fieldtrip as a family since Dad isn’t at work.  This is just a guideline though, and depending on what else is going on, I’ve prepared the boys to be somewhat flexible.  And just because we did math on Monday, doesn’t mean we can’t work it in throughout the week.  I also bought my kids some special notebooks that we will write in everyday to work on writing skills and spelling.  This is the last thing we do at the end of “School”. 

We also have a daily schedule of what we’re going to do throughout the day.  The plan is to do cleaning and exercise in the morning, followed by some play time.  After lunch we will read and have school.  School will take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour and a half, depending on the activities planned. 

I will be posting each week as it is done, to share the activities and things we did!

Happy summer fun creating!