The First Day of Summer

I'm always thrown for a loop when the first day of summer rolls around. It's almost July, the kids have been out of school for weeks...and it's only just NOW summer? At least I feel better since all the things I have planned to do this summer are stalled, which means since today is really the start of summer, I'm not REALLY behind, right? All that good-intentioned home-schooling I was going to do, the chore chart, my gardening...it's all not really where I pictured it to be by now. I'm still reading with my oldest, but the actual "home school" time I wanted to take each day with the big kids just really isn't happening as regularly as I had hoped. My plan was to work with them while the little guy(s) sleep, but I'm finding that that time is much better suited for them to play outside while I do inside things undisturbed...like blog. I guess it's really not a bad thing that I'm sending my kids outside to play instead of making them sit inside and do "school work". I read an article recently about doing school work in the summer (apparently some districts actually send summer work home and quiz the kids the first day back!) They argue that worksheets aren't necessarily the best answer to working with your kids over the summer. The author (Elizabeth Shaw from Kiwi) suggests doing muti-dimensional projects over the summer with your kids...well DUH! Why didn't I think of that?!?! I remember my mom doing worksheets with us and I guess I just kind of thought that's what I should do! So that's going to be my new task. Finding a topic that interests my kids and creating a project around that that we can work on and incorporate various areas of learning. As for the chore chart--that just needs a little more motivation on BOTH of our parts!

I realize that many of my posts are mostly for parents of young children, which I know not everyone has, so I thought I should add something else. I'm going to try to start adding a "fun fact" each post. My first fun fact is about diet and it's from Jillian Michael's book Mastering Your Metabolism.
"For each can of diet soft drink consumed each day, a person's risk of obesity goes up 41%"!!!