You guys. Do I ever have a treat for y’all! I’ve been racking my brain trying to find ways to keep Kate amused this summer during our daily therapy rounds, and then it hit me. She’s absolutely obsessed with the Percy Jackson books. The first one is The Lightening Thief and if you haven’t read it you should! But I’m getting ahead of myself.
You guys may remember from my Letter of the Week posts, but I love themes. We only got through about letter “I” and we spent more like a month on each letter, but Kate and I had so much fun with them. In fact, I’m considering pulling some of them out and reworking them for the babies. 🙂 But I digress. Kate got me to read The Lightening Thief and I was forced to admit that she had found an actual, honest to goodness, good book series. The books are set in the modern day, but the characters are “half-bloods”, which is to say they are the offspring of Greek gods/ goddesses and mortals. And they go to summer camp. SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY! I bought them all for Kate and they’re all fabulous. lol.
She regularly begs me to homeschool her for breaks and summer because she’s a weirdo she loves school. I typically tell her just to go play outside, but I do love me some Greek mythology. Plus, the former teacher in me doesn’t want her to go all summer without doing any writing or math so I needed to come up with something. Then I had the brilliant idea that we would spend each week in a different location from the book. Metaphorically speaking of course. (Although if someone wants to sponsor a RaptorMama trip to Greece, I’m all for it!)
A bit of background. Last summer, I tried to get Kate to do one of those summer bridge books. Despite her claims that she looooooooved school and haaaaaaaated summer and reaaaaaaally wanted to do worksheets everyday, she wasn’t really all that into it. And I wasn’t all that into making her do boring worksheets every day. Mia also has therapy 4 mornings a week, so I wanted something fun for Kate that she could do fairly independently. Then it hit me. Remember the road trip book I made Kate? (Um, it just occurred to me that I probably never blogged about that. Whoops.) Well, anyway, I thought I could make her a little weekly workbook to go along with our location. Win win.
I’ve decided to give our weeks a bit of structure. Generally speaking, Mia has therapy from about 8-9 on Monday and Wednesday so there’s still a whole full day ahead of us. On Tuesdays, she has therapy from 8-9 and then we go to an open gym class at Gymboree from 10-11 that’s about 30 minutes away. And on Thursdays we have therapy from about 10-11:30. Given that, I’ve decided that Mondays will be swimming with my mom at her neighborhood pool. Wednesdays will be field trips related to the theme. And Fridays we will “visit the oracle” AKA take the babies to story time at the library and check out some books. Tuesdays and Thursdays will be craft days and cooking days. This is all subject to change because we also have a ton of dr’s appointments in the summer. Oh, and in the books they get a bead for each year that they’re at camp, but Kate and I are going to do a bead for each week because we’re awesome like that. I ordered some plain wooden beads on Amazon and she’s going to choose how to paint them to reflect our adventures that week.
Oh! And this also ties into my screen time plan. Remember the summer boredom buster that I trialed over Spring Break? (Maybe not because I only mentioned it in a goals post and never blogged about it? Basically, she earned points for doing outside challenges, desk challenges, or badge work.) It worked pretty well, but Kate informed me today that, while she still loves Girl Scouts, she doesn’t want to earn any more badges by herself because it wasn’t that fun without other girls. After I stopped sobbing in the corner, I pulled myself together to come up with a new screen time plan. My goal with the first one was two fold. One, I didn’t want her begging me for screen time incessantly because I knew it would drive me crazy. Two, I wanted to make sure she was spending time outside and time being creative before she got screen time. (In case y’all don’t remember, I’m a mean mommy and Kate really only gets screen time on the weekends for about 30 minutes a day or so unless we’re having a family movie night.) I think the boredom buster reminded her of how much fun she can have outside, because now, 85% of the time, she chooses to play in the backyard or practice volleyball instead of asking for screen time. #winning But, as a motivator to finish her booklets every week, she will earn 5 drachmas (fake gold coins I had from a St Patrick’s Day theme) for each 5 pages she completes. (Each booklet has 20 pages.) She can also earn drachmas for doing extra chores, being helpful with her siblings, or just being delightful in general. I’m thinking 30 drachmas + a clean room will equal 3o minutes of screen time. I’m also thinking that I’m waaaaaay overusing parenthesis in this blog post.
Check back on Friday and I’ll share what we’re doing for the first week of summer. I can’t wait!!!
This post contains affiliate links. I think. 😉