By Leslie Lindsay

It may be summer but your kiddos still need to stretch their brains.  Here’s a fun way to keep the words a coming!

• Visit your library and stuff a basket full of books.  Try some new genres!  My 8 year old daughter was found browsing in the juvenile history section. Her favorite selections–Ancient Egypt, and the history of the Titantic. 
• Start a journal.  Pick one up at your favorite discount store.  Write in it everyday…simple things like what you did and where you went will suffice.  If you (or your child) feels like going deeper, go for it!
• Make a list of your favorite foods, put them in ABC order.  Maybe it’s a list of all of your favorite summertime foods: corn on the cob, watermelon, pasta salad.  Ask your mom to make some of those favorite dishes as a way to count down the days.
• Stage a scavenger/nature hunt, create a map, make a list of things to find.  Gather some friends and go!
• Read a book to your younger siblings or neighborhood friends.  Can you be the teacher? 
• Look for words in hidden places.  Can you find words within words on street signs, billboards, around town?  What about in the pile of junk mail (ask mom and dad what mail you can sort through, first).
• Sort through some magazines and catalogs and create a collage.  Make it all the same color, or make theme be that everything starts with the same letter/sound.  Get really challenging and make the same color/same sound. 
• Read anything today!  An instruction manual, the back of a cereal box, a magazine or newspaper…then write a one paragraph summary of what you read.
• Grab a friend or a sibling and write summer time words on your driveway or sidewalk.  Or, make a list of all of the things you’d like to do this summer: eat ice cream, catch butterflies, go to the splash pad, play kickball…maybe even dream a little…go to Disney, run on the beach.  The possibilities are endless!
• Write and then perform a short play.  Adapt this to make it like Reader’s Theatre (read the script/no need to memorize, no props). 
• Observe the night sky.  We do this on “Firepit Friday.”  Have a bonfire, roast some marshmallows and lean back and look at the sky.  What’d you see?  Can you describe it in using a new array of adjectives? Shimmery?  Sparkly?  Vast?  Bring a dictionary or thesarus with you.

What other ideas do you have?  Share them, share them!! 

Class dismissed…