Summer Brain Time

Okay, so it's summer.  Are your kids bored yet?  lol Mine have already told me more than once that they are.  Apparently that's normal, so no worries.  :)  I want to share an idea I came up with last year.  It was successful and the kids are already asking for it this summer.

I call it my "Brain Time Bin."  Over the years my kids have come home with end of the year school projects.  These were things like a color wheel to practice their colors, flash cards to practice letters and numbers, etc.  I never really did anything with them at first; just set them aside somewhere.  Well, last year I realized we had a lot of this stuff and maybe we could use it over the summer.  I threw all their projects along with some teaching tools I had collected over time from the dollar spot at Target into a large bin and decided to call it our "Brain Time Bin."

The kids loved it!  Almost every day, we would have "brain time."  I'd pull out the bin, set it on the table and let the kids pick out whatever they wanted to do.  We had a hang-man game, which my 1st grader loved to play (and little did he know, he was practicing his spelling at the same time).  We also had flash cards, some lacing cards for my preschoolers, and more.

This year with all three kids having been in school, I created a "Brain Time Bin" for each kid.  We have already started having "brain time" throughout the week.  AND if I forget, the kids have been asking for it themselves.  Amazing.