Cure For End-Of-Summer Boredom

My kids are bored and you know what that means, right? It means fighting and whining and complaining. And there is nuthin’ that pushes my buttons faster than THAT!

Now, normally they can find something to keep themselves occupied, but this has been a long summer. We usually homeschool year round, but this year life just got the upper hand and we’ve probably had 5 scheduled days, while the rest of the summer has been a herky-jerky mish-mash of free time that has resulted in many days of Unpleasantness between the kids.

My answer to the, “Mom, I’m bored,” statement is usually, “Oh, good! I’ve got a dirty toilet and scrub brush right here!” But they just don’t seem to like that very much.

Go figure!

So I’ve come up with some ideas to keep them occupied until I can pull it together and get school started.

1. We make kids scrapbooks. I give the kids a mix of dud pictures and some of the double prints I have left over, a 3 ring binder, and clear page protectors. Then we glue the pictures onto white printer paper, draw and design around them, and slide them into their pages. I just let them loose and then read a good book!


2. They play with corn starch goop! This stuffy is Nas-Tee but loads of fun!


3. Give them shovels and let ‘em dig. I have a place in my yard where I just don’t care what it looks like. It’s off in a corner, and no one can see it. You’d be amazed how much fun 4 kids and 4 little garden shovels can have. They made up stories about treasure, and journeying to the center of the earth, and pirates that lasted from morning till dark. You wouldn’t believe how clean I got the house that day while everyone was outside.


4. I keep several sets of toys in plastic buckets, hidden away. That way when we are stuck inside (we live in the rainy Pacific Northwest) it’s like having new toys to play with. I pull out a bucket and set it in the middle of the room and pretty soon all the kids are building cities with blocks, or playing make believe with the little people set. (Even the almost 12 year old jumps in, but he’d never admit it!)


5. Now, this one sounds too easy and like it would never work, but the thing that works the VERY BEST is giving them each a drawer or cupboard and letting them organize it ANY WAY THEY WANT! If you are a control freak like me, this one might be hard. But once I loosened up about it, I figured the free time I would gain would outweigh the fact that it wasn’t being done MY way. Although sometimes this can cause severe eye twitching in the control freak.


6. And one of the funnest things we’ve done is a treasure hunt. I make each kid a list of things to find outside; a round rock, a pine needle, a feather. Then I send them off. The winner gets to pick dessert that night or pick a book for me to read to everyone.
   

Let me know if you have any ideas. I’d love to add them to my “IF THEY DON”T STOP WHINING I’M GOING TO SCREAM” list.

Oh and check out more ideas at Works for me Wednesday.