Summer Plan of Attack

Kindergarten is coming QUICK! I want to savor our summer months together before they are gone and Bug is in school all day 5 days a week. So, I'm making it a priority to be organized this summer (or at least try to be) and not let the days slip away from me.  I've always been much better at making plans than sticking to them, but I'm determined to do it! I'm not striving to follow a strict down-to-the-second schedule all day everyday. I just want to have a plan (a somewhat detailed but flexible plan) and follow through with it (most of the time). I know there will be slip ups, sleeps ins, and last minute conflicts, but my goal is to stick to it more times than not. I put together a binder to help me with this mission. Here is what's in it:

Front Cover. The back cover has our summer bucket list.
I forgot to take a picture of the back.

List of activities we have on hand. The list is divided into the following categories:
fine motor, gross motor, adult directed, open ended, outings/misc

monthly calendars. I purposely left things off the July calendar. I didn't want to jinx anything
(like art workshop & gymnastics) by committing to 2 months before trying them out for a couple weeks.

activity ideas by theme/week

Daily plans/schedule. I don't fill one out everyday, but I try to do one for most days. I usually wait and do them 1 day at a time (the night before). The purple boxes at the top are for planning/listing activities in each of the 5 areas I want to hit daily (adult directed activity, child directed play, gross motor, fine motor, and story time). The blue chart is for writing out a rough schedule of the day.

 

Phonemic awareness activities (blending, segmenting, discrimination). These are super quick and easy.
 We don't do them everyday, just when Kylee asks.When we do (so far) we just do them verbally.

The plan is to focus on a different theme each week. Fancy Nancy is HUGE in our house! The girls love how endlessly fancy Nancy is, and I love that she's so glamorous without being a priss. Nancy is about as girlie as it gets, but she's not afraid to play soccer, wash the dog, or search for bugs. She's curious, creative, and FUN! Anyways, because Fancy Nancy totally rocks, and because we have almost all of the FN books anyways, I've decided to plan each week of our summer around a Fancy Nancy book. Each week, we will read a different Fancy Nancy book and do activities based (loosely) on the theme of the book.

I also made simple countdown calendars for the girls. Each day, the girls help me count and add a jewel sticker to their chart. 75 jewels = kindergarten day (for Bug)! Bear is counting down the days until she goes to Miss Jodi's class (3yr old preschool class, 2 days a week). She is SO excited about being in Jodi's class!!