How to Get Your Child to Do Their Summer Work

(Please note that all ideas on this blog are owned by Leslie Burby and copyrighted as such. Feel free to play these games but you do not have the right to sell or reprint this idea (in books, on social media, on a blog, or any other computer sharing) without giving credit to Leslie Burby and linking to this blog.)

In the summer, I agree that kids need time to be kids and climb a tree and walk a stone wall because working on motor skills is important, too, but kids do need to keep their brains sharp as well. Most parents and kids think of sitting at the kitchen table doing worksheet after worksheet to beat the dreaded "brain drain." "Brain drain" basically means that children forget most of what they learned in school during the summer. To stop the kids from forgetting what they learned, I have my children do a combination of fun "games" and "science experiments" as well as worksheets. Why? Well, because if I only do the fun games and experiments than my kids have a hard time sitting still in class. So I think that there needs to be a balance. We aim for only one or two worksheets to be done a day or 2 twice a week (but we don't stress if we miss one day because Grandma decided to bring us to the zoo or Mom needs a break and we spend the day walking the river.)
However, even though we read every day, and do worksheets (almost) every day, my kids still have a tendency to have days when they just don't want to do their worksheets. (Each of my children are sent home with a packet of dittos to work on during the summer and it has to be handed in on the first day of school.) So when the complaining starts, my brain starts racing of ideas to get them to complete the dreaded worksheets while having fun with them. Here are just two ideas.

MONEY

In order to get my kids to identify the fronts and backs of the coins (just the four basic penny, nickel, dime, quarter) we did crayon rubbing. 
I recommend using Glue Dots of the 1/2in size to get the coin to stay still while rubbing.
Before we started I folded the college ruled paper into fourths and wrote Penny, Nickel, Dime, Quarter. I wrote 1 cent with the penny, and 5 cents in the nickel box, and ten cents in the dime and 1 = 25 cents, 2= 50 cents, 3= 75 cents, 4= $1.00 or 100 cents in the quarter box.

First, put a Glue Dot on the back of a coin and stick it to your table or floor.


Then, have the children rub a crayon over it. We used the fat toddler crayons, but explore with different size and different color crayons for fun.


After everyone had a good rubbing of the front and back of each coin we played a game.





MONEY HUNT

I had this idea to have a money hunt instead of an egg hunt. The deal was that they could keep all the coins found if they added them up correctly. I was going to hide them in a small area beside my patio but one of my daughters was very concerned that she wouldn't be able to find the coins in grass and didn't want us to lose money because that would be wasteful. So to calm her anxiety, and because I don't want to waste money (she had a very good point) I dumped all our change on the freshly cleaned kitchen floor and gave them 60 seconds to collect as many coins as possible. 

 RULES

1.They must try to collect at least one of each coin.
2. After the timer goes off everyone must go to the table or set area to add the money but before counting they must make sure every player has one of each coin. If one player doesn't have a quarter and the other player has two then the player with two must surrender one quarter tot he player without a quarter.
3. They must sort their coins on the paper.
4. They must add up how much money they have for each kind of coin. 22 cents in pennies, 30 cents in dimes, etc.
5. They must then add up all four totals to see how much money they have in total.
6. If they add correctly, they keep the money.

The kids had a blast. I loved this game because they worked on:
skip counting (counted by 1's, 5's, 10's and 25's);
adding;
sorting;
fine motor skills (picking up the money and sorting it);
individual and team play.

Best of all they were rewarded for their hard work immediately and positively. As soon as they filled out the worksheet from the school and the math they did to add up their coins.