Unless you're sending your children off to sleep-away camp for the entire summer, you may be worrying right now about what you're going to do to keep the "I'm bored!" chanting to a minimum when your kids are out of school. Day camps and swimming lessons can keep them entertained for a number of hours, but you will still be faced with many evenings and weekends full of warm weather and kids who want to take advantage of their free time.

To stay ahead of the game, consider making a Summer Fun Kit. The purpose of the Summer Fun Kit is to have a book with a seemingly endless supply of ideas for summer fun. You'll need to do some brainstorming and decide how much you want to spend on possible activities, but it doesn't require much work after these decisions have been made.

To set up a Kit, you will need plastic sheet protectors, paper, and a three ring notebook. You can either print ideas on the top of each page with your computer's printer, or you can write them with a magic marker. Whatever is the easiest for you, go with that idea. You want to keep the majority of the page blank, however, so that your kids can write about when they completed the activity and provide pictures and reviews in the blank space. You'll want to use the sheet protectors so that you can put tickets and passes in the pages ahead of time and the kids can put mementos into the pages after an activity is completed. (For example, if you have a local pool, you can keep the pool passes in the sheet protector so you don't lose them.) At the end of the summer, your children will have a book full of memories and you'll have notes on what worked and didn't work when you're making plans for next summer.

Except for planned vacations or theater productions, I would avoid scheduling when an activity takes place. This will leave the choosing up to your children and give them some control over their summer.

Here are more than 15 ideas to get you started:

• Picnic in the park
• See a movie on the big screen
• Family bike ride to [X]
• Sleepover at grandma's
• Trip to local children's museum
• Afternoon at the zoo
• Painting piggy banks at the pottery center
• Trip to the amusement park
• Watch favorite movie at home complete with popcorn and soda
• Create a sidewalk chalk art gallery
• Rainy day board game tournament
• Morning hike to [X]
• Build sand castles at the beach
• Paddle boats at the lake
• Rainy day living room maze building
• Create a puppet show
• Family talent contest

Being organized and prepared with a Summer Fun Kit will reduce your stress and help keep your kids entertained. Please add more ideas in the comments section so that everyone can have the best Kits possible!

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