Summer Plans for Quarantine!

As I type this more and more businesses and attractions are opening up again, but cases of infection are also on the rise in many states.  Most summer camps, if not all, are still cancelled, and as far as I know very few pools will be open at all.  Right now our plans are to keep staying home except for essential visits to the grocery store, but we are starting to socialize a little while keeping our distance. We aren't among the lucky few that have vacation homes that they can get away to and still isolate, nor do we have family living in any kind of vactiony type of place that we could visit.  So, for us this Summer will be staying at home, but we will make the most of it.  No empty days, right?

The day after the last day of school we got straight to work on our Summer plans.  Each year we've made a big poster board with all of our plans for the Summer.  We print off bucket lists, look up fun craft ideas, recipes we want to try, goals for each kid, camps they will go to, trips we will take, chores to work on, books to read, and movies to entertain.  This year was no different.  We spent a couple of hours figuring out what we wanted to do and could do at home.  We came up with seven camp ideas to do at home, set up a calendar of when we'd do them.  I will write posts about each camp we complete with instructions for the activities we did.  So far we are doing a cooking camp, a film camp, a creative writing camp, a technology camp, another week of travel camp, a sports camp, and we will participate in some of the online options offered through our school district.  We got a list of 100+ things to do this summer from Brooke Romney and glued that one, 100 ways to fight I'm Bored.  Laylah found a bucket list just for quarantine ideas from Art with Mrs. E here: Quarantine Bucket List .  We found a new book bingo by Mr Watts here:Book Bingo for summer reading, and we signed up for the local library summer reading program. The thing that took the longest was our "Pick-A-Stick" activity list.  We've done this one before and had the sticks all ready, each one with one end painted a color belonging to a type of activity, and the other end with a number.  We got the idea from Pam at Over the Big moon, 60 Days of summer. Each stick corresponds to an activity and when you pick that stick you get to do that activity.  We put in four silver special sticks to represent day trips we could safely take we time and good behavior warranted. Since we'd already done the suggested activities from Pam, this year we made our own list for the sticks. Here are the activities we came up with:

Orange: Recipes Blue: water activities

1.  Egg Drop Soup             37. Water balloon toss

2. pretzels 38. Sponge darts

3.  Crepe cake 39. Water balloon baseball

4.  Cupcake cake 40. Water balloon toss

5. Poutine 41. Frozen dinos

6.  Chili 42. Slip N Slide bowling

7.  Burgers 43. Water balloon egg race

8.  White chocolate blondies 44. Tinfoil River

9. Strawberry cakebox cookies 45. Sponge dodgeball
10.  Watermelon fries

11.  Fried pickles

Purple: Crafts Yellow: Themed weekends

12. Qtip painting 46. Rainbow

13.  Watergun painting 47. Lego Challenge

14.  Paper plate jellyfish 48. Beach

15.   Windchimes 49. Games

16.   Sewing project 50. Minute to Win it

17.  Tissue paper stained glass 51. Transformers

18.   Giant Bubbles 52. Stranger Things

19.  Playdough 53.  Pirates

20.   Rock painting 54. Mystery

21.   Bubble painting 55. Cars

22.  Coffee filter suncatchers 56. 4th of July

23. Paper bag puppets 57. Father’s Day

24. Knit/crochet something 58. Outdoors

   59. Art History

Green: Science/History 60. Travel to England

25. Geography Bee

26. Tinkercrates day Silver: Special events

27. Dancing rice 61. Drive in Movie

28. Rube Goldberg machine 62. Fossil Beach

29. Pendulum painting 63. Drive thru Safari

30. Inertia experiments 64. National Park

31. Grow gummy bears

32. Clay cartouche

33. Medieval chemistry 

34. US history timeline

35. Backyard Archeology

36. Colonial games

We wanted to make sure and not do too many things that we've done in the past, so instead of using one of the options for weekly schedules online we decided to come up with our own schedule.  You know the ones like "Make Something Monday", "Teaching Tuesday", "Water Wednesday", etc.  On the weeks we don't do camp we will follow a schedule with a similar idea but all our own.  We liked: Mystery Monday, where we can do something related to adventure, mystery, or spies.  Ideas are escape rooms, mystery books, scavenger hunts, and spy school.
Travel Tuesday, where we will pick a new country to learn about, make crafts and food from there, watch a movie or documentary about it, etc.
Weird Wednesday, this day is for science experiments, or aliens and monsters crafts, slime making, anything weird!
Thrilling Thursday, this could be anything exciting, water games, a new work out, a surprise outing, ghost stories, maybe even a scary movie!
Fossil Friday, I don't know about everyone, but my kids LOVE dinosaurs!  On Fridays we will make fossils, hunt for them, learn about Dinos, geology, archaeology, or really any kind of subject they want to learn from history.

We also came up with a chore chart for each kid.  We had a template we used last year from Crystal at Money Saving Mom, here : Weekly Cleaning Schedule .  Laylah decided it would be more motivational and fun if the kids could bid on chores every week instead of always doing the same ones.  So we filled in a complete list of chores that should be done daily, then weekly.  Each kid could start by bidding 10 points, whoever bid the lowest number of points would win the chore.  So if you weren't willing to do it at all then the other person automatically got 10 points for doing it. If you really wanted it you had to be smart and bid enough that it was still worth winning it.  So far both kids like the system and have completed the chores.  At the end of the summer we will add up all the points for rewards.

Since it was also the first weekend of Summer we decided to do a themed weekend-Carnival!  Connor got a Nintendo Switch carnival game as his big gift in his end of school goody basket.  He loves it!  We drew inspiration from the game and set up a few carnival games in the back yard.  We also did face painting and made fresh popcorn.  The kids enjoyed beanbag toss games, nerf fun target practice, a cup water gun race, fishing with magnets, ring toss, and a game of chance where you had three chances to pick a floating animal with the right color on the bottom.  There were lots of laughs and everyone, even the adults played the games.

We decided to keep the theme going by watching the new Dumbo movie on Disney+, and I made home made funnel cakes for dessert!  Funnel cakes are actually super easy.  All you need is Bisquick, flavored coffee creamer of your choice, an egg, and powered sugar.  I like using the vanilla creamer because it's more traditional, but you can use whatever flavor you like. Mix the Bisquick with the creamer and egg until it's the right consistency, kind of like slightly thinner pancake batter, just add a little at a time and make as much as you need for however many funnel cakes you want.  For a big batch of funnel cakes I used 2 cups of bisquick, about 1 cup of creamer and 1 egg. It made around 8 medium sized cakes. Heat vegetable oil in a large frying pan, about 1/2" deep.  Put the batter in a plastic bag and cut off one corner.  Drizzle the batter into the oil in a zigzag pattern, flip when the underside looks golden brown.  Take the funnel cake out of the oil and put on a paper towel, sprinkle with powdered sugar.  You can also put chocolate syrup or fresh strawberries on top.  Super easy, and super yummy!

Here's to the first week of Summer!  It's going to be a great one!