Planning your children's summer: Structured activities vs. free time 15 Articles

by Michelle Frost

Summer is an excellent time for a creative parent to spend time letting their child's imagination take flight. When the alternative is too much time spent in front of a television, video game or computer, a little structur...read more

by Linda Shrigley

Planning Your Children's Summer Vacation In my experience with having had two small children, I do believe that you should plan at least part of your children's/child's summer vacation. If the children do not have somet...read more

by Petriesan

The best summers for kids are those without planned activities. Here's the thing: boredom is a good thing. Without it, our minds do not wander. Without the wandering, nothing creative happens. Kids really do not ye...read more

by Meghan Claire Moyers

My daughter is six years old. She yearns for structure in her life, but still wants her freedom too. I believe that all younger children need a healthy mixture of both. It's just a matter of finding the perfect recipe ...read more

by Laura Leigh Fields

For most kids, summer is the greatest time of their life. They are out of school. They can sleep in or stay up late. They can romp around outside. The weather is beautiful and there is plenty of water in the lake. It is ti...read more

by Angela Harris

I'm baffled that parents now plan their children's summers. I know that the world has changed a lot since I was a child. After all, I have raised children myself. Almost all of them are college-aged now. I made no special ...read more

by Ginger Kazay

When you are making plans for your child's summer; a variety of activities is best. Free time is what most children look forward to after the school year is finished. However, as every parent knows, in just a week or t...read more

by S D Rios

Summertime and the living is easy...I remember the days when I couldn't wait for summer to begin. By the end of the very long summer, I couldn't wait for the hustle and bustle of school to begin again! Summers are long, es...read more

by Allison Claridge

We all have favorite memories of our childhood summer days... afternoons by the pool and mom had to drag you in when the sun went down, packing a backpack with food and water and taking off for the whole day and no one car...read more

by Allen Dobkin

SLURP! Something happens to kids across America every summer, and you can practically hear the giant SLURPing sound as half of what they learned in school this year washes down the drain. The Brain Drain. Like anything...read more

by Chris Con

Planning your children's summer is a good idea, as long as you are planning fun. Fun for the kids don't always coincide with fun for the adults. As a matter of fact, if the adult thinks it's fun it's highly unlikely the ...read more

by Louise Debell

Summer is the time for fun. Let children be children and let them enjoy their time away from school. As I have quoted in other articles, there is always a but. We need to let our children learn by PLAY - Pretend, Learn,...read more

by Jayne Smith

I use to love the summer holidays! The absolutely best time of year for a child. Mum and Dad would make them so packed with fun I don't know how they managed to work as well! We would be involved in library reading sc...read more

by Jesjer

The children count the days down when the end of the school year approaches. The parents wonder where the year went. Summer is here already! The sun is shining, its getting warm, and the children are getting antsy . The wa...read more

by spelly

Remember lying in the back yard looking up at the clouds and seeing them as dinosaurs or a gorilla or a helicopter getting ready to land? I remember summers of my childhood as days like this. Making mud pies, riding bike...read more