Summer Reading and 'Rythmatic

Summer is here! I have 2 1/2 months to keep 5 kids from driving me completely insane. The fighting has already begun. Full force. Daniel is 50% of the problem and Leah is 70% of the resulting noise. Nathan is pretty good at joining in.

In anticipation of this, I re-instituted my summer worksheet program from two years ago. The kids have been doing worksheets for 4-5 days now. They are full of fire and motivation. We'll see how next month goes. For now, they do a selection of worksheets that have been stapled together and assigned a point value. When the papers are done, I check them and then they get to put a sticker on their chart for each point. Every 5 stickers gets them a prize from the prize box. The girls are whizzing through their worksheets. Of course, they are so easy, it's almost shameful. The boys have to work harder, but even if they only did one worksheet a day, I'd be happy. Here are some of their charts. Leah's seems to be missing for the moment.

You can see that Daniel is trailing in the worksheet area. That's no surprise.

But Daniel hasn't been completely without goals. We've also started a reading contest this summer. We're counting pages read. For each milestone in pages, they get a specific reward. Daniel has turned into quite the dedicated reader! He's already nearing his 500 page mark and we only started this week.

The boys read their own books, I read books to the girls, with Leah doing some of her own reading in some very simple books. So far, everyone has passed 100 pages. And as I type this, here is what the boys look like.

We also have monthly contest for reading. I ordered a $5 trophy (a cup mounted on a plastic base) that will be awarded monthly for the most pages read. I expect it to travel mostly between the boys. At least, I hope it travels. Daniel is putting so much of a lead between himself and Nathan, I hope that Nathan will have a better chance next month. I'll probably hang a tag on the trophy with the winner's name and month, so they can keep the "glory" even if they don't own the trophy.

But we aren't all couch potatoes. I bought a croquet game this week. We played as a family yesterday afternoon. It's really quite a challenge to play with a 3-year-old! The kids went out and played this afternoon while I napped. They've spent time running through the sprinklers, re-planting the garden (we froze to death), helping Chad build a picket fence in the front yard, swinging on swings and riding bikes in the driveway.

School starts August 19th.