Summer Activities for Families and Kids

Heading out for a family trip? Before you go (and even if you are staying close to home), take a look at Factory Tours USA, which currently lists 573 tours of factories throughout the US. Categories include agriculture, vineyards, glass factories and mines and mining. Most are free or very low cost and there are links included to let you check on details. The site urges that you contact the business in which you are interested to confirm hours and availability of tours. There is also a feature that lets you search by geographical areas, so you can plot your visits by category or location.

No matter where you are heading, if you are bringing kids of middle school age or older, it is always a great idea to visit one or more college campuses along the way or at your destination. Walk around the campus, take a tour (always free, but you may need to schedule in advance and hours vary during the summer, so check the college's website under "visitors" for the best information). The goal of these visits isn't to consider any particular school, but to start getting your child aware of the many different kind of colleges out there and to foster family conversations about college, how to prepare for college, and even the financial realities of college in today's world. Have lunch in the cafeteria and see what you all think about the "vibe" on campus!

Closer to home, check out free or very low cost workshops for kids at stores like Home Depot, whose next free workshop for kids 5-12 is Saturday, August 2nd. Loew's offers free Build and Grow workshops.

And Michaels craft stores offer 30 minute craft sessions for kids while parents shop, for a $2 fee. They also offer an array of longer classes. All of these classes (except those for shoppers' kids at Michaels) require preregistration.

Thanks to Jeanette Pavini of Good Housekeeping magazine for some of these ideas.

Paper Crafts Make Learning A, B, C's Simple and Fun

In a recent search for innovative ways to teach youngsters the names of letters, we came across two free resources too delightful not to share. We were looking for something pretty specific: a system that turned each letter into a recognizable shape so that the familiar image would trigger both the shape of the letter and the sound it represents. A tall order to be sure, but we were delighted with two wonderful ideas we discovered.

The first, shared by the Totally Tots blog, is a collection of crafts, one for each letter, which artsy parents or teachers can make with their little ones. For example, capital A is given two eyes and teeth and turned into an alligator. Capital H receives windows, a door, and a rooftop to turn into a house. It’s important not to neglect the lowercase letters when learning the alphabet, and luckily, they’re available, too.

There are no templates to download, but the letters are as simple as they are ingenious and should be easy to reproduce with glue and construction paper. Kids will have great fun decorating the letters. After it’s finished, the whole alphabet should be displayed for easy reference. A minor, cautionary note, however: The orientation of some of the letters is altered in their presentation on the website. For example, the lowercase f, dressed up to look like a fish, has been rotated 90 degrees. This makes it look more like a fish, but sideways letters may cause confusion among young learners, so it’s best to display the letters right-side up. After your child has made and admired each letter the way it’s presented on the website, be sure to hang it up the right way. 

The second resource is not for the faint of heart or wobbly of hand, but patient adults with some free time will be delighted with the results. Paper crafter Markus Fischer has generously made available free templates  for three-dimensional versions each uppercase letter. Download the PDFs, print them in color, cut them out, and glue them together –you may wish to consult his tutorial for one of the trickier letters if you’re a beginner to paper craft—for a whimsical, ingenious way to teach kids their letters. We suggest printing on cardstock to make the letters more durable; after all the work of assembling them, you’ll want them to last. Children will have fun handling the letters, examining them from all sides, and using them to form words.

Do you have any innovative ways to help children remember their letters? We’d love to hear them!