Goodbye School. Hello Loosli Learning Adventure Camp!

The last day of school was on Thursday and I'm pretty darn happy about that. No more rushing the mornings and rushing kids to bed at night. No more school uniforms (got those all packed away for the summer - and I even put away most of the socks - the kids wear sandals and flip flops for the most part all summer and it cuts down so much on laundry and on the dirty random socks that end up all over the house...) No more homework. Precious few deadlines for anything. Just lots of learning adventures and fun ahead of us. Hurray for summer!

 
Every year on the last day or school (or thereabouts) the kids and I go through the piles of stuff they bring home from school combined with precious art projects and school papers from earlier in the year (each kid has a folder in a file box where this stuff goes during the school year - anything oversize gets photographed and thrown away) and choose their favorite things to put into page protectors and put into their binders. We've got 1 or 1.5 inch binders for every two grades and they can keep whatever fits. The older kids are starting to fit 3 grades per binder as they are doing less art projects these days and mostly just want to keep some reports and grade sheets. It gives us all a tremendous sense of accomplishment to get all that school stuff neatly tucked away. And it's fun to go through binders from previous years while we're at it. 

Here are our binders. Sure, I guess I could print out nice binder labels...but for me, if it's complicated or involves a trip to the store, I know it'll keep getting put off and maybe won't ever happen. So I use the binders I've got on hand and the huge package of page protectors I bought ages ago and we just get the job done. And the kids think these binders are wonderful.

Anyway, the past few weeks have been PACKED with end-of-school-year-hoopla (photos and details coming soon) and lots of projects for Power of Moms that I've been trying to cram in so that I could focus on fun and learning with the kids once they got out of school. The article I wrote a couple weeks back on the "Do-it-Yourself Summer Camp" our family does (based on an old blog post) has been read by over 50,000 people now thanks to lots of Pinterest and Facebook shares plus regular Power of Moms traffic. And lots of people asked for more details. So for the sake of solidifying our own summer plans and helping other families create their own family summer camps, one of the projects I've been working on has been gathering and sprucing up all our family summer camp materials and they're all available HERE. See if this is something that could help your family have the summer you'd like. I just introduced everything to my kids and they're so excited to get started!