For reference my older kids are 6 and 4 and my two littles are under 3. This post contains affiliate links.
Two years ago I shared a very detailed post on how we do preschool at home in the summer. When our family started fostering last year I began looking for inexpensive summer learning activity books. I knew I wasn’t going to have time to put together binders for each child like I had the year before. What I purchased worked out so great and I am planning to use the same products again this summer.
Here is a roundup of what we are going to be using this year plus purchases from last year that we loved!
Workbooks & Reading Programs
These Summer Brain Quest Between Grades books are fantastic! Fun enough that your kids will ask to keep working through the book but still educational. We had to limit the number of pages done each day so we didn’t finish the book in the middle of summer.
We love Curious George in our house. So this Curious George Sight Words Reading Program was a no brainer to buy last summer. This program is under $15. It comes with flash cards, 10 reading books, and a sight word tracker chart that includes stickers to mark off which words have been mastered.
Keeping with the Curious George theme. I bought Curious George Math and Science Readers STEM Program to add to our collection this year. This boxed set includes ten fun stories and activity cards featuring Curious George designed to introduce young readers to science, technology, engineering, and math.
I plan on visiting our local library often over the summer with the kids to keep our reading material new and exciting. My goal is to read to them often and to cut back on the amount of television they watch. Wish us luck! Our plan right now is to let each kid pick a show 1 day a week. This will equal out to 30 minutes of television Monday-Thursday with Friday being a family movie day.
Our son’s school uses Spalding and he has learned the first 70 phonograms this year. It was a little challenging for me to learn these so I could help him with his homework and I don’t want him or myself to get out of practice over the summer so we will be reviewing these often ;).
Bible & Theology Resources
We are still working our way through Old Story New. I plan on using these 10 Minute Devotionals along with The Gospel Story Bible and The New City Catechism during our summer school time. We have been reading The Jesus Storybook Bible again in the mornings at breakfast and plan to continue this also.
FREE Resources
There are so many great resources also available for FREE! Here are a few that we have used in the past.
- Spot and Dot Alphabet Pages These are excellent for helping your preschooler work on their hand-eye coordination, their fine motor skills, and so much more! We use the Do-A-Dot Markers for this activity.
- Number Playdough Mats
- Create Your Own Handwriting Sheets I use this to generate sheets for the kids names. I finally got smart and instead of printing one out for each kid everyday I put the paper in a clear sheet protector. The kids now use a dry erase marker and once a week get to practice with a pencil.
I am just so excited to have all my kids home together this summer. We don’t have any huge plans, just good quality family time!
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