When Moms Bring Summer Camp Home
Around the World Themed activities for kids
For the past few years I’ve brought summer camp home to my kids as a fun way for us to spend time together and have a summer tradition we can look forward to every year. This year, I picked four themes for us: Around the World, Cooking, Music, and Doctor camp and we every day of the week we do some sort of activity that corresponds to our theme.
Our first theme of mom camp was around the world and so far I feel like we’re off to such a fun start, so I wanted to share everything we did in case you wanted to bring some camp fun to your home too!
Monday: Make it Monday
Monday is the day I introduce our camp theme so I pull out a little suitcase trunk I found at Michaels and I fill it with books, little toys or items we’ll use throughout the week and craft supplies. You can get some of the things I found for around the world week here. We then spent the morning making suitcases out of cardboard and we also tie dyed some shirts because I feel like you can’t have camp without tie dye. Finally I made some pancakes for us to eat and cut them out using these little cookie cutters I bought (as you can see everyone was so excited that they were already touching it before I could snap a picture haha)
Tuesday: Taste it Tuesday
Tuesday is our snack day and to be honest, we look forward to this day the most. I come up with 3-4 snack ideas that go with our theme and sometimes I let the kids choose what they want to make. Other times I’ll write the ideas on a slip of paper and we randomly choose one. This week our snack was banana sushi and let me tell you- I’ll be making those nutella biscoff smore sushi again.
Wednesday: Water Wednesday
On Wednesday we do some type of water activity because our summers are HOT and water activities are always a welcome reprieve. We all went to the splash park for the first time and then did a little around the world flying sensory once we were back home. I love this age of sensory play because my kids have upped their creativity a lot so I can sit back on the porch and read while they just play and imagine away PLUS I don’t have to worry about them putting anything in their mouths. The baby stage is cute, don’t get me wrong, but this stage is great too.
Thursday: Thinking Thursday
You can’t take the homeschool out of the homeschool mom so I like to spend Thursday doing some kind of hands on learning activity. For our around the world week I wanted something for both my 3.5 year old and my 7 year old so I created these little continent playdoh mats for them to create and this ball toss board that they could do. The idea with the ball toss is that you can try and throw a ball to hit a continent and then see who can get to 100 points first (or if you’re younger you can just count how many times you make it through the hole). My oldest can learn geography and work on strengthening addition while my youngest can work on counting. It’s a win win over here.
Friday: Fun Friday
Friday is always our chill day and since the Fourth of July is right around the corner, I thought we’d visit China to learn all about fireworks. This is such a low prep science activity that your kids can set up and complete from start to finish. All you’ll need is :
tall vase
water
vegetable oil
food coloring (different colors)
Fill your vase with water and pour oil on top. Slowly add a few drops of food coloring to the top (I like to mix two primary colors when I do this) and wait to see them explode down into the jar. It’s something that amazes my kids everytime we do it and I just love how simple it is.
I hope you loved seeing our camp week and it inspires you to try and make one at home. As you can see, once you come up with a theme and set up a schedule it’s a lot easier to fill your day with activities or crafts. But in case coming up with ideas isn’t your thing, I created this 90 page pdf so you can have everything you need to create your own around the world camp week at home! For my paid subscribers, I’m including 50 pages of my pdf for you to see.
Can’t wait to see you next week at cooking camp.
