Every summer I get sooo excited to make it the funnest yet for our family with our 7 kids!! We usually start out strong and fizzle out by the end, haha! But each of these ideas have kept us going, with happy kids, in between camps and vacations until school starts up again. We’ve also made a lot of great memories! Enjoy!!

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SUMMER BOREDOM BUSTERS!!

Cook something!!! My passion!!
Getting your kids in the kitchen will not only give them something creative and productive to do, it will show them a good time and instill confidence in their grown up skills at the same time!!
We have hundreds of family friendly recipes on our blog for you to browse through! Some of the breakfast favorites right now are: Homemade Poptarts, Raspberry Lemon Scones, Banana Pancakes & Avocado Toast.
We also have a cookbook your kids can cook through with us this summer! Every week on social media, we will be sharing a recipe we are making. We’d love to see what you are making, too! Tag us @helpingofhappiness in your posts and stories so we don’t miss it!
Every recipe in our Best Ever Babysitters Cookbook has a QR code that you can scan for a YouTube video on how to make it! These recipes are so easy a babysitter could make them, plus your family will LOVE them!

2. Learn Something New about a different Country! Through Art! You know i looove other cultures!!

Want to explore 25 countries with your kids through art, music, food, and stories?

Art Makes Me Smart – Around the World is a creative, low-prep resource that helps your kids really remember what they’re learning. A lot of homeschool families use this for their curriculum - we go to public school, but I love using it in the summer to keep my kids busy while they are off school!

Each unit blends art tutorials with book lists, recipes, and cultural projects that make the world come alive. ✈️🎨📚We are obsessed with this course from Lily & Thistle!

Check out a preview of China here!!

Use code: HAPPY to get $50 OFF!

3. Station Time - Give Yourself a Couple hours of daily peace without using screens!!

This idea was something I used EVERY DAY in the summer when my kids were little and a had a baby with naptime. Those days I had a house full of babies, was working part time out of the home, was soooo exhausted, had a husband who traveled a ton for work, and desperately needed a break midday.

This is still a great strategy for when you want to sneak in a nap, or need to keep your kids out of your hair for a couple hours.

This is how it works:

Set up 4 stations
Put a different kid at each station (This will help eliminate fights you have to break up during your peaceful break- combine older and younger siblings if you must!)
Pick out activities for each station. Some examples of these would be: piano practicing (if you have a digital piano with headphones it can be even quieter!), scripture study & journaling, sensory bins, playdough, writing kind notes, magnetic drawing boards, coloring, Legos (you can even give them a creating challenge), reading, sticker books, handwriting practice, flash cards, puzzles, 1 person games such as solitaire, Art Makes Me Smart (see the idea above) etc, There are a million quiet activities on Amazon.
Set a timer for 30 minutes. When the timer goes off, it’s time to rotate stations. If your kids are really young, you may need to take this down to 15-20 minutes.

Here are a few pro tips:

I use this tactic after a busy morning, whether that is going to the pool or park, playing with friends, going to camps, etc. It’s the perfect in between activity after lunch before you hop on screens.
Have the kids end on an activity you know they will love. For example: if you have an avid reader, put reading as their last station. If you have a Lego creator that will spend hours building, but that as the last activity. This will extend your time to yourself because they will get caught up in the activity without the timer to interrupt their flow!!
Reward GOOD behavior. Have a small reward if they stay at their station. I didn’t even care much if they were productive at their station. But if they gave me my peace and quiet to rest or work, they got a treat or a sticker, a friend over, or some sort of outing to the pool, ice cream, the park or whatever. It has to be something you can sustain. For some more ideas on family rewards & helping kids get along, head to this post!!
You can also insert chore time in here if your kids are responsible enough to do that without your encouragement - doesn’t work as well for me with mine, but I know it’s possible!! We have several free printable chore charts in our VIP FREEBIE LIBRARY. Sign up free here!
In our VIP Freebie library, we have book lists for every age, if you are looking for some new ideas for your family! We use Cloud Library & Libby (digital library) a lot during the summer.

4. Take a break and watch a good clean show through VidAngel!

Because of different sensitivity levels, not only in our own family, but in general, we LOVE VidAngel. Have you ever heard of it??! We have been paying for their service for years to filter content we feel is inappropriate for our family.

It’s super easy, you download the VidAngel app on your phone, computer &/or TV, and then connect it to your other streaming apps (we use it with Netflix, Amazon, Max & Apple+). VidAngel will pull the movies straight from your streaming apps and then you can choose what filters to put on.

VidAngel offers over 100 filters to choose from for content such as profanity, blasphemy, nudity, sexual content, violence, and more.

VidAngel provides filters for over 20,000 movies and TV shows, and we are always adding new content every week.
VidAngel’s apps let you filter shows online, on your phone, or on your TV.

We love VidAngel so much, that we partnered with them to give you 3 months for $3!! All you have to do is put in coupon code: HELPING

5. Go to free or cheap activities in your community!!

We love going to free concerts, splash pads, bowling (through Kids Bowl Free), library programs and cheap movies in the summertime!!

6. Get together with a few other moms and rotate hosting kids for a couple hours.

This can be a family playgroup or just a kiddo kid group. Moms can come, too, if you are also looking for some social time! Each mama can host some sort of activity, and you can rotate through the summer. This can be a themed group like a cooking lesson, playing pickle ball or other sport, or a book club, or some kind of craft. It can also just be free time.

7. Do some service!!

We all feel good after we have done something good for someone else. Listen to this quick podcast from our archives - it’s just over 15 minutes- for a bunch of ideas.

I can’t say enough about how good it is for my kids to be making and bringing treats to neighbors and friends, doing yard work for a widow or elderly loved one, working on family history, serving in the baptistry at the temple, packing food with Feed My Starving Children & Kids Against Hunger, local service listen on Just Serve, or doing simple acts of service for our family. It’s so important!!

To make chores a little more exciting, use our Summer Fun Club Tickets! Circle the chore you want them to get done and when they finish, they can use their ticket for a fun activity! You can use it once a day or throughout the week. **Grab this free printable in our** **VIP Freebie Library!!**

8. Cool off with water & ice

We live in Texas and the summers are HOT!!! Head to the pool or the splash pad, run through the sprinklers, play with water balloons (these easy to fill balloons that fills hundreds at a time is such a life saver!) or set up the slip n slide.

An activity my kids LOVED when we hosted summer camps were the Lego ice activities. We got some Lego ice trays and filled them up with water and had a great time playing with those. You can also blend up a smoothie (or use your favorite juice), freeze in trays or sleeves and make popsicles!

You can use any of these things as rewards when they are behaving during Station Time!!

9. Have a lemonade stand or a garage sale

These usually take some work from mama, but my kids LOOOOVE doing these. Make our Signature Berry Lemonade - always a hit (recipe also found in our Best Ever Babysitters Cookbook), and get the kids out there selling. You can even print out a Venmo QR code to make purchasing easier for your customers.

10. Make a dream vacation Power Point Presentation for the Family

Our kids have been working on these and we are going to have a family night where everyone presents their ideas. It has been SOOOO fun to see what they have come up with- different cool AirBNBs and activities all over the world! Some ideas have been just a few hours away, and some half way around the world. I loving seeing into the dreams of my kids. Let your kids loose in the Travel Tips section of our blog for some inspiration!

This is also a great motivation for kids to save their money or look for odd jobs to keep them busy during the summer, and throughout the year, to make their dreams a reality.