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It's the perfect time to get outside and make amazing memories with your kids! Even if you homeschool year round, who doesn't want an excuse to take a break and enjoy the summer months outdoors?! There are so many awesome opportunities of things to do locally during the summer. With Gymboree's Local Legends campaign, they have challenged us to share how we can become #locallegends. Here are a few of our plans...

Park Days...

I don't know about your kids, but any day at the park is a good day for my boys. They especially love exploring parks we've never been to! It may sound crazy, but I frequently pull up Google Maps just to look for green patches that I'm not familiar with. If they happen to be a park, we're going there! The boys love it!

Vacation Bible School...

I grew up going to Vacation Bible School every year. In fact, not only did I attend the one at my church, but we often attended other local Vacation Bible Schools offered in the area. They can be such fun weeks full of activities kids will never forget!

Pool Days...

We have a neighborhood pool that we try to go to daily if we can. We actually prefer to go at sunset when it's not as busy. By the time we get home, the boys are tired and ready for bed -- total win!

Splash Pad...

Besides the one we have in our neighborhood, our boys love going to the one at the mall and any other we can find. It's endless entertainment!
Summer Reading Program...

Do you participate at your local library? We LOVE ours! Not only do the prizes provide a fun incentive for my boys to read, but the events throughout the summer are so fun! One of our local libraries is hosting a Star Wars day this Saturday. We'll definitely be there! I'm all about fun, FREE, entertainment!

Beach Days...

We're blessed to be within an hour of the beach here in Southern California. Whenever we get a chance, we love packing a picnic and enjoying the beach! To be honest, none of us are big into actually swimming in the ocean -- hello! Have you seen Jaws?! Ha. However, we love the waves. I could lay there and just enjoy the smells and sounds of the beach -- so relaxing! We also love checking out the local tide pools! If we go at the right time, there are volunteers from a local non-profit that will teach you all about the local wildlife. I joke that we can call that "science" for the day, ha. I guess that's what you get when you homeschool -- mom's always thinking of how you can incorporate school into everything, ha.

Family Hikes...

Now that my youngest is oldest enough to handle a little hiking, I hope to get us out on the mountains a little more. We live close to several great hiking spots, so it's the perfect excuse to get out there and explore! The boys can learn so much and it can be a great workout!


Water Balloon/Gun Fights With Friends...

The boys both own Super Soakers now. It's the perfect excuse to meet friends at a park and cool off with a little water fun! Plus, I love that you can buy bags of water balloons for a buck at the Dollar Tree. It doesn't have to get expensive, but it's definitely something the boys will remember!

Art...

Over the school year, we had lots of well-intended plans of doing art -- LOTS of art! However, by the time we finished book work and got to our various planned activities, we never really got around to doing much in the way of art. I'm rather sad about that, but I hope to make up for it this summer. I had ordered a kid's pottery wheel and several paint sets that my son is SUPER excited about using soon! He has all sorts of ideas of what gifts he's going to make for people, ha. I have no doubt we'll be spending many afternoons doing that.

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That's just a few of the fun activities that we plan to do. I absolutely love that Gymboree is hosting such a fun campaign!

Being a homeschool family, we try to soak up as many field trips as possible! After all, that's one of the many perks of living this lifestyle! The ability to drop the books and do some hands-on learning is the best! Wonderful memories are made and I can't even begin to describe how much more my son soaks up from a little trip vs. reading a paragraph in a history book! Plus, our trips usually result in a few days of continual questions and conversations about what we saw -- I love it!


Yesterday was our latest trip and it was to none other than the new King Tut exhibit at the California Science Center! I think my husband was looking forward to it more than the kids and even cleared his schedule so that he could join us, ha! We lucked out with being able to get significantly discounted tickets by going with our homeschool group, which was an added bonus. The tickets included both an IMAX movie and the entrance into the special exhibit. It was such a fun experience! Several of the items on display were marked as being the first time out of Egypt -- how cool is that?!

I always find it so fascinating to see artifacts from long ago. It gives you such a different perspective on whatever you're learning about and makes it that much more exciting to study! It makes me think of when my husband and I moved to Germany early on in our marriage -- seeing the cannonballs in the walls of various downtown buildings and seeing ruins from war made me want to dig in and study about those times in history. Today's field trip had the same effect. Even better than that, it did the same for my 1st grader, too! Ever since we've been home, he can't stop talking about it. There have been countless questions (some repeats, ha) and conversations about different topics relating to what we saw. We even had to pull up a film on Netflix about it all, ha! I love it.

If you have little ones in the house, I'm sure you've gone through the dinosaur phase. My boys are currently hooked. They both love watching Dinosaur Train and reading various books about them. A perk to living in Southern California is that we have a few awesome museums nearby -- they both loved going to the La Brea Tar Pits and the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Palentology during the last year! Over the last week, our family did a road trip up to Yellowstone and when I found the Dinosaur National Monument on the map, I knew we had to go!

To be honest, I had never heard of the Dinosaur National Monument, but I'm glad I found it while browsing Google Maps. It was the perfect addition to our trip and the boys had an amazing time checking it out! It's pretty surreal standing there next to a wall of rock that has dinosaur bones in it that were found long ago. I think it's amazing to think that bones found there have been shared to museums such as Carnegie and the Smithsonian. I never really put much thought into where they came from when we've visited those museums, but to stand there where they were initially discovered -- it's pretty awesome!

Since my son, Sam, has been wanting to create videos to put on YouTube, we made one about his experience at the Dinosaur Quarry Exhibit Hall. I decided if I can make this love for YouTube into a learning experience, then why not? Check out the video below to see Sam's take on his visit there. If you feel compelled, also leave a comment (on the YouTube page) for him to read later. It's cute how excited he gets about this stuff!