We’ve pulled anchor and are under way to sailing through a great Summer of Fun 2016… it has begun!!

But first, a quick tip.

When we first started our lists I would write each activity on a post-it-note and hang them on the wall. Then, we created a jar and placed each activity in the jar and would draw each day from the jar. Next, we designed and built a wheel-of-fortune sort of wheel and wrote the activities on each space.

While none of them were horrible, they each had their own little short-comings. The post-its would fall off the wall, float along and hide behind furniture or under chairs; the jar didn’t allow us to separate the activities into categories (free stuff, travel, etc); the wheel was what we were looking for but as you can see it’s a bit cumbersome.

This year, my youngest went on a hunt to find just what we needed and by Jove I think he has hit upon something fantastic.

This year we’re sailing into the 21st century and going all techno! This nifty little idea allows us to categorize our activities, affords us the ability to make our choices weather friendly, money friendly or lack of money friendly, etc. and it’s a ton of fun!!

My dude discovered Decision Making Wheel, a downloadable app for our computer!! It allows us to customize and create a wheel(s) that suit our needs and sits right on our desktop!

Little guy (ha, who am I kidding? He’s not so little any more) downloaded it, opened it up and immediately created three wheels just for our Summer of Fun.

Our wheels:

1. Free (for those things which require no equipment or uses things we already have)
2. Buy (for those things I haven’t finished purchasing all supplies for)
3. Travel (for those little day trips, weekend excursions, etc)

We open that bad boy up, choose which wheel we need to spin for the day, spin, and away we go making memories!! I guide which wheel we spin based on the time we have, cash flow or lack of cash flow at the time, weather, etc

Here’s a peek at our wheels

 

You have to try this app!! Isn’t it terrific? You could use it to make all sorts of decisions with your kids or spouse about where to go on vacation, who gets to do the dishes, what’s for dinner… the possibilities are endless!!!

Oh my gosh! I’m all a flutter with the excitement about spinning our wheels – tee hee hee no pun intended. 😉

Enough talk about this great app! Let’s get moving and see what happened today.

TODAY’S ACTIVITY – A Writing Contest

I wasn’t quite sure what this activity looked like because the oldest thought it up. He’s a great teacher and explained it very well.

For today’s activity you will need:

1. Paper (we used our summer journals)
2. pencils or pens (for younger kids you could use crayons or colored pencils)

That’s easy huh?

How it works:

1. Each family member writes a short story: ( two or less pages…heck even a paragraph) about anything they like. We didn’t put a time limit on the writing because they were supposed to be short stories. (younger kids could draw their story in pictures or tell it verbally)

2. Each member of the family then reads each story:  we sat in the family room, each with our own journal and then passed them to the right until we had each read everyone’s story.

3. Give the story a rating from 1-5: After you’ve read a story, you give it a rating. One being it was not my favorite to five being the best story you’ve ever read. We decided to go anonymous and put our ratings at the top of the story page (of course it’s sort of easy to tell by the handwriting whose is whose)

We discussed before we started that we are all individuals with personal likes and dislikes. The ratings were for fun and didn’t reflect negatively on who you are or on your ability to write a story.

Be sure to set up some guidelines about this to avoid hurt feelings

4. Get your story back and add up your ratings: add up the ratings you received and write that total on the top of your story. In our case there were four of us so we had three ratings to add. Highest rating wins!

That’s it.

We are a family of writers and readers so this was a lot of fun for us. Every story had something special about it, even the tale of poop! (I’ll let you guess which of us wrote that particular tale)

 

And the Winner Is…

I’m a firm believer in teaching my kids that you don’t always win. I’m probably opening a can of worms but I’m not one for getting a grade just for participation; I’m not one to buy the sibling a gift because it’s not fair they don’t get to open a present because it’s brother or sister’s birthday; I’m not one who believes every ones a winner in sports; I’m not one to throw a game so my kids can win.

There is nothing wrong with losing (not all the time of course), but there are valuable lessons to be learned in both winning and losing.

Winning teaches us to be gracious and humble. Losing teaches us about our strengths and weaknesses. There’s a reason we win and there’s a reason we lose. We just have to figure those things out so we can continue to grow, change, and mature whether we win or lose.

What are you thoughts on this topic?

OK, that’s  my 2 cents about that!

Here’s the winner of our writing contest today… 

 

We had a terrific time today and hope you’ve enjoyed spending a little time with us!

Can’t wait to see what tomorrow will bring!

What did you do today? I’d love to hear all about your day too!! Be sure and share it with me in the comments!

♥ See you tomorrow ♥