Show us how you’re having a Smart Summer!
The Prize for this, the FINAL SMART SUMMER CHALLENGE week…Outer Space Week, is from HP. PLUS we have additional prizes from Juice in the City and Pixie!
(I am going to post the Water Fun Round-Up separately early next week)
We’d love for you to share your ideas–you can add a link to a post on your blog or even a photo set on Flickr, photos you’ve uploaded to the Smart Summer Facebook page, or any types of publicly viewable “journal” entry on a social media or community site.
Not a blogger? If you do not have access to posting entries on any public site, you can also leave a comment on this post, sharing the learning opportunities you incorporated into your week with your children.
Your post (or comment) can be something from your archives that speaks to our theme for the week (Water Fun) or it can just be a general post about how you are fitting fun learning into your summer activities. You can find our weekly themes on our calendar of ideas but ANY learning activities, big or small, are welcomed!
Just add your link(s) (as many relevant links as you would like) to a specific post or page (i.e. http://www.naturallyeducational.com/2011/06/fight-the-summer-slide-with-the-smart-summer-challenge/ NOT http://www.naturallyeducational.com) to the link widget below.
WIN PRIZES!
Every link you enter in the widget below (or your comment) during the week will also enter you to win our AWESOME prize of the week: an HP Mini!
The HP Mini 210 is a portable (3 lbs.), long-lasting (10 hour battery life) notebook that features Beats Audio and a wireless internet connection, making it an ideal PC for students of all ages.
The HP Mini 210 is available now at HPDirect.com.
The winner of the HP Mini 210 (valued at $300) will be determined at a drawing to be held by the hosts of the Smart Summer Challenge on [date: late July/early August]. This game is sponsored and administered by hosts of the Smart Summer Challenge. Prizes and promotional support are provided and delivered by Hewlett Packard Company headquartered at 3000 Hanover Street, Palo Alto, CA (HP).
MORE PRIZES!
In ADDITION to the HP Mini, your entries throughout the ENTIRE challenge will count in our giveaways of a $150 Gift Certificate from Juice in the City to the local toy or book store of your choice AND five downloads of Pixie software (ARV $50 each).
Juice in the City is unique because of our mission to save local! Our sales force is comprised of moms who source deals based on their personal experience in local businesses. We believe in supporting the community while at the same time, empowering moms!
Pixie is exciting creativity software students can use to share ideas, imagination, and understanding through a combination of text, original artwork, voice narration, and images. Whether you work alone or in a group, Pixie is the only canvas you need.
Official Rules
The linky and giveaway closes at 11:59 PM EST on Thursday, August 11. You may enter as many links as you wish and each will count as an entry. Comment entries are limited to one per person, per site (total of three (3) possible comment entries). US Shipping only for prizes, due to sponsor requests, but international friends are still encouraged to play and add their links! Winner will be chosen at random from valid entries.
You retain the rights to all entries but grant us permission to share your links along with a short excerpt and thumbnail image.
We reserve the right to disqualify entries at our sole discretion and change the rules or prizes without notification beyond updating the page.
Spread the Word!
We’d love you to help spread the word–please feel free to link back and/or grab the code for the button below. And don’t forget to visit us on Facebook where we are sharing some more ideas from the community! Feel free to also post photos, questions, and ideas on the Facebook page, too: http://www.facebook.com/smartsummerchallenge.
Thank you for taking the Smart Summer Challenge!
Your hostesses,
Candace at NaturallyEducational.com, Amy at teachmama.com, MaryLea at PinkAndGreenMama
<a title="smart summer button '11" href="http://www.facebook.com/smartsummerchallenge"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5194/5829107237_2558c61bf9_m.jpg" alt="smart summer button '11" width="150" height="150" /></a>
Baking to show the kids about measuring water.
The Smart Summer Link-Up has been great! I’ve enjoyed seeing all the ideas each week. Thanks to you, Amy, and MaryLea for hosting such a fun summer event! 🙂
learned about locally produced foods
We love walking in parks to learn about nature
Thanks so much!! Janna Johnson jannajanna@hotmail.com janna@feedyoupig on gfc
The local museum and nature center have great programs for kids, as well as the public library’s summer reading programs.
I incorporated some culinary learning with my kids by taking them to the farmer’s market to pick out fresh produce and then we looked up recipes togheter online to cook – we made a market pizza topped with fresh zucchini, tomatoes and cheese! Plus, we’re going to make a peach milkshake tonight with some peaches we just bought because now they’re ripe!
We go to nature parks a lot to learn about the plants and environment.
I’ve been using the caterpillars in our garden to teach about how things grow from just an egg to eventually being a big butterfly!
heatherc191 at gmail dot com
I’m working really hard this summer to teach my kids to cook. I NEVER use mixes, but I’ve been gritting my teeth and buying them so they can get some confidence before we move on to harder things.
We visit as many planetariums that we can
I took my child to a local strawberry farm to show him that strawberries and other produce do not suddenly appear in cans and boxes. They are grown and harvested. Plus, we got to eat a lot of strawberries that we picked ourselves.
My granddaughter helped us plant our garden this year. We also took her to an art museum and made several trips to the library.
We have a lot of options where we live. Although, we usually wait until the heat and tourists are gone to have our fun. There’s a place called “Wonderworks” which has a lot of learning opportunities in a really fun atmosphere.
We went to the Science Center this week and learned all sorts of things! My son especially loved learning about robots.
We have a wide variety of educational “field trips” we can take such as the zoo, aquarium, and the Children’s museum. I also do a weekly educational craft with the boys. 🙂
We take hikes, learning about nature, habitats, picking up waste pollution and then do art projects with some of the leaves, acorns, rocks… we have collected and learned about.
I learned about locally produced foods.
We go to the children’s museum and natural history museum to incorporate learning into our kids’ week.
learning about Science
we go to the science center in st. louis
We have been focusing on money and finding bargains while shopping. I feel that learning to save money is important to learn early.
tdlsfm(at)gmail(dot)com
We planted a garden with a variety of vegetables so we can see that some plants grow faster than others and have different tolerance for sun and shade. Then we use those vegetables in our meals.
I tried your “Government Week” idea. I did not follow it entirely, but I incorporated certain exercises, such as the coin-cleaning activity(also modified to see how many different ways we could make change for a dollar). Since we’re having issues with the country’s budget, I went over how the three separate branches of the government function and why it might be difficult for them to agree on certain things (I gave an example of how it might be hard for three different friends to agree about what their favorite movie would be).
Thanks for some great tips!
Visits to the local farmer’s market where we can browse for hours talking about foods and recipes, and also about entrepreneurship and the folks who, through their own impetus and drive, endeavor to make a living through farming and homemade products.
My son is very young, but we read books about nature and then go for nature hunts. I point out things and ask him what is this? Sometimes, we will take the book and I point at the picture and he has to find it
It’s cold almost year round here, so we’re using the summer months to get outdoors, identify trees and leaves, small insects and animals, and flowers and plants – it’s like a scavenger hunt with nature
Thank you so much for doing this all summer. It is so cute to here my son ask what we are going to learn today every morning when he woke up.
we collect rocks, seashells, leaves, etc. and then try to identify them when we get home.
The local museum — great to find out some have days with free admission. We even went to the art museum. Going to the local observatory is another fun adventure. We’ll be watching the Perseid meteor showers from the Anza-Borrego desert.
We took the kids to the water park this past weekend. Got to tell them about how the waves were formed i in the big pool versus the ocean waves. Also talked a little bit about gravity, potential and kinetic energy when they used the water slide
brich22 at earthlink dot net
My son loves animals so we went to the zoo this past weekend and we were reading about the animals and their habitats.
We have also gone to the planetarium and learned about the planets and stars.
It’s always fun to go to the park or local trails. Walking past different animals and identifying them, picking fruit and counting how many we got, and learning to socialize with other people we meet!
xbeautifulcoma at yahoo dot com
To teach basic math, we use candy and play money so that they get real world examples.
i don’t have kids but but incepting math when teaching about money is great
I would love to bake with kids