Our summers are pretty unstructured. This will be the first year that my boys, 4 and 5 years old, go to a summer day camp. It’s only a week of half days in July at my youngest son’s preschool, but they are really looking forward to it.
My 10 year old usually chooses two or three week-long day camps offered by the town’s park and rec. department. They center around certain sports or themes, and I try to space them out so she also has a lot of summer “down time.”
As for filling up that down time—that’s the best part of summer! We go to the beach at least a couple of times a week. We visit local hiking trails and playgrounds, go to the Aquarium, the Peabody Natural History Museum at Yale, and this insanely overpriced dinosaur themed place with a sprinkler park (we only go once a year because the price pisses me off!). We play in the sprinkler and set up the kiddie pool in the yard, catch bugs, try to grow plants that never seem to survive, and building a little fire in the evenings to roast marshmallows.
Summer is also a good time for things like raising tadpoles, hatching some praying mantis egg cases (you can order them online) and watching caterpillars turn into butterflies. I can’t wait!! The kids are in school until late June, so we still have time to make plans and pretend like we won’t spend half the summer complaining about the heat!