Tips For Summer Fun with Respectful Rabbit
As the school year winds down, summer is now upon us! Another year gone by, so fast. For some families summer is stressful while there is many times not the opportunity to send a child to camp or classes to keep them engaged during their time off from school. As a parent you want to keep your child safe, healthy and happy during their time off. Plus, you don’t want them to fall behind in their academics. As an educator myself, I found the first few weeks of the new school year we were just refreshing academically from the prior year instead of jumping in to the grade level at hand. Yes, that is okay, however if we can keep our children engaged in literacy, social skills and some academics during the summer they are more prepared themselves when they move to the next grade.
Tips For Summer Time Fun:
Keep a routine and some sort of schedule.
Visuals work well for this. Put visuals in a place where both you and your children will see them, on the fridge, a door or keep a journal for the family to communicate in. You can even laminate these and put them on your child’s backpack or a key chain or ring so they can look at these and be comfortable on what is next and how their day is going to unfold. Use pictures and words for this reminder.
Be prepared. Have a portable basket with simple, yet engaging activities to keep your child occupied. You can put a journal, pens, crayons, markers, books, chalk, kite, bubbles, squirt gun and even board games. This way when you’re ready to go on an adventure you’ll have some things for your child to work on. Of course pack for you destination, blanket, sunscreen, water, etc. You’ll have more fun when you’re prepared!
Be organized. You can set up an activity station in your home in the same way and when there is down time encourage you child to look in the basket. You might change the contents every few days so they don’t have the same thing to do over and over, keep it fun, keep it simple and keep encouraging your child to grow. Make sings, READING STATION or PAINT STATION or PUZZLE STATION or WRITING STATION or THINKING STATION or IMAGINATION STATION and switch out the contents every other week or so to keep it fun!
When your child feels respected, they are more apt to ask you questions and engage with you. Empower them in this positive character trait by treating them with respect, show them respect by listening to them, communicating with them and allowing them to express their feelings to you. Have an open discussion on what it means to be respectful and how they feel when the feel respected. This is powerful! I like doing fun activities to learn so that I don’t sound ‘preachy’ and while there is a time and a place for that type of conversation, remember we’re talking Summer Time Fun!
Try this fun activity: Purchase some beach balls. On one of them, write I AM RESPECTFUL. Then in a space write a question; “how do you show respect to others” in another space write; “who do you respect and why” and in another space write; “what makes you feel respected” in another space write; “who lives in our community that you respect” get creative with your questions! Now, play catch with the beach ball or roll it around! Here is a coloring page of Respectful Rabbit with a beach ball for your child to color. Use this as a sticker chart for when your child is respectful or use as a journal cover for your child to write in a journal all about respect. Here is Cool Respectful Rabbit to also use as a journal cover or sticker chart. Here is a booklet for your child to color. Here is a Certificate of Achievement for being Respectful!
We talked about being Respectful and brought Respectful Rabbit to life on canvas as a visual reminder to be respectful!
This is a young lady who reached out to Characters of Character to use Respectful Rabbit as her platform while she was running to be Miss Roy Utah! Shelby Hill won the title and shared Respectful Rabbit to the schools in her community.
Here Pre-K students learned about Respectful Rabbit and colored the character, another great visual reminder to be respectful! We have published over thirty books to support the development of good character in our children and youth, be it at home, at school or in the community. You can learn more here.
Learn more here about Characters of Character and their work in the nonprofit world. WE are making a difference in the life of a child.