Freebie Friday: Kids Summer Reading Programs and more

My son is doing well with his summer reading (although sometimes it is still a fight to get in the 20 minutes for the day).  His school promised if they got enough reading from all of the kids that they would have a bounce house for them when they got back to school.  He was so excited when he brought back the special calendar to fill it out.  I have had to come up with other goals to try to help him. 

The first every summer is to do the summer reading program at the library.  He reads the 15 books and then he gets his name on the wall and a coupon book. 

We have already used the coupon book to get a free flash light, marigold seeds, pencil, strange plastic bug (not pictured because my son hid it on the window), ear buds, zipper pouch, book and box of ice cream sandwiches.  There are so many other coupons in the book and I hope that we get to use a lot of them.  Sadly, the summer usually runs out before we get to use them all but we always get a good haul!

We love to do lots of stuff over the summer and free is always good.  We have done three of the AC Moore programs where we get to make different crafts for free.  The first was my favorite because it was on the summer bucket list to make a tie dyed t-shirt. He picked the bullseye pattern and the other two kids that I brought used the twist pattern.  They put the rubber bands on the shirts, dipped them in water and then used squirt bottles over a plastic bin and colored the shirt.  We let it set for 24 hours and rinsed it out and this is what it looked like after.  It was pretty fun and now he gets to wear the t-shirt all the time as a reminder of our fun summer project.

Then we went back to make the bucket.  It isn't exactly functional like I was hoping because they just gave him stickers because the picture online looked like it was painted but my son and his friend had a blast making them.  They were slow when we got there so the nice ladies pulled out extra stickers so they could spell their name on the side.  We are not going to be bringing this to the beach because I think that the stickers will collect lots of sand and I think that it is a better bucket to hold things on his dresser where it is now.

We went back another week to do the decorate your own cupcake.  They had cupcakes from the local grocery store already made and they put it on the paper towel for the kids and they had tubes of frosting in a few crazy colors and small sparkly gel frosting in green and yellow.  My son had trouble getting the frosting out of the tube because no matter how many times you tell them that they have to squeeze from the end down, they think you can squeeze at the end and it works the same but it just doesn't.  It is the toothpaste fight all over again!  He loved to decorate with those colored candy balls (which were like small jawbreakers) and yellow sugar to top off his beautiful creation. He still had a blast decorating this cupcake and even more fun eating it out front of the store since I wasn't sure it was going to make it home in the heat without melting. 

All of these projects are easy ones that you can do at home but we really enjoyed going out and getting to do it with some friends and adding some reading really makes the summer go by quickly.  I hope that you enjoy your summer and get a bunch of neat things just for enjoying your summer all year long with the memories!!