Every child loves summer. Summer is a time for playing outside, swimming in the pool, and hanging out with your friends. Unfortunately, summer is also a time when kids lose a lot of what they learned during the previous year of school. As an elementary school teacher, it was frustrating to watch my students struggle at the beginning of each year with objectives that they had mastered the previous year. As a parent, I want to make sure that this doesn’t happen to my children. This summer, I will be setting aside a little time each day for some fun learning activities for my kids. Hopefully, they will have so much fun they won't be worried about practicing their reading, writing, and arithmetic! If you are interested in guest posting for this summer learning series, just shoot me an email at betweenthelines-kam at hotmail dot com.

A few days ago, the girls and I had some summer fun with Sidewalk Chalk. And while they were engaged in the fun, I couldn't help but add a few lessons into the games. You know me...always taking advantage of those teachable moments. My girls wanted to play hopscotch. So I drew them an Ultimate Hopscotch board so we could practice our addition and subtraction facts. Before each turn, I gave the girls a math problem. After they solved it, they had to throw their rock onto the corresponding number. Then it was hopscotch as normal.

After our fun hopscotch game, we decided to decorate for our upcoming 4th of July BBQ. I took this opportunity to teach the girls about the number of stripes and stars on the flag and their meaning. The sun glare made it hard to get a good picture, but we had fun creating it.