Organizing Your Summer with Weekly Routines

Need a routine to help keep you sane this summer and prevent the endless cries of “I’m bored!”?

Previously, I shared tips to help you create a daily summer routine.  If you missed it, click the link and check it out so you’ll know what I’m talking about.

In this post I’ll give tips to help you create a weekly routine for your family too. I put both of these routines together one summer when my kids were little and it worked well for us. I hope it helps you too!

Here’s the bottom half of our routine page (the daily routine was at the top):

Nothing too fancy, but I wanted to document some of the things the kids had written on their summer brainstorming lists so we wouldn’t miss any of them!

Schedule Time For Categories of Activities

If you read the tips in the summer daily routines post, you’ll remember that I suggested creating categories of some of the activities you and/or your kids want to do through the summer. This bottom part of our routine is where you can go into more detail about what those activities are.

For example, every day I scheduled a Learning Time.  I wanted to prioritize a time where the kids could work on the things they said they wanted to learn this summer, as well as some things their teachers mentioned they should continue practicing. I listed everything in this part of our routine, so we wouldn’t forget what to work on.

I also listed some of the ideas they wanted to do for outdoor time and play time so we wouldn’t forget any of them. Having these listed out helped when the kids started getting bored of doing the same things every day. It helped switch things up a bit so they were still interested and had fun.

Be Creative With Activities

Any routine can become boring over time, so it’s good to build in things that are exciting and new.

What ended up being the best part of our routine was the “Activity Time” every afternoon. I decided the best way to do all the different things they wanted to do, without any of them becoming boring, was to pick a different type of activity each day of the week.  This way they could look forward to each day of the week and the particular type of activity we did that day.

Here’s a bit of a description for each day.

Make it on Mondays

My kids enjoyed baking and I had a bunch of fun summer recipes to try out. And my son asked if we can make ourselves a “cookies in a jar” mix, like the ones we gave their teachers. Cute.

We also had a bunch of craft kits, paint-by-number sets, and science books/experiment kits that we didn’t typically have time to do during the school year.  This was our craft and activity area, ready for summer!

These were the kinds of things we did on “Make it on Mondays”.

One Monday we made dirt cake.  I’ve never made it before but it was Y.U.M.M.Y!  My daughter especially liked adding the gummy worms on top.  Because what’s a little dirt without worms?

Play it on Tuesdays

On Tuesdays, we played games.  We had lots of games in our games cupboard, but some are played more than others.

My son wanted to play each game at least once this summer.  I thought that was a fun idea.  Once we played through all of them we played whatever we wanted to play.  And at the end of the summer we purged some that they didn’t like as much or probably wouldn’t play again.

Which park on Wednesdays

My daughter LOVED playgrounds, so I wanted to make sure she had lots of opportunities to enjoy them during the summer.  Especially since she was stuck going to her brother’s baseball games and practices several nights a week.  She was not the LEAST bit interested in watching, but she was too young to go off to the playground by herself while were there. This girl needed some dedicated playground time during the day.

{Yes her shirt’s on backwards… I picked my battles.}

We had some favourite playgrounds near our house, but there were tons of others within only a few minutes’ drive.  I thought the kids might get bored going to the same places too often, especially my son who was starting to get a bit old for playgrounds.

I figured by calling it “Which park on Wednesdays” I could kind of make a game out of going to a different park each week.  They definitely liked the idea… even my son.

My son was learning how to do underdogs and my daughter was more than happy to be his guinea pig.

Get wet on Thursdays

This could involve all kinds of options, but the ones my kids mentioned on their summer brainstorming lists were splash pads, the beach, swimming pools, and the good ole’ sprinkler. We added in water balloons and sponges throughout the summer too {sponges are much easier than balloons}. We even washed the car and had fun spraying each other while we did it {we don’t wash it very often so it was a fun event for them LOL!}.

Of course, we had to change this routine when the weather didn’t cooperate, and sometimes we moved the wet days around if there was a free swim at a local pool, or play date with a friend who had a pool. It’s summer.  It’s good to be flexible.

Watch it on Fridays

After all those activities all week, I figured Friday could be a little bit lower key.  And since we limited screen time normally, this was our opportunity to have some extra time in front of one.  But this is shared together instead of individually each person on individual devices.

Everyone had their favourite movies or shows, but there were some that they either hadn’t watched or hadn’t watched in a long time so summer was a good time to watch some of those. I took the opportunity to introduce them to some movies or shows they hadn’t seen before as well.

Once in awhile, we went to an actual theatre too.  There was a discount one around the corner from us that had movies that were nearing the end of their run.  It’s much more economical to go then, and at that point my kids didn’t mind not seeing movies right away when they were released.

Putting it all together

Once you’ve put some thought into the activity categories and titles for your summer, add them to your summer routine list and post it somewhere that everyone can see. This builds the excitement and helps reduce the endless questions about what’s happening that day.

Here’s a look at our whole summer routine sheet.

It hung in our kitchen command centre, in place of one of the daily routines from the school year.  I couldn’t believe how many times the kids checked it to see what we’d be doing next.  The novelty wore off a bot as the summer went on, but overall everyone enjoyed the variety.

And, by having certain times when we planned to be doing things together and other times when they were doing things on their own, I ccould be fully engaged when it’s “together” time, and not feel guilty doing things I wanted or needed to do at other times.

How do you organize your summer?  Do you have daily or weekly routines?

Have a great summer and happy organizing!