Tip—Brief planning sessions between parent and child are desirable before any activity requiring parental permission, participation, or cooperation.

It’s late August and the kids are getting restless—either bored with the activities they’ve been doing all summer or just getting antsy over the approaching school year. You might also live in a part of the country where outside activities are just too scorching to consider in August and have kids penned up inside. Let’s save everyone an overdose of TV and screen games in favor of some more creative ideas.

You may be feeling just as antsy as the kids after a couple months of at-home togetherness, but a small amount of adult planning and direction in the beginning will yield some real interest and participation. What’s more, kids who are genuinely engaged in an activity will often spontaneously branch out into other, related activities. For example, after enjoying a particular novel, my 11-year-old daughter recently wrote a short play, using the same characters. She then invited a few friends over to help her stage an informal performance. They had a great time. My part in it all? I listened to her plan, made a few minor suggestions and agreed to provide to lunch.

Tools—Louise Tracey, author of Grounded for Life?! points out that parents often take more responsibility than they need to for a planning session. School-aged children and older are capable of planning and brainstorming ideas for a day trip—including budget concerns, food preferences, facilities, and equipment.

She recounts a time her children, ages eight and up, planned for and implemented a day on the coast—visiting a deserted beach, using wave-riding equipment and having a picnic. Because they’d discussed ahead of time any money to be spent, activities at the beach and behavior while there, their day trip was the easiest trip to the beach she’d ever taken with her kids and turned out to be the kids’ high point of the summer.

Here are a few other ideas when your kids complain of boredom this month:

• Neighborhood First Aid Clinic. Kids love to learn and demonstrate first aid. Give them a copy of Kids to the Rescue! First Aid Techniques for Kids and invite them to learn the techniques of three or four first aid skills (some suggestions: bee sting, bleeding, broken bones, something in eye). Gather together some younger neighborhood kids and teach them the techniques by acting out the scenarios in the book. Finish up with popsicles and homemade certificates for attending this first aid course.

• Back Yard Wildlife Photography. Have your children photograph any wildlife they commonly see in your own back yard. (So far this summer, we’ve seen in my back yard: hummingbirds, butterflies, crane flies, tiny tree frogs, bumble bees, and chipmunks.) At the end of the week, print out photos on your computer and have your child mount them on construction paper. He or she can create a small “gallery” of the photos on posterboard, a recycled tri-fold presentation board, or hang them from a clothes line. Have the whole family tour the gallery and admire the photos.

• Write Your Own Decision-Is-Yours Book. This can be a fun group activity. Read one of the Decision Is Yours titles to the kids so they can familiarize themselves with the choose-your-own ending format. Agree upon a topic and let the kids choose the characters. As a group, write the opening scenario and set up the problem. Make a simple choice tree (see below) for them to follow. Assign each child a choice page. Once the first two are written, the kids can build upon those branches. It’s more fun if you switch off writing for different branches.

  Page 1 sets up the scene and the problem. Offer two choices.
  Page 2				Page 3
  Page 4		Page 5		Page 6		Page 7
  Page 8	Page 9	Page 10	Page 11	Page 12	Page 13	Page 14	Page 15

  

  Once they have the story written, they may illustrate it.

You’ll find more practical tips you can use right now in Grounded for Life?! Stop Blowing Your Fuse and Start Communicating with Your Teenager by Louise Felton Tracy, M.S., Kids to the Rescue! First Aid Techniques for Kids by Maribeth and Darwin Boelts, and the Decision Is Yours Series.

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