Host a summer day camp.

Looking for something fun (and not budget-busting) to do this summer? How about having a week-long or once-a-week day camp? You could pick any one theme, such as art, or have a different theme each day like History Day and Music Day.

Borrowing from the idea of weekly science camps held at the Orlando Science Center, this week we're having a Summer Science Camp at our house. We have two other homeschool families involved for 8 kids total. The experiments are all conducted using common household items and the kids are filling out FREE SCIENCE EXPERIMENT NOTEBOOKING FORMS for each experiment. (More in full post.)

Our camp is meeting daily from 10:00 until 3:00 and we're sharing lunch costs by each family contributing different food items for each lunch. Today was Chemistry day. We followed several experiments found online and let the kids begin their Summer Science Camp notebooks. Tomorrow we'll be having a Physical Science day. Wednesday is "Backyard Science", which will combine some fun outdoor science experiments and a 4th of July party. (For instance, instead of traditional fireworks - we'll be making an exploding volcano.) Thursday, we'll be studying Earth Science, and on Friday we'll be having a general science fun day to wrap up all the experiments that took more than one day, due to necessary observations of results, followed by a movie and a presentation of CERTIFICATES OF PARTICIPATION.

Summer day camps hosted by companies like the YMCA can run hundreds of dollars or more per child, but if that's out of the question for your budget, as it is for ours, you can recreate the same concept right at home. Find some friends to join in and though it's a learning experience, keep the focus on the fun. Be sure to take plenty of photos, too, so that the kids can have some to paste in notebooks if they're making them, or in a homemade photo album. (I use a digital camera and print pictures right off my color printer on regular paper - not the expensive photo paper.) You can host every day at your house, as we're doing, or have each family host a day or two at their own homes.

We're making our notebooks in plain green folders I bought last summer for 10 cents each. I printed THE PERIODIC TABLE and glued them to the fronts for covers.

At the end of the week the kids will have their notebooks, their certificates, and a few "souvenirs" like spongy eggs - made from soaking eggs in vinegar - and the crystals we're growing.

We had a lot of fun today, but wow! I think I might need a nap now! :)