Building a summer daily routine for your kids is all about making life easier and helping them find their groove. Creating summer routines each day helps both moms and kids get things done each day rather than slothing around the TV.
You don’t want your child’s summer daily routine to take up the entire day. Make sure your kids have plenty of time to just be a kid and explore their own interests. However, it’s also important to keep them on enough of a routine that back to school is not a stressful situation.
Why a daily routine is important for kids in the summer
It’s easy to fall out of routine in the summertime and struggle to keep up with things that need to be done.
While your child does not have to go to school in the summer (unless they’re attending summer school, in which case you’ll need to keep them on a summer school morning routine, at a minimum), they still have chores and should have some sort of routine for reading and daily hygiene.
By building and maintaining a summer daily routine for your child, you ensure that they will have the time in their day to get the things they need to do.
Help keep your child focused this summer with the printable chore charts, daily planning pages, and fun activities in the Systems to Organize Summer bundle.
How to put together a summer daily routine for your child
Make a list of the things your child needs to do every day over the summer. This includes basics like personal hygiene, as well as things that will help them make the most of summer break, including reading a book of their choice and spending time playing outside.
Starting with a list will help you work these important things into your child’s routine.
Start by keeping as much of your child’s school year morning routine as you can.
Your child still needs to get dressed, brush teeth, and get ready for the day. This doesn’t change, and keeping this as part of their summer daily routine helps make it easier for your child to transition back into the school year come fall. This simple step can save you a lot of trouble later.
Figure out what you want your child to get done each day. Do you want them to play outside? Read a book? Work on a summer homework packet their school sent home with them?
When building your child’s summer daily routine, you want to ensure that you include the things you want to see them doing. Otherwise, your child will get into the habit of not really doing anything all day. This habit can be hard to break.
Plan the evenings.
While bedtime may go out the window or significantly be raised during the summer when your child can sleep in and the sun stays up longer, your child still needs a daily summer night routine.
A solid bedtime schedule helps to keep them sleeping evenly, and when it is time to go back to school, a consistent bedtime routine makes the adjustment easier on them (and the rest of the family).
For the most part, your child’s daily bedtime routine in the summer should stay close to what they are used to during the rest of the year. This keeps them on a steady routine and makes transitions easier.
Nighttime summer routines should include bathing after a long day of play, reading, or at least putting away electronic devices, and spending quality family time before bed.
Summer chores as part of your child daily routine
With kids home all summer, they are making more messes around the house and should, in turn, be doing more to help around the house.
In the summer, assign your child more chores as part of their daily routine.
Summer chores for kids can be as simple as helping collect the extra dishes your family goes through before loading them in the dishwasher to helping with sweeping and mopping up the extra dirt they track in as they run in and out all day.
This helps take some of the stress off of you so you can put more energy into making memories with your kids this summer, rather than simply cleaning up after them.
Get my printable age-appropriate chore list below:
How to enforce your summer daily routine for kids
When you build a daily routine for your child to use over the summer, you have to enforce it to ensure that they stick to their routine.
A great way to enforce these routines is to keep distractions to the side until they complete their daily tasks. For most kids, this means completing their daily routine before getting electronic devices or the password to the house WIFI.
Build their routines into habits.
When you take the time to drill the same routines into them day after day, they will eventually become such a habit that they no longer need to be reminded.
Just like when they learned to brush their teeth and get dressed before school, they can learn to do some simple chores and read a book before moving on to whatever they want to do for the rest of the day.
A visual schedule like this is also a great tool for helping kids remember and follow daily routines.