Summer Outreaches to Teach Kids Valuable Life Lessons
As summer opens up to new activities and experiences, how about teaching the kids in your realm of influence valuable life lessons in learning how to make this world a better place?
Summer Outreach Activities
It can take a lot of work and creativity to fill up the long summer days with your kids. How about including some activities as a family or social group for bonding. Also make a difference in your neighborhood and community. Below are some ideas to positively impact those around you. What a great way to say “Believe It Or Not I Care.” So, if you have a family or group looking for some excitement this summer, you will love these activities.
Here is a calendar with a category of outreaches suggested for you to try each week. Here is a planning form to bring everyone together to plan the outreaches. As a family/group with young kids, sit down each week to plan out the outreach. Then assign each person a responsibility or two for the outreach. If you have older kids, this is a great opportunity for life skill building that they can put on job, college, or scholarship applications. They can choose an entire outreach, plan it all out, and then assign tasks to people for the completion of the outreach. Make sure you take pictures or videos to capture the outcome so they can brag and show what they organized. **Important note if you are reaching out to others, only take pictures of your family/group and not those you are reaching out to – for the privacy of those people.
Here are some ideas for the June outreaches. If you are starting now you will be behind a couple of weeks on the calendar…but you can just continue the outreaches into August.
Week 1: Cheer up a senior citizen. Think through any senior citizens you know of who may need some help or encouragement. Do you have a grandparent or an elderly neighbor? Call them (on speakerphone so the whole family/group can hear) to ask what they need or how you can encourage them – landscaping, a picnic, organizing their garage, etc. Or how about contacting a local senior living center and asking how many residents are there and if you can make a card for every resident? Or do a search on the Internet for “free coloring book pages” to color a picture for every resident. Then plan a day and time for the outreach. Gather all of the supplies for each person to work on their part of the project, and get to work. Take photos of your family/group doing the outreach and post them on your social media and on B.I.O.N.I.C’s social media too.
Week 2: Make Your Community Beautiful. How about cleaning up trash in a park, or painting rocks with positive sayings or words? Then place the rocks on the ground in various places where people will see them. Some ideas of sayings are like the picture above, or these ideas:
- You matter
- You are beautiful
- Someone needs your smile
- You are enough
- Hope
- Love
- Joy
Week 3: Thank your postal carrier who brings your mail every day or your delivery person who delivers your packages. A thank you note plus a gift card to a favorite restaurant, store, coffee shop, or bookstore is a great idea. What else can you think of?
Week 4: Reach out to a homeless person. Put together a ziploc bag of a little bottle of water, a granola type snack bar (in its original packaging) – not chocolate so it doesn’t melt in the sun, little bottles of lotion or sunscreen or hand sanitizer, a little package of tissues, chapstick, etc. Then when you are in your car and see a homeless person on a street corner, give them the ziploc bag of goodies. It can be a blessing to them on those long days in the sun. Note, the homeless may have food allergies, so do not include peanuts or other items that can cause allergic reactions. For safety reasons, always make sure an adult from your family/group is in the car when a child wants to give out a bag, and don’t get out of the car to give it. *Again, when giving these out do not take a picture of the homeless person, just show a picture of the bag and your family/group.
We can’t wait to see your posts of pictures and comments on what your family/group is learning through the outreaches! Besides posting on your social media sites, here are our B.I.O.N.I.C. social media sites that we would love for you to post to also:
- Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/bionicteamorg
- Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/b.i.o.n.i.c.team/
- LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandy-austin-bionic/
- Twitter – https://twitter.com/Bionicteam
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