I had this crowd last summer, we basically spent as much time outside as possible, park every morning... which was great b/c all their buddies were there from school. They LOVED sidewalk chalk, so we'd spend some time, usually the end of the day in the driveway doing chalk. We spent a lot of time in the backyard in the sandbox, with the sprinkler, we had a wading pool that they basically took buckets of water out of to throw at eachother. I had 1 child that napped so we had quiet time when I'd put a movie on for them. I did a few backyard science experiments, we had a theme day or two. One was pirates and it was fantastic! I bought some red satin sheets from a 2nd hand store for about 8 bucks, tore it all up and made sashes and bandanas, had the kids help me make eyepaches and dabloons and pouches to carry their dabloons in. They had so much fun they went to the park alld ressed up in their outfits! it was hilarious.

We didnt do crafts every day, we reserved them more for rainy days. But I did take advantage of doing messy crafts that I normally wouldnt do b/c we could do them outside.

When I had a small amout of kids or if my husband was around, we'd go to the beach and spend a good part of the day there... that was tons of fun... went fossil hunting, etc. We had a blast last summer!