Want some cheap summer fun for you and your children? Of course it’s fun to go to amusement parks, a water park, the swimming pool, the beach, hiking, or the lake, but that’s not always feasible and certainly not something most of us can do every day. Especially if you have a lot of littles.

The best, most sustainable summer activity, in my veteran homeschooling SAHM opinion, is to read aloud books to your children. Now that it’s warm weather you can easily do it outdoors, unless you’re in Phoenix, or Yuma, LOL. Here are some great suggestions for summer read aloud books. I’m showing some of the books mentioned in that list, also in the video below, and adding to it some of my own ideas.

Marcie, the mom behind the list, and shown in the video down below, says the following:

“Are your kids bored? Here’s my trick! I stop what I’m doing and read to them for 30 minutes. Then, inspired, they go off and pretend to be kids in the book we just read. They may make a wax face and pretend to be a waxworks boy like Rufus Moffat or have a cat that can type like Pinky Pye. There is no end to their adventures when we read books together!”

I will add, that advice works if your children aren’t addicted to screens. If they are, reading aloud for long stretches of time might not work. If you’ve never read aloud to your children before, you might have to build up your children’s attention spans to listening to read-alouds. Especially if they are used to flashy fast-paced and easy screen entertainment. Try five minutes at a time of reading aloud, involving food, something simple like popcorn, to make reading aloud more delightful. Gradually add more time. Use quiet activities mentioned below if needed. End your session on a cliff-hanger so they eagerly await the next session.

It’s great if the kiddos just sit and listen, but rather unrealistic to expect that if they aren’t used to it. It’s OK if they are doing something quiet with their hands, like drawing, paint by sticker books, jigsaw puzzles, play doh, thinking putty, fidget toys, or things like that. So I’m showing images from readloudaloudrevival.com of quiet activities to accompany read-aloud time. Make those things special and only let them play with them during read-aloud time. See more about that here with lots of quiet activity suggestions. Some people are OK with Legos. Some aren’t. They can be rather noisy if the Legos are all bunched together, causing the kiddos to have to sort through them, making a rustly noise.

I absolutely love Gone Away Lake by Elizabeth Enright. I blogged a lot about it over here. It combines two of my favorite themes: summer and cousins.

Check out all of Marcie’s list of summer read alouds here, and be sure to watch her video above.

You can get Marcie’s study guides for some of the books on her list here. Each guide has questions and enrichment activities.

If you want help with limiting screen time for your children, learn about that here.

It’s also OK if you don’t do all the reading aloud with you as the narrator! Mama’s voice gets breaks for sure! Use audiobooks! Lots of books are available for free in LibriVox and YouTube, and for a small monthly fee (<$20) in Audible and Everand.

Audiobooks are super great for car trips. We listened to a bunch on a road trip to Nauvoo IL in 2015.

You can also just bypass the recordings in the car and use your own voice, of course. It can just be hard on your voice if you have a bunch of kids spread out in a big car, like a 15-passenger van. So audioboooks to the rescue with the speakers turned on in the back of the car too.

Some of the Betsy-Tacy books are on audio over here. Learn all about the author and her books over here.

All the Little House Books are in everand.com. Learn more about everand here.

It’s also totally OK to read aloud while your children are doing household chores. For years we had a ritual of me reading aloud while my children did the dishes and folded clean laundry. Those days are gone but still a happy memory.

Happy reading aloud! May it create many magical summer memories for your family.

We listened to Johnny Tremain on our trip to Nauvoo. Such a classic!

Here’s a super fun podcast episode with Emily from the Really Very Crunchy Mom book and Jennifer Pepito on reading aloud with your family.

If you need convincing on why reading aloud is so wonderful and how to do it, check out the books above and below.

Lastly here’s my other website where you can get many more book title suggestions for summertime, including picture books, which I didn’t show here.

I hope all this inspires you to make reading aloud a habit, not just for the summer, but all year round!