{GE Family Craft Night} Avoid The Summer Slide

Is it important to you to keep your kids learning over the summer or do you give them a break?  I do a little of both!  I don’t want them to experience too much of a “summer slide” but I also want them to really enjoy their summer vacation.  So, I try to sneak in some learning by doing fun activities in which they don’t realize they are learning!  I will share some of them with you this summer.  Yesterday we had a GE Family Craft Night…well, actually it turned into more of a GE Family Craft Day between the shopping, replacing bulbs and making the tri-fold display!  We did a lighting makeover and then calculated the savings!  Recently, I posted about our living room lighting makeover and wanted to extend the energy savings to other rooms in our house.

The first step was to go around the house to count every light bulb in every room and outside.  The kids added up the bulbs (have to keep those addition facts sharp in their minds) and came up with a total of 67 bulbs!

Next, we went shopping at Walmart to look for GE Energy Smart bulbs as well as an Elmer’s Tri-Fold Board for making a display.  We ended up buying 25 light bulbs and spending just over $100.

It was hard finding all of the bulbs we needed but Vanessa and Zack helped me and we eventually figured it out. During the shopping trip, we kept track of the cost with a calculator app on our iPad (more math skills).  We had to do some problem solving when they didn’t have the bulbs we wanted for our chandelier.  When the price tags on the shelves didn’t match, we had to do some more math and some more problem solving.

 Back home, we gathered together the GE Energy Star light bulbs we had purchased and got to work.

We went room by room replacing as many of the bulbs as we could.

Then we started on the tri-fold board. We drew a large light bulb in the center and used my X-ACTO knife to cut away the outside part.  Then, we pulled out some Mod Podge Glow-In-The-Dark and some metallic & glitter paints.  Vanessa applied the Mod Podge to the bright part of the light bulb and Zack painted the silver part of the light bulb.

Once the paint had dried we filled out the board using paint markers.

Next, we went to GE’s website and used their GE Energy Smart CFL Saving Calculator.  We replaced 25 bulbs and I added the 4 energy efficient living room bulbs from the previous post.  I got on my electric company’s website and figured out that we pay an average of $0.13 kilowatt/hr, which is more than the average of $0.10.  This diagram shows our savings!

On the left side of the board, we put the tally of all the light bulbs in our house.   In the middle we put the money we will save.  On the right we each thought of a thing or two that we could buy with the money we will save.  My kid’s favorite part was the glow-in-the-dark bulb.  I tried to take a picture of the glowing bulb to add to the post but even with a slow shutter speed, it didn’t work.  It sure does look neat though! We were all amazed with how much money this will save us.  Hopefully we can continue replacing bulbs until all 67 of them are energy efficient.

How do you plan to help you kids avoid the summer slide?

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