I was visiting with one of my sisters-in-laws when she told me of something her husband was doing with their kids. He had issued them spy cards and they were working as a team to solve puzzles and doing service acts. I decided to take his idea and change it a little to better fit my abilities and my kids! I loved the idea of having my kids work as a team to accomplish something and that they would accomplish that by serving others.
So I came up with the theme of Secret Service Agents. I made a list of 11 "missions" or service activities ..one per week during the summer break. I tried to keep them pretty simple since my kids are small. I thought it would be cool if the mission would be have to decoded someway but I couldn't get the invisible ink to work right...they were excited anyways! I tried to keep it as secret as possible and not have them know that I was the Special Agent in Charge.
Our first mission was to pick up trash around the neighborhood...It made a really good FHE activity!
After completing the mission, they each drew a picture of them completing the mission, placed it in our spy box ( a plastic pencil box that I wrote Spy Box on...nothing fancy here..) and then place it in the mailbox with the flag up so the Special Agent would come and get the box and deliver our next mission.
This was the flag that I used to alert the kids that they had a new mission. I hid the spy box and then left a 3 clues that lead them on a treasure hunt to find it. They loved that part!
I then had them decipher the message... a simple letter for letter decipher... A=Z...B=Y...that kind of thing! It was a great incentive to have them get their chores down so they could figure out the missions.
With each completed missions, they got a puzzle piece to some great reward...a night at the local swim park!
They loved this activity and it was excellent for teaching the value of service and pushed us out of comfort zones!