Crafts

In our melting pot of a city, kids are exposed to lots of different languages, and the summer is a great time for children to try to pick up a new one. Whether your child yearns to master Chinese, French, German, Italian or Spanish, New York City is home to lots of language immersion summer camps. No textbooks at these programs. Instead, kids experience the usual seasonal fun—swimming, sports, arts—in their non-native tongue. The instructors and counselors are all fluent and not only teach kids the language, they expose them to the culture, too. Here are 10 language immersion summer day camps that will have your kids saying hola, bonjour or ciao in no time.

For the past few years, I have dreamed about having a party with a photo booth. Not only does it seem like a fun party activity, but the guests end up with great favors: The funny photos that show everyone together, having a blast. You can rent a photo booth from a local company, but the prices start in the high hundreds and go up from there, so I looked into different options for DIY photo booths.

After much research, my photo booth solution ended up being incredibly simple and free, and it was a huge hit at my last gathering. We got terrific pictures of all the guests, but the biggest surprise was how great having a photo booth was for the kids. We had children ages 3 to 12 completely occupied, snapping away, leaving the grown-ups to eat, chat and mingle.

While this easy DIY photo booth works for grown-up parties, I think it's a particularly great addition to a kids' party. The only downside is, if you want the kids to do anything else, it might be hard to pull them away.