I would not do Colonial Williamsburg on a Sunday. You can still walk around but not much is "open." We made that mistake once, lol.
If you log on to the Colonial Williamsburg website you can pull up the "This Week" and it will show you what is open.
You should definitely sign up to do "RevQuest: The Sign of the Lion and the Unicorn." It's another great way to get the kids highly involved - a cell phone with texting is required, and there is a mobile website for it, but a smartphone is not needed to complete your mission.
http://www.colonialwilliamsburg.com/content/summer/spy-central.html
They also have a really great kids website
http://www.history.org/kids/visitUs/index.cfm
That's a great week to come here IMO! Most places are back in school, so a lot of the visitors are gone and it will be mostly locals. We LOVE to go to both BG and WC during that last week before Labor Day
Actually - ALL of the schools except a few private schools will still be out. The schools in counties/towns east of Kings Dominion don't go back to school until the Tuesday after Labor Day. I've only lived here 8 years, but from what I understand several years ago the big tourism companies/towns (Kings Dominion, Virginia Beach, Busch etc) all got together and lobbied for legislation to keep the kids (And therefore their cheap labor) out of school until the end of tourism season. It's nicknamed the Kings Dominion Law. So, while the parks will be less crowded the last week in August than they are now, we don't go back to school until the Tuesday after labor day.
okay, so I previewed before posting and realized you were talking about other schools being back in session, not local schools! Yes, most of the Southern states will be back in school (next week for many) and half of the state of VA will be. So we will have less tourists.
Thanks for the tip, maybe I will switch BG with CW on Sunday. I hate last minute changes - we leave in four days!! But I would be more irritated if nothing was open at CW.
Remember that you can also always walk around CW and go into the shops free of charge. You just can't go into any of the museums without a ticket. So if you wanted to walk around one evening and "get the lay of the land" you could do that also.
Don't forget to buy your meal passes for Busch Gardens online before you go. When I go with my 3 girls we buy 2 of the $14 meal vouchers (entree, 2 sides and a drink) and that more than easily feeds the 4 of us, sometimes even with extra if we end up getting a larger meal. (for example there's a meal in Italy that is manacotti, spaghetti and chicken parm - then you add 2 sides and a drink and that will fill up all 3 of my girls on one meal ticket. There's also a rib & chicken platter in France)
Das Festhaus is not bad, but it's not as great as Trappers Smokehouse. The one thing Das Festhaus has going for it is large air conditioned seating - but it's the ONLY air conditioned seating in the park and it can be crowded at regular meal times. It has really good pizza for an amusement park (doesn't taste frozen at all) and the bistro sandwiches are very very good.
Water Country has a similar meal voucher program, but the very few times we've eaten at WC we haven't found anything worth finishing or repeating. So we either go at opening and leave around 1 for a late lunch, go between lunch and dinner or do an early dinner and go after dinner for the evening. There are not any really close restaurants to WC (unless you count the starbucks and snack counter in Target next door), there's a subway about 1.5 miles up the road near Harris Teeter, but there are a lot of fast food type places just outside of Busch (and easily accessible to WC) but WC has a better picnic area in the parking lot.
) to the Richmond area a lot and it's a crap shoot every time. Traffic on 95 most of the way down is terrible and once you hit the DC area, forget it. On a good day, he can do it in 5 1/2 to 6 hours (add another 45 minutes to an hour to get to W'burg). Some days it's taken as many as 8 to 10. If you can travel in the middle of the night, that would be my suggestion 
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