10 Fun & Interesting Activities to keep Children Learning this Summer
The summer holidays are upon us and with education being disrupted so heavily over the last 18 months because of the pandemic, understandably parents are concerned that their children are going to fall further behind during the summer break. However it doesn’t have to be that way, the summer holidays can be a time for family bonding ,personal development and learning for children. The following 10 activities are some useful ways you can engage children and help their learning. The vast majority of these are easy to implement and also very cheap or free to set up!
1. Help Plan a Trip
If you’re already planning to go away as a family, a great way to get children involved and develop their organisational and planning skills is to allow them to help plan the itinerary. You can give them oversight or input over a particular day of your trip or even longer, if you think they are capable they can even plan the whole trip! They can plan activities they would personally enjoy or activities they think the whole family will enjoy. This can also work if you’re not planning on going away on holiday, they could plan a single day out locally.The fact that they are personally invested in the trip could make it more enjoyable for them.
2. Guided Nature Walks
Time spent outside is a great opportunity for exercise, exploration and learning. You can search up local nature walks in your locality, you can even put together a scavenger hunt of items they have to find, pinterest is a good place to find these.
3. Get involved in Grocery Shopping
Getting children involved in the weekly shop is a great way to teach them about budgeting and planning ahead. Give them a certain amount of money to spend and you may also want to specify what the house needs. You may want to allocate a little bit of spending money for them so they can get an item or two for themselves as a reward for a job well done.
4. Cooking Challenge
Continuing on from that you can use the summer holidays to develop the lifelong skill of cooking, start gently with simple things if they are not experienced but you can progress to more complex dishes and even share cultural and family recipes.
Cooking is a great way for children to express themselves, you may find after they’re able to make a few dishes they then start getting ideas of different combinations of food that they want to try. It may be helpful to have a checklist of things that they should aim to be able to make by the end of the summer.
5. Building your family tree
During the summer holidays and with Covid restrictions slowly starting to ease we will have more of an opportunity to see family members. Building the family tree from scratch is a great way for children to understand the history and culture of the family and where they fit into all of it.
They can interview family members, collect pictures and learn about interesting family anecdotes. The presentation of the family tree can be up to the child, they may want to draw it out or even create a digital copy, that way they can insert old family photographs and have them alongside recent digital photos.
6. Journaling
Journaling helps develop writing and self reflection skills, crucial skills needed to be a successful student and person. You can encourage the use of a conventional journal, one in which they are able to document their summer activities, thoughts and feelings. Additionally for more creatively minded children, they could have a sort of scrap book full of drawings, poems, magazine cuttings etc. There are also task managers such as notion that can have all of this in a digital version but this would be more appropriate for much older children and adults.
7. Use your local Library and start a bookclub?
Your local library will most probably have a range of different activities for children to get involved with over the summer. A book challenge can encourage children to be reading all through the summer and there is normally some sort of prize for completing the reading list.
Another idea could be to start a reading club with your children’s friends, they are likely to have similar interests and the accountability of reading with friends is a brilliant incentive for children to read, the children can discuss what they’ve just read and do other activities.
8. Family games night
Having fun as a family is very important and the summer holidays present a great opportunity to do this with children being at home more. Family game nights are something that children can look forward to and definitely something that can remain as a permanent fixture even after the summer holidays. Fantastic educational games like catan and monopoly teach children about negotiation, building communities, strategy, economics and much more.
You can also use online resources like Kahoot to do family quizes, you can make them yourself or use the wide array of question banks made by others.Even card games can teach children a lot. Whatever the game, the main point is that the family has fun together and the children learn.
9. Family Movie Night
Similarly a family movie night is something that the whole family can look forward to, it can be a great bonding experience and you can even introduce them to some of your childhood favourites.
There are many educational documentaries, films and shows that you can select from the various platforms such as Netflix and Amazon Prime. You can also find a lot of good quality free content on Youtube.
This is a great way to entertain and introduce new concepts to your children, it creates topics for discussion that can be developed further.
10. Construction/Destruction projects
If you’re planning to do DIY over the summer, get the children involved, let them see and take part in the process of putting together a cabinet or painting the front room. There are many build-it sets that you can buy specifically for children, even lego will help in this area.
Similarly if you are dismantling or breaking something up this can also be a useful learning experience, even old tech that you don’t need can be a treasure trove for a curious mind, they can see how common tech items work and maybe even have a go at putting them back together, all with adult supervision of course!
Bonus Activity Science Experiments
Summer is also a great time to kindle a love for the natural world, understanding how chemicals interact is a great way for children to have fun and learn about science.
You can make things even easier and learn about natural science by gardening with your children.
There are so many more ideas and examples of really innovative and fun ways your children can continue their learning over the summer holidays. You can share some of your ideas in the comments section – Happy Summering!
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