Summer vacation is an amazing time to bond with your kids, but over so many weeks, you may begin to worry that you’re not stimulating their brains enough. With so much time for play and rest, it’s easy to neglect the concept of keeping your kids actively learning throughout their vacation – but how can you achieve this without making them bored or forcing them to learn? Here are a few tips that you can try out this summer.
Learning Activities
One way to get your kids to spend some time learning this vacation time is to trick them into it! Nope, this doesn’t mean setting a trap and locking them up with a book. Rather, invest in some fun and interesting learning games and activities that they’ll enjoy so much it won’t even feel like education. Some ideas you could try out include Summer STEM activities, learning-based video or computer games, or even family-friendly board games that have an educational element to them.
Read to Them
This is especially great for younger kids. Bedtime stories are something that most children love and look forward to every evening. Whether your stories are learning-based or not, developing a love for reading will benefit them in their academics in the long term, they’ll be expanding their vocabulary and comprehension, and you’ll have an easy way to get them to drift off to sleep so you can have some downtime too. Bonus!
Nature Trips
Going for a hike, a visit to the beach, or even just a trip down to the local park are all fun and relaxing pastimes, but they can also serve as great learning opportunities. Teaching kids about the world around them is best done through up-close experiences. Take your children along on an outdoor adventure and get them interested in what they see all around them – the trees and how they grow, spiders and how they spin their webs and fish in the pond at the park.
Cooking Together
Believe it or not, food can be an educational experience too! Letting your kids help out in the kitchen will help them to learn some basic cooking and baking skills which we can assure you, they will love. Letting them get messy and experience tastes and textures is great for younger children, and the older ones can learn more about temperature, how ingredients react together (like science!) and even find out about different cultures and cuisines.
Field Trips
Rather than just heading out to beaches and barbeques, plan some fun but educational outings this summer too. Taking your kids to a museum, aquarium, zoo, or some local historical sites are all fun activities for the whole family but also offer a whole lot of learning opportunities for your kids. They’ll get to move and run around in new places, and all the different and exciting experiences will be stimulating for their young minds. As a bonus, you never know, you might end up learning something for yourself too.
