Summer is the time for everyone to let loose. While the kids are busy exploring their wild side, the parents are more than happy to enjoy their much-deserved break. Catch up on your reading, work on that body, indulge in comfort food and maybe, even enjoy a few Sunday brunches with your friends. While you’re enjoying your summer, it makes sense to engage your kids in a few activities that are educational as well. Often, kids get sucked into the world of video games and outdoor games over the summer, that they forget what they learned in school during the previous academic year. In other words, a summer brain drain. We need some fun, educational summer activities for kids, to help them retain all that they have learned. If the teacher asks a few revision questions, they should be able to answer them in order to feel confident and smart. Not being able to answer will crush their self-confidence.
We bring you a bunch of fun activities that both, you and your kids will enjoy:
Now, depending on how old your child is, you can make them solve a variety of math puzzles. This can be in the form of online games, puzzle books or just casual games that you made up at home. You could ask them to hop four times, then six times, and finally ask them how many times they hopped in all. Also, if you’re in the backyard, you could play a game of Simon Says and ask them to bring you various items from the garden or the house – maybe 2 pebbles, 4 books, 3 spoons, etc. Ask them to add the number of items at the end of the game, or take away a few items of each and ask how many remain. Even while having breakfast, they can count how many fruits are on the kitchen counter or how many pancakes are made. You can then ask them to divide the total number of pancakes by the number of people that are having breakfast to help them practice their division. Math is all around you, and it doesn’t have to be the nightmare that it is perceived to be. It’s a great activity for 4 – 11 year olds. You can make it fun for your kids in your own special way.
Did you know that if you cut an onion in half, make a little dent in the centre and fill it with baking soda and vinegar, you could actually create electricity? It’s true! When you stick a bulb in that dent, it will actually light up! Science can be so much fun when applied. You must have heard about what happens when you put an Ivory soap in a microwave, right? It becomes a big, fluffy cloud in a matter of seconds. There are loads of experiments that can be done at home using day-to-day household items that will help kids understand physics and chemistry, thereby avoiding that summer brain drain. They’ll understand concepts of space, time, heat, expansion, speed, etc. Investing in a few science games for 4 – 11 year olds will spark a great curiosity for science in them, and then you won’t have to worry about them not paying attention in science class.
Is there a better way for kids to remember their environment studies? Summer activities for kids are incomplete without a visit to the great outdoors. Take them out on an excursion and ask them to name everything they see – ponds, rivers, animals, trees, birds, etc. Make it exciting and give them points for every right answer. Treat them at the end of the day with ice cream, and help them recall everything they experienced. Or a few days later, show them the photos from the excursion and see if they remember the various birds, animals and trees they came across during the outing.
Apart from going over the poetries that were done in school, they can always read new poetry and story books to help them better their language and vocabulary. You will find many online games that focus on learning the alphabet, completing stories, getting creative with rhymes and improving your vocabulary with synonyms and antonyms of words. Apart from the online games, you could also do crosswords with them or read bedtime stories to them. It seems like a miniscule activity, but we all know how much kids retain when they are little. Reading is an activity that sharpens the mind in many ways – creative thinking, imagination, vocabulary and grammar.
Once you’ve covered activities related to school subjects, you could focus on a few activities that require critical thinking. Games like Soduko, Brainvita, Find Waldo, Rubik’s Cube, etc are a bunch of intellectual games that can engage them for quite a while. It is important for a child’s mind to constantly be challenged with new and different things. If you’d like, there are puzzle books as well as online games for kids that will strengthen your child’s critical thinking. Critical thinking can also be incorporated through art and craft activities; origami, hand painting, building blocks and clay art, to name a few.
Go ahead! Make the most of the summer before heading back to school. Spend quality time with your kids with the summer activities that will help nourish and nurture their young minds.
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