Summer vacations — the one time the students keep aside their textbooks and say goodbye to their classrooms for a short bit. This is the time when students make up so many plans and think of doing things which they otherwise, with a usual routine, cannot! These can be, learning how to row a boat or even just visiting their grandparents’ place.
But, being on a summer break certainly does not mean leaving studies and overall development behind. Though they might wait eagerly for this time to come, at the same time, these long breaks can be effectively utilized not only to avoid monotony but also to develop valuable skills.
Summer activities added to their routine may be a good idea to make them productive and boost self-esteem as well. With multiple edges, as one may infer, summer vacations, when managed properly with activities, may make a reasonable difference. To support you in this expedition, we here listed out the edges of these campaigns in detail and also a list of activities you may prefer.
Activities in summer vacations: What edges do youngsters gain?
Vacations can create a good space and scope for children to expand their horizons. Nonetheless, these activities need the proper implementation to be effective. By employing campaigns with some tips, kids can make the most of multiple edges like:
- Break from gadgets: Children today often spend long hours a day in front of screens. Indulging in activities, students can take a vacation from these electronics throughout the summer, breaking their routine habits for betterment. These activities may help them discover new things apart from using the technology.
- Enhances social skills: Learning entails more than just taking tests and getting excellent scores. These activities serve as a location for a child’s social education. When doing these activities they are in a better position to be more social and interact with more people.
- Productivity: Children who are continuously doing something are more productive throughout the day. Evidently, doing something valuable is always preferable to doing nothing. These activities may support them to increase their productivity by learning new skills and also a few tips to get them faster.
- Fun and entertainment: These activities are enticing, thereby may keep the children entertained, and they may relish the whole process. They may like to try new things and do it with utmost enthusiasm. It will be a great source of entertainment for them as children enjoy these fun activities.
Activities for young learners on sunny days
While there can be tons of ideas, a perfect activity may need a creative angle along with the value. Accordingly, we have crafted and listed a few campaigns here:
1. Reading out to Explain
Reading is not just for the mind, but for the body and soul too. The benefits of the same cannot be enough emphasised upon. And therefore, it would be a great idea for kids to indulge in reading during their summer break. This is also crucial because they aren’t able to spend much time with the books during their school days due to tight schedules and schoolwork.
Encourage your children to read engaging stories and novels. Spending some time with the books every day helps kids develop their reading abilities, gain information, and expand their vocabulary, among other things. Math lovers can go for some math fiction; while visual learners can treat their eyes with some visual books.
For little kids, who have not developed the habit of reading and are yet to become more affable with words, parents or caretakers can spare some minutes in the day and read them a few pages of the book.
This activity can also be used to enhance one’s oratory skills. The student must read aloud the text from the book to make sure their oratory skills are improved by the time they head back to school. They can first do it all alone by standing in front of the mirror and observing themselves. Special emphasis should be there on the tone, pauses, dialect, pronunciations, etc.
Later, after a few days, this activity can be performed in front of friends or even family members. This will help them boost their self-confidence and make them better speakers and orators.
2. Making rock Paintings
To get started, this activity doesn’t require a lot of ingredients. Simply look in your own backyard for some rocks. Children can also visit the garden for collecting different types of rocks. Before painting, children can clean the rocks with soapy water to remove dirt and debris and then let them dry in the sun before painting.
The rocks can then be painted and decorated. The most common choice for painting rocks is acrylic paint or paint pens.
Children can also make rock paintings more innovative by using different materials such as sticks and other decorative items. This activity will bring out the creativity and uniqueness in the kids. Getting artsy during the summer break can be a good idea; parents and caretakers can motivate the little ones with some fun art quotes too.
3. Cooking with Math
Cooking is an interesting activity for helping a youngster develop their numeracy abilities, as a lot many times a lot of ingredients need to be added in specific numbers like 1/4th, 20ml, 1 cup, 1.5 TBSP, and much more. This way, the kids not only learn to clean, prepare food, measure, bake and cook, but also become problem solvers in many ways.
Math is used extensively in cooking and hence, it can be made into a great activity to teach fractions, measuring addition, and multiplication to young children.
Start by teaching them the number of ingredients required. Then you can continue with the measurements of each of the ingredients. You can ask them the difference between measuring cups of different items and so on. To make the cooking time more knowledgeable for the kids, adults can purposely give them full cups, instead of half cup wherever half a cup is required to check whether or not the kid has understood the concept of using half a cup.
This can also be done in another way, when a recipe asks to use 1 full cup, half a cup can be given so that the student can apply their knowledge and use half cup two times to make one full cup.
Using fractions, decimals, and ratios during cooking time teaches them a lot about these concepts and also helps them understand how math is used in real life.
4. Roleplay of a movie
For this activity, copy and cut out role-play cards. Make one role-playing card for each student. Make a list of movies that your child loves so that the activity becomes all the more interesting.
For this activity, each kid is allowed to take one card from the box. Children may now dress up as any character from the film and act like them. Role-playing is a fun activity that will keep the children engaged. They will enjoy their time socializing with other children while also being productive.
Summer vacations can be a great time for kids to get to know more about their passion and what they like the most. This activity, for instance, can give them an insight into how they can be perfect for theatre or other creative fields like costumes, etc.
5. Gardening with measurements
Children can utilize their free time in the vacations by gardening in their house garden. Through gardening, measuring the space of a plot or gathering statistics on the development of veggies will become routine tasks. Students can immerse themselves and learn volumes about these concepts while seeing the growth of their garden.
They will learn about the area as they plan how many plants they can grow, how far apart they need to be, and how to measure distance for each kind as they graph out the plot. Therefore, this fun activity can be a great way to learn about gardening, spending time in nature, learning about measurements, and at the same time, spending time with the family.
6. Recycling old bottles
Children can make a new product by recycling old bottles. Boosting their creativity, this can be a fun activity to teach the kids about the importance of recycling and how crucial it is for mother earth!
Children can easily find old bottles at home and instead of throwing them away, guide them as to how they can decorate them and use them in other ways, such as planting a plant in the bottle. This will also teach them the value of things.
7. Learn a new language
Learning a new language can widen many horizons, even for a young kid! Benefiting them in the future, the summer vacations can be the perfect time for little learners to learn a new language. It can be any which they want to learn, or even the language which is widely used where they live, especially if their mother tongue is different.
Learning a new language is always a fun idea. However, this requires a lot of time and patience, which of course is not possible during the usual routine. Hence, taking some time every day to learn just a few words can be enough. Kids can enroll in online courses or even physical classes. If the parent knows a particular language, they can also spend some time with their kid to make them understand the nitty-gritty of the language. This can be a great linguistic as well as developmental activity.
8. Memory Scrapbook
While there is no denying that summer vacations are a memorable period for every student, how about capturing the memories and preserving them in a scrapbook? The students must keep a record of what they did during the month-long break. It could be visiting the grandparents, going on a vacation, or even spending some quality time with the family.
For this scrapbook, the student must take 10 pictures of what they did during their break, and then explain it beautifully. They are free to decorate their scrapbook as per their liking and put a title to it with their name. For example: ‘John’s Summer Memories 2022.’
This will not only help them become more creative, but while explaining the pictures, they will improve their handwriting and writing skills. This can be kept with them and it would be such a pleasure to revisit such beautiful memories! Hence, this thoughtful activity becomes a must for summer vacations!
Conclusion
Summer vacations can be a good time to relax, as well as work on skill development. On the first day of the vacation, each student must make a list of skills that they wish to acquire during their small break. By the end of the vacations, they should be able to tick off at least a few of those!
Kids should be made to understand that vacations are for fun, but for learning too! Mentors may start with easy tasks to get the little ones into the learning process. It may be beneficial if the young ones are taught how these campaigns develop crucial character traits such as independence, responsibility, decision-making, and resilience.
What’s the bonus – the students can talk about their experiences and learn from the activities once they get back to class!
Try the above-mentioned summer activities with your children this summer break and see which activity they enjoy the most. You might discover some of their hidden talents through it as well.
An engineer, Maths expert, Online Tutor and animal rights activist. In more than 5+ years of my online teaching experience, I closely worked with many students struggling with dyscalculia and dyslexia. With the years passing, I learned that not much effort being put into the awareness of this learning disorder. Students with dyscalculia often misunderstood for having just a simple math fear. This is still an underresearched and understudied subject. I am also the founder of Smartynote -‘The notepad app for dyslexia’,