Summertime plans often lean toward travel and vacations, but some of the best parts of summer are the relaxed days that families spend together at home or close to home. There are lots of fun, inexpensive ways to spend time with your children and to help them develop a healthy, receptive attitude toward learning new things about the world around them as they explore their own skills too.
You can help your kids discover an interest in science by simply spending time in your own backyard or at a local park and observing nature. While eating lunch outside, see how many different animals you can notice, from butterflies to squirrels. Be sure to listen as well as look for animals.
Educational websites like Scholastic.com have lots of ideas for nature-themed activities for the youngest children. For example, if your child is curious about bugs, try scooping the flesh out of an orange or grapefruit, turning the empty halves upside down, and leaving them outside overnight; in the morning, turn them over to see what insects have come to visit.
Plant life also catches the interest of tiny scientists-in-training. Take a nature walk around your neighborhood and collect bits and pieces like leaves, twigs, and blossoms. If you buy a pack of solar print paper at a local toy or craft store (or online), you can then arrange the pieces you collect on a piece of special photo paper to leave in the sun and make a sun print. Kids enjoy arranging their collections of treasures from nature on the photo paper and then seeing the shapes left behind when the print develops.
Gardening is another fun learning activity. You can incorporate skills like counting as you count how many seeds or plants you’re putting in. Children also learn a lot by following the growing process from seed to seedling to full grown plant. While gardening, kids also learn about the weather and how it impacts plants. Repeated activities like watering and weeding help teach responsibility, and kids learn self-confidence as their plants bear vegetables to pick and eat with their family—or better yet, to share with friends and neighbors.
Summer is a great time to encourage the habit of reading. Let kids choose plenty of books to bring on vacations, and make time for reading together every day. Many local libraries have summer reading programs with prizes and group activities. In Clifton Park, NY, the Clifton Park-Halfmoon Public Library has summer reading programs for kids of all ages, including free educational activities specially designed for preschoolers. Libraries often offer story time too.
Finally, kids can explore lots of different ways to make art in the summer, from painting and drawing on construction paper to using sidewalk chalk. By the way, if you don’t want to leave the chalk art on your driveway or sidewalk, you can give kids big paintbrushes and a bucket of water afterward, and they can “paint” over the chalk with the water until it washes away.
It’s a fun change of pace to take an easel outside or set up an art-making station at a picnic table. Kids often enjoy drawing their surroundings like animals, trees, and flowers. Cutting and pasting are favorite activities too. How about helping kids find pictures in magazines that reflect their ideas about summer and then letting them cut the pictures out and paste them on a piece of paper to make a collage? You can also write out the words for the pictures kids choose to encourage letter identification and pre-reading skills.
Of course, the best way to encourage learning with your young children over the summer is to spend time with them and have lots of conversations. Listen to the many things that kids have to say, and help answer their questions about the world and themselves.
