Summer Learning Activities the Entire Family Can Enjoy

Summer is the perfect time to introduce learning into everyday activities. Here are some fun suggestions that the entire family can enjoy!

Explore the outdoors. Whether it’s going to the park or taking a long hike, spending time around nature is one of the easiest ways to incorporate learning into everyday activities. Here are just a few examples:

  • Science: Identifying and categorizing plants and animals
  • Geography: Following a hiking trail or map for directions
  • Executive Functioning: Planning a route in advance and preparing supplies
  • Math: Calculating how long a physical activity will take based on time and distance

Besides the obvious physical benefits of spending time outdoors, children can also experience academic growth while keeping their minds occupied during the summer months. Go out there and get your Vitamin D – rain or shine!

Learn with sports. As we’ve talked about on previous blogs, sports are an ideal way to introduce math concepts to kids. Whether your child is involved in a team sport or just enjoys watching games with the family, math lessons are very easy to implement for students of any age. Sports are often based on score keeping and/or using numbers to measure place/distance/time/etc. Working with numbers that have real applications often makes these concepts more relatable for students. Statistics, probability, and units of measurement all have their place in sports – for more great tips on how to teach math using sports, check out our extended blog on the topic!

Cook a meal together. Not only is preparing food a valuable life skill to have, but it’s also a wonderful family activity that encourages kids in more ways than one. Cooking can be challenging and teaches kids the importance of fostering a growth mindset (believing they can succeed at something if they keep trying). Even more importantly, cooking allows kids to experience healthy failures without any real consequences. After all, it’s no big deal if you burn a few cookies! Cooking and meal prep also teach kids how to follow directions and even involve math concepts (like units of measurement). For example, a fun way to practice fractions is to have your child convert a recipe to a different serving size. If the recipe serves 4 and we only want 2, ask them to “half” the recipe! If a recipe normally calls for ½ cup of flour, explain how ¼ cup would be half as much. These are just a few examples – it’s easy to build learning lessons into cooking. Most importantly, your kids will have a blast experimenting with culinary creations!

Looking for more awesome summer activities for the whole family? Click here!

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