In last week’s post, we discussed why it is so crucial for students to remain engaged with learning this summer in order to maintain (and even progress) the gains they’ve worked so hard to earn over the course of the school year. We know most parents and caretakers have their hands full, so we’ve put together a collection of ideas for educational summer activities kids will actually want to do, some online and some off.
Digital Learning Experiences
Whether spent with family or on a class field trip, some of the most exciting out-of-classroom learning experiences happen at museums. But since so many are closed, they are bringing their exhibits to you! Check out the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s #metkids program, where young travelers can hop in a time machine and choose any time period, region, or idea to explore. Participate in the weekly STEM challenge with the Boston Museum of Science’s #mosathome. Or visit any one of these museums, offering virtual tours from the comfort of your couch.
If your child is more into living exhibits, they can also virtually visit some of the world’s most famous zoos and aquariums. Many zoos around the world have set up webcams in the enclosures of some of their most popular residents. Younger students can practice their inferencing skills by writing down their observations of what the animals are doing, then brainstorming the reasons for that behavior. Middle school students can compare and contrast the habitats, foods, and climates of different animals in the zoo. High school students can research animals in the wild versus in captivity, and write a persuasive essay arguing for or against zoos.
Other institutions offering online resources are National Geographic for Kids, Discovery Kids, iCivics, and NASA. And for more online learning ideas, WideOpenSchool offers amazing resources (free and paid) with new content being added every day.
For TV and movie lovers, turn down the volume and turn on closed captioning. Or watch in another language! It’ll be impossible to follow what’s going on without reading those subtitles.
And for more structured online learning, sign up for Smarten Up’s Smarter Summers group workshops. We’re offering weekly workshops for elementary, middle, and high schoolers in June and August. Elementary courses run 1.5 hours a day and include meaningful and engaging activities in all core subject areas. For older students, check out our more targeted list of offerings, like Expository Writing, Persuasive Writing, and Math Problem-Solving.
Continuing the Learning Offline
For those whose children have had a little (or a lot!) too much screen time, there are plenty of off-screen learning opportunities, too. One great way to kick off a summer of learning is for kids to write a letter to their future self. This could be a letter for their end-of-summer self, their next-year self, or even their 18th-birthday self! Or they could write one to be opened at different milestones in their future. These letters are often extra powerful when they write down a goal they have for themselves (whether or not it’s academic), as having those goals in writing make them much more achievable. Worried about losing them? Students can either type their letters online and send them to themselves with a delivery date in the future with Boomerang, or parents can help by doing the same thing with a picture of the letter.
If your kids like to cook, have them follow a recipe and convert measurements from U.S. units to metric, or vice versa, or have them double (or triple) a recipe. And if cooking is less interesting to them than playing with their food, have them engineer and build a food structure using toothpicks and bite-size foods like grapes, blueberries, etc. Kids can plan out their structure, making predictions for how tall they can make it and how many toothpicks they’ll need. Then have them test their hypothesis.
If your kids have an affinity for writing, encourage them to craft a play, comic book, magazine, or newspaper. For the playwright in the family, offer to do a family reading of the finished product. If they opt for a comic book and need some help on the artistic end, they can enlist some friends or siblings. And magazine and newspapers are always easy to make a team effort. Your child can be the editor-in-chief, and friends or family can contribute articles, op-eds, advertisements, etc.
However your child’s learning takes place, make sure they’re excited by it. Summer is certainly not a time to veg out on the couch all day, but it’s also not the time to “cram” in learning that might make your child bored, or worse, resentful of that learning. Summer should be about filling our days with activities that are fun, spark curiosity, and help us learn something along the way.