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Kids’ Summer Challenge: 10 Fun Skills To Learn
Slide Nr 1Our little ones have missed out on quite a bit of scheduled, academic learning this year. Luckily, they’re never not learning, so what they lack in school time is easily made up in life lessons. With these activities and challenges, you can make sure that any summer fun they have is also educational.
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Kids’ Summer Challenge: 10 Fun Skills To Learn.
Slide Nr 2Cooking Their Favourite Meal – Chances are, there’s been way more cooking and baking going on in your house this year (welcome to the quarantine kitchen club). Kids being kids, there’s also a strong possibility they’ve been eager to get in on the action. Seize that opportunity to get them interested in homemade food and teaching them some basic skills. There are special children’s cooking books for all ages, starting as young as pre-kindergarten. Using illustrated recipes and colour-coded cup measures, they make creating tasty dishes fun. Bonus: Even fussy eaters are way more likely to gobble up something they made themselves.
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Kids’ Summer Challenge: 10 Fun Skills To Learn.
Slide Nr 3Growing Their Own Produce – Another great way to get little ones interested in food – especially of the healthy, non-processed variety – is to let them watch it grow. If you already have a veggie patch or herb garden, give them their own little plot or planter where they can sow any seeds they fancy, tend to the plants, and monitor their growth until they finally harvest the resulting crop. If you don’t have space for large-scale horticulture, set up small pots on the windowsill for a few unfussy plants. Expand the challenge and sneak in some science by keeping a plant diary, tracking development milestones and naming the different parts of the organism (as it grows, blooms and bears fruit, for example).
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Kids’ Summer Challenge: 10 Fun Skills To Learn.
Slide Nr 4Navigating, Orienteering, Finding And Leading The Way – In everyday life and on holidays abroad, adults usually take the lead and kids follow. Use this staycation as an opportunity to let the kids lead the way. Let them plan a hiking route using a map, or follow a certain trail by reading the signs along the way. On a more mundane (but nonetheless exciting for kids) level, let them plan a route for routine errands. They probably know how you normally get to the shops, playground or a friend’s house, but maybe they would like to try a different way. You can also help them understand how their small corner of the world fits into the town, city, neighbourhood or the planet at large by tracking these destinations on a map at home and bringing a compass along as you navigate familiar routes.
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Kids’ Summer Challenge: 10 Fun Skills To Learn.
Slide Nr 5Survival Skills – The best place to be this summer is the great outdoors. And the best way to make time in nature interesting for kids is to frame it as an adventure. In addition to reading a map, working a compass and using landmarks to orientate yourself in the landscape (see above), simple survival skills include first aid, finding water (and making it potable), creating and seeking shelter (ie. pitching a tent, building a makeshift canopy or finding a cave). If they are old enough, you can even teach them how to use a pocket knife, how to start a fire, or how to identify edible plants and forage for food.
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Kids’ Summer Challenge: 10 Fun Skills To Learn.
Slide Nr 6Photography – Children growing up in today’s phone camera world get used to being subjects of photography from infancy. Give them some agency by letting them get behind the lens. Second-hand point-and-shoot models can be found cheaply. Using the camera to document the progress of any summer activity can become part of the chosen challenge and teach an additional skill, even without formal training.
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Kids’ Summer Challenge: 10 Fun Skills To Learn.
Slide Nr 7Journaling – Encouraging kids to keep a journal is a fun, unstructured way to encourage creativity, but it also helps them organise their thoughts, process emotions and experiences, plus of course it will help preserve the memories of this summer. Small kids can draw what they did and saw each day, older children can write, keep a video diary, create mixed-media collages or even adapt adult techniques like bullet or gratitude journaling.
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Kids’ Summer Challenge: 10 Fun Skills To Learn.
Slide Nr 8Vocabulary – Journaling is already a great way to expand a child’s vocabulary. Add to the challenge by setting a daily goal. For example, each family member could contribute a new word to the family dictionary each day, explaining or illustrating what it means, then learning everyone else’s words. Alternatively, you could make a note of every unfamiliar word they come across, then spend an hour each evening looking each one up and writing it down in an ever-expanding list of new words. At the end of the summer, you can craft a story using all those words together.
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Kids’ Summer Challenge: 10 Fun Skills To Learn.
Slide Nr 9Swimming – Many sports activities are cancelled for the foreseeable future, but swimming is a low-risk activity (in terms of virus transmission) that requires little equipment or interaction with others. Even if you don’t feel confident enough in your own skills as a swimmer or instructor to teach your kids to swim, you can use this time to learn about water safety and explore the element together.
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Kids’ Summer Challenge: 10 Fun Skills To Learn.
Slide Nr 10Financial Planning – If times are tough in your house – or even if they aren’t – this global crisis is the perfect opportunity to teach even young children some financial skills. They will probably be aware of a change in routines, activities and even money worries due to the economy or lay-offs. Try to find an age-appropriate, playful way to talk to them about income, cashflow, taxes, government subsidies, budgeting, savings and investments. While you don’t need to worry them with scary details, emphasising the positive ways they can prepare for and protect themselves from the negative impact of a financial crisis will be valuable going forward.
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Kids’ Summer Challenge: 10 Fun Skills To Learn.
Slide Nr 11Volunteering – On the flip side, now is also a good time to impress on young children how fortunate they are if their lives aren’t adversely affected by a global crisis. Volunteering for a local charity is a rewarding family activity at any age. For the littlest ones, it may be as simple as selecting some toys to donate to a local refugee shelter, while older children can help sew face masks or deliver groceries to high-risk community members who can’t leave the house.
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