Fun ways to keep your child’s brain engaged during the summer break

I hope all of you are doing well as your kids are out of school now and you are planning your getaways. Hopefully your bundles of madness have not driven you to the brink of insanity yet. Summer is a great time to reconnect as a family and have fun together. However, it also can be challenging as you still work and try to find ways to keep your kids from becoming couch potatoes whose brains are stuck in off mode. Children can lose a significant amount of information that they learned through the school year as the summer break goes on. According to www.wasatchacademy.org, teachers spend an average of three weeks every fall reviewing and re-teaching material that students have forgotten during the summer vacation. Many students lose up to one to two months of reading and math skills during the summer. There is perhaps an even more harrowing figure. By the end of elementary school, students who haven’t learned anything over their summers are on average two years behind their peers who have. How can you as a parent or care giver make sure they can stay mentally sharp yet also have fun? There are several activities you can partake in brought by www.greatschools.org that give some recommendations:

• Clip, paste and write about your family’s adventures

A family vacation is a perfect opportunity to create a trip scrapbook that will be a lasting souvenir of family adventures. Collect postcards, brochures and menus from restaurants and tourist attractions. Encourage your child to write descriptions of the places you visited and tell stories about your family’s escapades. Or suggest a scrapbook on your child’s favorite sports team or a chronicle of his year in school. The scrapbook might contain photos with captions, newspaper clippings or school mementos. Many photo-sharing web sites will help you (for a fee) create professional quality photo books, where you arrange the photos and write captions.

• Become the family’s junior travel agent

Half the fun of a trip starts before you get there. Involve your child in the planning by practicing how to use a map to find cities and tourist attractions, and how to estimate distances. If you are driving, work with your child to figure out how many gallons of gas it will take to get there and estimate the cost. If you are flying or traveling by train, check travel schedules and costs. Research your destination in books and on the Internet. If you are going to a different state, look up information about the state, such as the state flower, state bird and interesting attractions. Have your child write to the state tourism bureau to ask for information.

• Paint the picket fence, baby-sit or volunteer at a soup kitchen

Even young children can learn to be responsible by helping to set the table, take care of a pet, clean out a closet, wash the car or paint the picket fence. Ask your child to be your energy consultant and help find ways to conserve energy in your house. Outside summer jobs and community service help children learn to be punctual, follow directions and serve others.

• Turn a museum trip into a treasure hunt

Get your children excited about visiting a museum by exploring the museum’s Web site and taking a virtual tour. When you go to a museum, take into account short attention spans and don’t try to cover a whole museum in one day. To make them less intimidating, start in the gift shop and let your child pick out some postcards of paintings or objects on display. Turn your museum trip into a treasure hunt by trying to find those paintings or objects in the museum. Look for interactive exhibits and for periods of history that your child has studied in school.

In addition to these outlined tips, I would like to provide a few of my own based on my experiences growing up. My parents took us to the park and the beach often during the summer. During these trips, we looked at the natural sites and the animals together. My parents would tell me more about the animals and other things I was interested in. My mother also instilled in me quite the love of literature, which I hold to this day. We had books we picked out to read over the summer months.

I recommend taking your kids on a “safari” at your local park and being their tour guide. Have them later draw pictures of what they saw and ask them what they thought about the experience. Their insight might surprise you. Also register them for summer programs at local recreation centers if you are able. Some of these are free or at low-costs. Recreation centers, aquariums and parks also hold exhibitions for children to learn while having a good time. The principle is to have them learning while they don’t know it. Don’t package the event as a learning experience or mention anything school or learning related. School is exhausting for kids and they need time to recharge just as adults need vacations from work. You just want their minds to stay active in other ways so they are fully prepared to shine in the coming school year. Continue to enjoy the summer sun.