Fun Educational Tasks To Entertain Your Kids Over The Summer

Fun Educational Tasks To Entertain Your Kids Over The Summer
No kid is going to want lessons during the summer holidays. So what activities are there that combine learning with fun?
Written by Liz Bayardelle, PhD | See Comments | Updated 08/09/2021
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Fun Educational Tasks To Entertain Your Kids Over The Summer
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It can be difficult as a parent in the summer holidays. How do you keep your kids entertained? Plus, with them no longer being in school, how do you keep them learning? Kids’ brains are still forming – you want them to grow into well-learned and intelligent people. But, stuck at home, staring at the TV, it’s easy to fear that they aren’t learning.
But no kid is going to want lessons during the summer holidays. So what activities are there that combine learning with fun?
Baking
Baking is a great activity that is both entertaining and educational. Baking teaches your kids plenty of things – from essential life skills like cooking and scientific facts, like irreversible reactions.
You can expand the educational properties of a baking afternoon by bringing your kids with you to buy the ingredient. If you put your kids “in charge,” they can be responsible for writing a shopping list, looking around the shop for the ingredients, and working out how much it will cost. This teaches your kids independence, mathematics, and responsibility.
Plus, at the end of the day, you have a cake to eat!
Make a Movie
Making a movie is a great holiday activity for several reasons. For one, your kids will almost definitely want to do it. Growing up with sites like YouTube, they are very familiar with the concept of homemade films – whether these be mini short films or just video recording of day-to-day activities, like baking or going to the park.
On the other hand, this activity is great because it will ensure the creation of something lasting. Like a photo album or a story that gets retold, again and again, the movie they create can be watched back in ten years and laughed about. So it works as a great scrapbook of this summer right now, for the future.
Finally, making a movie is a great summer task because it is educational without feeling like a series of lessons. Making a movie will force your children to be creative and come up with ideas. Better than that, though, they will have to make their ideas practical. They will have to face obstacles as they realize not everything can be caught on camera. For example, they might want to have a unicorn in their film but, learning they can’t catch an actual unicorn on camera, will have to devise a solution to make this happen.
While making a movie, your children will have to co-operate with one another and likely take different roles. It teaches them teamwork and effective communication. On top of this, it can be a great time to teach them completely new skills, like how to use software that puts music over their movie. This helpful webpage should teach you how to do this: https://backlightblog.com/add-audio-to-imovie
Making a movie will also take up a lot of time, giving you a bit of a break! Remember to look super impressed when they show you their movie – even if it seems a bit strange, they’ve put their hearts and souls into it!
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About the Author

Liz Bayardelle, PhD
Founder | Contributor
Liz (or Dr. Mommy, as her toddler started calling her after learning what a PhD was) is the happily sleep-deprived mom of a toddler (and professional raccoon noise impersonator), a sparkle-clad kidnado, a teenage stepdaughter, 200 cumulative pounds of dog, and herd of dustbunnies (if daily vacuuming doesn't occur). During nights and naptimes, she uses her PhD in business psychology as an author, speaker, and consultant. She also serves as an executive and principal for three companies, two of which she co-founded with her very patient (and equally exhausted) husband.