Summer Fun Activities

Educational Projects for a Summer Day

Links checked 05-02-2016

As your children make the transition from the school day to the summer day, they don't have to stop learning. Check out these great resource sites that provide all kinds of project ideas for them to try at home to combat the "summer brain-drain".

Here are some of our favorites:

• Animal learning crafts from The San Diego Zoo. Lots ideas for Father's Day gifts, masks for play-acting and so much more. Also, visit the live cams to see the animals in their habitat.
• Reinforce time and months of the year by making a Family Birthday Calendar. This is a great activity for kids that allows them to express their creativity and is useful, too!
• Did you know that time spent in the kitchen with kids can help them improve their math skills? - Craft Recipes for instructions to make silly putty and homemade playdough and they will learn that using the correct measurements really does matter!
• "Grab a Shovel and Start Digging". Plant an herb garden with your child and teach them how to tend it. All you need are some seeds, containers, dirt, water and sunlight.
• Get a little sticky and learn to "Create a Model Cell" of your very own. This project is great for 4th graders and up.
• A quick Social Studies lesson, "Create a Tennis Ball Globe" is a fairly easy project for 1st - 5th graders, which quickly shows them seeing how a spherical Earth can be shown in a flat map. Let them color the map and mark their location with a thumbtack. This activity reinforces the concepts of absolute and relative to identify places on a map.
• Summer Fun Guide from Ziggity Zoom - "Keep Your Kids Cool, Having Fun, and Exploring the World" - Outdoor games, boredom busters, art projects and more.
• Whether in the classroom, or rain/snowbound over vacation time, our Virtual Field Trip Collection is a wonderful way to teach and learn about the outside world. You can travel to museums, exotic islands, and even outer space. Please read the introduction first, as planning is critical to a successful trip. Remember it is the journey, not just the destination that provides the learning experience!

For more summer ideas and links to other resources on the web, visit our parent resource page.