Beat the Gap: Fun School Holiday Activities For Your Learners

Support an enduring love of learning with summer school holiday ideas that promote confidence and growth. Avoid learning regression with fun activities that take the kids into the learning zone and keep them occupied and entertained, too!

Keeping the kids entertained during the summer break is a perennial task for parents. It’s tempting to sit them in front of a screen and call it a day, especially if you’re working from home or have other commitments eating your time. But the summer holidays are a critical window for learners. Without the right support, they can lose valuable skills.

But keeping your kids engaged and entertained on the break doesn’t need to be hard. From toddlers to teenagers, there’s no reason you can’t keep them active and entertained for hours while still keeping them learning. In fact, there are a host of things you can offer your kids over the break to give them a boost in the new school year. Let’s take a look!

Why Organise Learning Activities for Kids?

Many summer holiday activities for our children focus on activities to keep them out of our hair and entertained. But the six weeks of holidays is a long time. Kids and adults alike need to practice skills not just to improve them but to retain them.

We recognise that athletes must train consistently, and musicians must spend time with their instruments each day to succeed. It’s no different for our kids. Unless they practice all that fantastic learning absorbed through the school term, it risks being lost altogether.

At Seeds of Knowledge, we call this loss ‘learning regression’ or a ‘learning gap’. They start small, but without practice, the gap will get larger, and our learners will have to relearn a lot of valuable skills once the school year commences after the break. It’s especially noticeable in our youngest learners — after all, six weeks is a lifetime for a prep child!

Building Motivation and Confidence with School Holiday Activities

In addition to avoiding a learning regression or gap, the best school holiday activities promote confidence. Learners who know they can overcome difficult but enjoyable tasks with patience and perseverance will be well-prepared to tackle difficult curriculum components once they are back in school.

Children are often motivated in the classroom using external pressure. They work to seek the approval of their teachers and peers or to get more obvious rewards like a sticker on a star chart.

But difficult tasks that they enjoy at home generate rewards from within. Children revel in the sheer pleasure and sense of satisfaction they get from building a complex piece of Lego, getting to the top of a tall jungle gym or finishing a huge sandcastle. They’re more willing to try hard things that they enjoy and are more motivated as a result.

There’s also less pressure to succeed. It doesn’t matter if they use the wrong piece on their Lego masterpiece or if their sandcastle gets washed out to sea. They can fail at those tasks with no fallout or bad grades, and so they’re more likely to take risks. When those risks pay off, especially after repeated attempts, they learn that they can overcome difficult tasks.

Later, when they’re faced with a tricky math problem or a longer piece of reading than usual, they’ll remember that feeling of accomplishment and be more willing to try. Not only that, they won’t give up the first time they make a mistake. They’ll have the confidence to try again.

As a parent, you might need to point out these little failures and achievements. Kids can easily miss the effort they put in before they succeed, especially if they are having fun. Let them know you see their progress and their pride. It builds their confidence in a real, tangible way.

Fun Educational Activity Ideas to Keep Kids Busy

The good news is that fun and educational activities are all around us. There are countless ways to introduce opportunities to help your child keep their skills sharp and their learning on track. Here are some ideas to help get you inspired.

To Promote Literacy

• Look at where you can inject written language into your everyday life. For example, turn on subtitles when you enjoy a movie or TV show.
• Provide easy access to inspiring books. Our Seeds of Knowledge families benefit from the Brisbane City Council libraries, which have a huge selection of high-quality books, ranging from picture books to decodable readers, non-fiction children’s books, magazines, and more. Check with your local council and see what’s available in your area.
• Recipes are an excellent way to introduce young readers to simple instructions that yield delicious results. Let your child choose from cookbooks — again, consider hitting the libraries if you don’t have many at home.
• Show what you want to see. Let your children see you reading for pleasure when you have free time.

To Support Maths

• Get creative in the kitchen – baking is an excellent activity that rewards good reading comprehension and math skills with delicious treats.
• Water play with measuring cups is a great way to beat the heat as well as provide practical instruction on volume and fractions.
• Simple board games encourage counting and number recognition. Use dice with pips as well as numerals to give children the opportunity to recognise number groups as well as digits. Classics like Trouble, Ludo and the like are perfectly fine, and there are many fantastic educational games available, too.
• Don’t overlook card games. Uno for example is fantastic for number recognition, and can be played as suggested or used for Memory, Snap or other games, too.
• Playing shops is a perennial favourite of small children everywhere. Take that to the next level with printable play money, count change and add items for purchase totals.

To Encourage Writing

• For our younger learners, pre-writing activities that build finger strength and grip are both fun and educational. Painting with water on concrete is mess-free and promotes precision and endurance.
• Collage making, especially if they cut their own materials, is another rewarding pre-writing activity
• Arts and crafts activities help older kids maintain fine motor skills so critical to writing. While it’s tempting to use printables with a defined end product (like colouring in sheets), open-ended choices also have less pressure and last longer. A big box of cardboard rolls, old cereal boxes and paper shopping bags can inspire a whole host of creations that promote hand-eye coordination, finger strength, cutting technique and other skills that will translate to confident writing.
• Encourage children to produce their own comics or picture books of their own. Even a blow-by-blow recreation of their favourite TV show will still give them an opportunity to get writing.
• Play Mailman – set up letterboxes at bedroom doors and encourage your children to send you letters, postcards or even invitations to dinner.
• Speaking of dinner, rope the kids into meal planning by asking for help writing menus, shopping lists and the like.
• Older children benefit from journaling or diary writing. Younger kids can get the same writing practice from “to-do” lists or jotting down fun things they’d like to try each day.

It’s Not Too Late to Join Seeds of Knowledge School Holiday Program

If this all seems like too much effort, it’s time to call in the professionals.

School holiday programs in your local area are perfect for families who want to keep their children on track but who may not have a heap of free time to dream up craft ideas or pack a picnic every other day. A tailored holiday tuition program that kids will love takes the pressure off while keeping our little learners on track.

Our Holiday Intensives are 90-minute sessions that use literacy or numeracy content from the Australian curriculum as a foundation for enduring learning. Our program encourages kids to connect with their own learning and move beyond just repetition and rote. We teach them to find joy in their own abilities and give them the confidence to pick up new skills and knowledge. Our small group setting also allows them to develop and practice the social skills so critical to active classroom participation, and is a lot of fun to boot!

Give us a call or drop us an email to check availability in your area.