summer

Educational Summer Activities Your Kids Will Love

June 21, 2018 by Guest Writer

It’s finally summer break! Your kids are thrilled, but you may already be looking for ways to keep them occupied once the novelty of their freedom wears off. Plus, you’re eager to engage them in learning so they keep their minds fresh for the upcoming school year. Fight the summer slump by planning educational summer activities your kids will love!

Visit a Children’s Museum

Across the country, children’s museums offer kids space to learn, explore, and play. Exhibits often educate children about basic physics or biology concepts as well as other topics including architecture, geology, health, and recycling. From climbing walls to demonstrations, children’s museums are the perfect spot to spend a hot summer day. You may have one in your city; if not, there’s probably one within easy driving distance.

Take a Hike

Nature walks or hikes provide you with plenty of opportunities to reinforce what your children learned throughout the homeschool year. They can bring along notebooks to record what they see and small bags to collect specimens and interesting finds. Your little artists can sketch objects in nature or take photos, while your analytical children may enjoy measuring leaves or weighing rocks. In addition to the beneficial exercise, the kids can practice writing, math and measurement, making observations, and drawing conclusions.

Plan a Day Trip to a Local Landmark

Do you live near the site of a battlefield from the Revolutionary, Civil, or Mexican-American War? Maybe the house of a famous author or the birthplace of a renowned inventor is somewhere near your home. Visits to sites of historical significance make fun, educational summer activities—and often admission is cheap or free! Many of these locations also feature small museums with artifacts, activities, or presentations to enjoy.

More Educational Summer Activities

Looking for additional enjoyable and educational summer activities? Bug-catching is a great way to help your kids brush up on their insect knowledge. A STEM activity like kite-making challenges your children to experiment with shapes and structures to figure out which designs fly best in the summer breeze, while growing flowers or vegetables helps children understand growth cycles and plant life more deeply.

Visit the library and let the kids stock up on DVDs, books, and music CDs. To keep last year’s learning fresh in their minds, assign a couple pages each day from BJU Press Vacation Stations review books. With these activities, plus plenty of time to amuse themselves, your children are sure to have an exciting and educational summer!

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Rebecca is a work-at-home freelance writer, novelist, wife, and the mom of two bright-eyed little ones. She credits her success in writing and her love of books to her own mom, who homeschooled three kids from pre-K through high school.

10 Exciting Summer Activities for Homeschool Families

June 29, 2017 by Meredith

All right, admit it. Not all summer vacations are created equal.

Perhaps you remember figuring this out as a child when the neighbor kid returned from a mega theme park. After telling lots of cool stories, he asked where you were going on vacation that year. And somehow the idea of a weekend camping trip lost a little of its luster when compared to the excitement of the fast rides and thrills of a theme park.

The hard part for a child to learn is that it doesn’t matter so much where you have an adventure as much as who you have the adventure with! Some of the best childhood memories can spring from times when family members have little but each other. All it takes is a bit of imagination, resourcefulness, and creativity.

If your family—like most—just can’t seem to coordinate time and finances long enough to pull off a flashy vacation, don’t give up! For the family determined to have a good time together and make fun memories, there’s no need to even leave town.

Try these fun ideas for an unforgettable summer:

Go on a photo scavenger hunt with the whole family. Make a list of cool and wacky items to find around town—a statue of a lion, an ice cream shop, a blue kite, and such—and take fun family pictures with each item. To provide more of a challenge, set yourselves a time limit or divide the family into two teams. Maybe your town has something like Greenville’s Mice on Main^©.
Instead of going to the city pool or recreation center, find out whether there are any natural or manmade lakes or reservoirs in your area and if they’re open to the public. See whether you can find any information on how they were made, and then turn that into a summer field trip—with a picnic and an afternoon of swimming to finish up. If there are several, try to visit each lake or reservoir over summer break, and have the family rate them as to which ones were the best.
If you have very little ones, a summer camping trip may seem like too much of a hassle. But camping out in the backyard is certainly doable! Set up a tent (borrow one from a friend if you need to) and roll out sleeping bags for the whole family. Then, stoke the fire for dinner and some storytelling! (Depending on local ordinances, you may need to use a deck fire pit instead of building a fire directly on the ground.) A dinner of roasted hotdogs and toasted marshmallows will fill tummies nicely, and campfire songs and exciting stories told around the fire will make for a wonderful and memorable evening.
Have each of your children set a goal for the summer break. It can be any kind of a goal—frivolous (“I’m going to make my brother laugh every day”), practical (“Learn to ride a bicycle”), or slightly outlandish (“I’m going to touch my nose with my tongue”)—just so long as it’s the goal that child wants to pursue. Then have them chart their progress—they might have to get creative in how they measure it—as the weeks go by so that they can see how far they’ve come over the summer.
Join a summer reading program, but don’t just do it just for the children. Get everyone involved and track how many pages the entire family reads over the course of the summer. The program prizes will provide children with motivation to read, but you can spice it up even more by throwing in your own incentives for siblings who help each other reach their goals by reading out loud. Find some great books to read in these posts.
Invite friends over for a halfway Christmas party—play Christmas music, drink frozen hot chocolate (you can find great recipes online), do a white elephant gift exchange, go caroling in your neighborhood, and have a contest to see who can perform the best wacky summer skit version of Charles Dickens’ classic, A Christmas Carol.
Plan a family theme day. As a family, decide on a theme—pirates or a favorite children’s story, like Secret Garden or Alice in Wonderland—and a specific day to celebrate it. Then brainstorm about decorations, food (there are lots of themed party recipes online), activities, costumes, and props—even what accents you’ll use. Make sure everyone is involved in the preparation and can contribute to the adventure.
Hold game tournaments. Incorporate board games, electronic games, and physical games to challenge the skills of family members in different arenas. You may even want to purchase a brand new board game that appeals to the whole family. Learn how to play it and then include it in your tournament matches.
Choose a skill that interests the whole family—maybe rock-climbing—and take lessons together throughout the summer. Not only will you be equipping your children with another skill but you will also be doing it in a way that provides quality family time.
Pile into the family car and try to get lost in your city! If you’ve lived there a long time, it might be a little difficult, but there are countless roads that will surprise you with the interesting things they hide. Stop at places that look interesting. Also, this is a great opportunity to help your children learn how to follow a map. Let one child be the navigator and trace your route on the map. Then have him practice giving directions accordingly. Alternatively, each child can chart a route on an individual map before leaving home and then take turns following the route as navigator.

The potential for summer fun is practically limitless. Learning can happen in the most surprising places and at unexpected times. And wonderful memories can be created without ever leaving town. All you need is a good imagination, a spirit of adventure, and some dedicated family time. So set the cell phones aside, turn off the TV, log off the computer/tablet, and go have some summer fun your family will never forget!

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Keeping School-Year Smarts During the Summer

May 30, 2017 by Guest Writer

As summer approaches, most kids have just one thing on their minds—vacation! Most homeschool parents feel that the summer break is good for their children, giving them the opportunity to “just be kids.” It only makes sense, right? Everyone needs a vacation once in a while, especially the energetic “junior set.” The time away from the disciplines of your homeschool schedule allows them more opportunity to explore their personal interests and to further develop socially by playing with other children.

The Downside

But before your kids play away their summer days, consider these research findings from Johns Hopkins University that reveal the possible pitfalls of an extended vacation. On average, children lose 2.6 months of learning over the summer. That’s more than ten weeks of material they will have to review before being caught up enough to begin the curriculum for the next grade.

We’ve all heard that the brain is like a muscle, and that means that it has to be challenged and exercised regularly to stay in shape. The hard work students put into their studies during the homeschool year is almost wasted if they don’t spend at least some time during the summer months keeping the material fresh in their minds.

Maintenance Mode

That doesn’t mean that children should be locked away to study grammar and work math problems all summer. Taking them on frequent visits to the library to find reading material they enjoy is a far more effective way to keep their brains engaged throughout the sunny vacation months. This is also a great time to help your children establish good reading habits—manageable, set amounts of reading time every day—and to help them discover and broaden their reading tastes without the pressure of academics.

Reading throughout the summer months is especially important for children who are still developing fundamental reading comprehension skills. If they spend an entire summer without any extended reading practice, they’re far more likely to lose the vocabulary and comprehension they gained from the previous year.

Educational Outings

Be on the lookout for creative ways to sharpen academic skills or incorporate them into fun summer outings. Visiting a farmer’s market? You can include reviews on everything from geography and history (Where did these different fruits and vegetables grow natively? How and when did they cross into new countries?) to agriculture (What processes actually go into growing food?) and botany (What part of plants are the various fruits and veggies?).

Small-Business Ventures

You also might want to consider having a yard sale or a bake sale. Working with cash transactions and making change for customers will help young people strengthen basic computational skills while also giving them a concept of the realities of money management. A few math exercises out of a workbook every week can help keep math principles fresh in their minds but give them a fun motivation: earning points toward a small reward at summer’s end.

Media Options

Most libraries have a good selection of educational videos for younger children that can occasionally serve as a positive substitute for cartoons. Let your young audience help you choose videos on topics that interest them. Also, you can find many parent-approved educational websites that kids can visit to learn about their favorite topics, participate in simulated experiments, and play educational games.

Summer Camps and Programs

Enrolling children in summer programs or camps is another beneficial option for making the most of your family’s summer learning time. The Johns Hopkins study noted that only 10 percent of children nationwide are involved in summer learning programs. However, the majority of students consulted in the study wanted to be in an educational program during the summer. Children who attend get to enjoy making lasting memories while also learning in a relaxed, fun atmosphere.

For another easy way to maintain your child’s academic skills over the summer, check out the Vacation Stations activity books. These short, fun-filled activities review math, language, and reading. With lots of hands-on activities, exciting outings, and a few pages of Vacation Stations review each week, your children can enjoy their summer while holding on to their hard-earned knowledge.

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Q&A: Should I homeschool year-round?

June 23, 2016 by Justin

One of the great things about homeschooling is that you’ve got lots of options. One of those options being whether to follow a traditional schedule with the summers off or a year-round schedule with shorter breaks along the way. There is no right or wrong way to do it because each option has its advantages. Each family should decide what works best for them.

The debate about year-round “school” is too large to cover in a single post, but here are a few considerations that impact homeschooling specifically.

Advantages of a Year-Round Homeschool Schedule

Avoiding burnout

Year-round homeschooling allows for frequent short breaks (typically a week or two long) as opposed to one long break in the summer. The advantage is that both child and parent (yes, parents can get burned out too) get refreshing downtime more often.

Less time to forget

Most summer breaks last about three months, and that’s a long time to remember concepts, which means that a lot of information is forgotten. Thus, a lot of review is required at the beginning of the next school-year. Homeschooling all year long minimizes these problems.

Normalizing schedules

By learning all the time without a large gap, homeschool becomes more of an accepted part of your family’s normal routine rather than an extra task that only has to be done part of the year.

Advantages of a Traditional School Schedule

Summer break

Who doesn’t like a three-month break? Spending a good deal of time indoors focused on textbooks and projects gets a lot harder when backyards, swimming pools, and beautiful summer weather are calling. Summertime is also typically accompanied by an increased number of extracurricular activities such as sports and travel, and it may be more difficult to squeeze those in around your homeschool.

Easier scheduling

Many homeschool curricula and schedules are designed to fit a traditional school year. By following a traditional schedule, your child’s point of transition between grades is more clearly defined.

Coincides with conventional schools

By following a academic year calendar, time off will align with friends and family members who are in classroom schools with the same schedule or are planning to take vacation around a holiday.

If you’re on the fence about homeschooling year-round, I hope the information we’ve covered will be helpful in your family’s decision-making process!

What other advantages would you add to these lists?

June Is Reading Month!

June 2, 2016 by Justin

Enjoying a good book while sitting in a deck chair on my patio is one of my favorite summertime activities. The relaxing sounds and smells of nature combined with the warm sun make it easy to be carried away by the pages.

June is reading month here at BJU Press and to celebrate I’d like to highlight some of my favorite blog posts about reading.

Tips for Teaching Reading

Fun Reading Activities

Exciting Book Reviews

Need some extra reading material? JourneyForth is offering 25% off the entire lineup throughout June 2016. From children’s novels to adult Bible studies, there’s something for the entire family. Happy reading!