Manage your sanity (and your children’s time) during summer break by teaching them something useful
Summer break is wonderful—for your children. Sometimes, for busy parents, the summer break is a time of rising stress and too much television.
There’s a reason they say TV will rot your brain. After a few days of gobbling up whatever they find on TV, many kids need to find something else to focus their time on, hopefully something productive and something that will give them a heads up on the upcoming school year.
Saving your sanity during the summer months might be as simple as putting your kids to work learning something new.
For older children, you might want to consider keeping them busy with tasks that can prepare them for their future. If college is in the cards for your child (don’t we all hope that’s the case?), try getting them interested in software programs that can get them ready for standardized high school tests and college entrance exams. Vocaboly.com offers a vocabulary builder that can help your children build and improve their vocabularies.
Vocaboly.com’s software is vocabulary building software for SAT, TOEFL, GRE, and GMAT, and comes with a free trial so you find out what you’re getting before you buy.
When I took the GMAT, I scored high on the Verbal Section, and I believe my larger-than-average vocabulary (from extensive reading) was helpful. If your child has never been a voracious reader, using software to beef up his vocabulary might be the way to go.
Younger children might be better suited to educational computer games, such as those you’ll find at coolmath-games.com. My 9 and 11 year old love these games.
If you have the time and interest, don’t rely on others to teach your children something new. Do it yourself.
You can create interesting puzzles for your kids to solve with EclipseCrossword. I love this software for creating holiday puzzles, but it can certainly be used to create educational puzzles in history, social studies, geography, and other subjects.
If you want your children to spend more time outdoors than in, maybe this is the year to teach them how to grow flowers or vegetables, how to mow the lawn or trim the weeds, how to identify plants, or even how to change a flat tire!
Summer fun doesn’t have to be mindless and it doesn’t have to drive us crazy. A little educational entertainment and mindful preparation for the future can keep our kids busy learning, while we have lemonade—or get things done around the house.
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