# 14 Skill-Building Summer Activities To Do with Young Children June 16, 2020 As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to alter daily life, many families will find themselves staying closer to home than they normally would during the active summer months. Fortunately, there’s lots of summer joy to be had right in your own backyard—or on your balcony, in your living room, and around the neighborhood. Here are 14 ideas for having fun with young kids this summer while nurturing important language, STEM, social, and motor skills. Adapted from and inspired by some great early childhood books from Brookes, these activities will help keep families busy during the hot summer months and help children expand the skills they’ll need to succeed in school. ### **Have winter in July**. When the summer heat makes you miss the joys of a snowy January, conjure up some winter fun inside. Wrap some cardboard bricks in white paper and build a snow fort together. Challenge kids to make creative pretend snowballs out of materials you have on hand (crushed paper, foam, coffee filters) and then have a family snowball fight. Set a large piece of plastic on the floor, put on some music, and have a skating party in your winter socks. Go “ice fishing” with a magnetized fishing pole and fish, and make some hot chocolate when you’ve caught them all. During each activity, look for opportunities to promote children’s language skills by asking questions, commenting on the activity, and modeling new vocabulary words. ### **Make an outdoor path game.** Path games are even more fun when kids can play them outside, using themselves as the life-sized game pieces. Come up with a name and theme for your game, and work together to draw a chalk path on a stretch of blacktop or on the sidewalk. Include as many spaces as you can. When you’re done, roll a large die to determine how many spaces kids can hop along the path. Not only is this activity a good way to encourage exercise in the sunshine, it also helps young children construct the idea of a number line. ### **Bring the beach to your backyard or balcony.** Whether due to health concerns or other barriers, sometimes a beach vacation is out of reach. But with a little creativity, you can bring a slice of the seashore to your backyard or balcony. Fill a small plastic pool with sand and bury some seashells in the sand so that children can dig for them. Put on your sunglasses and lay out on beach towels together. Cut out surfboards from big pieces of cardboard and paint and decorate them. Set up a boardwalk area with games and concession stands made from large cardboard boxes, and take turns running the stands and being the customers. Talk to the child about what you’re doing, and what activities you’d like to do together the next time you’re at the beach for real. ### **Practice patterns with undersea shapes.** Fishing is a classic summer activity, and young fishing fans may enjoy this neat patterning activity. First, hang some S-hooks on a bar or pegboard divider. Help your child cut out and decorate fish and starfish shapes from colored fun foam or sturdy paper. Talk about the mathematical concept of patterns, and model how to hang the fish and starfish from the hooks to create simple patterns: fish, fish, starfish; starfish, fish, starfish. Kids can make patterns based on colors or by animal type. ### **Tell a story through photos.** Before an outing, an activity with many steps, or a walk around your neighborhood, have your child take digital photos of the event as it happens. Then have the child select pictures that tell a sequential story of your activity. Help your child arrange a display of the photos, either on your computer or on paper with printed-out photos. Give language skills a lift by encouraging your child to show the display and tell the story to family and friends during your next visit or video chat. ### **Go on a geometry picnic.** Next time you go on a backyard or park picnic, give it a STEM infusion. Pack foods that take the form of standard geometric solids: big marshmallows (cylinders), grapes (elliptical solids), cheese sticks (rectangular solids), melon balls (spheres), cheese cubes (cubes). Name and talk about each of these and encourage kids to use plastic knives to slice into the foods and see what shapes are made when they’re cut in different ways. ### **Brighten the day with rainbows.** Colorful rainbows capture kids’ imagination, and there are lots of different ways to play with them inside and outside. Here are a few suggestions: - Read a children’s book together about the science of rainbows. - Make rainbows outside with prisms or a spray of water from the hose. - Learn a rainbow-themed song together, like “I Can Sing a Rainbow,” “Des Colores,” or “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” - Create a rainbow paint set by putting a dollop of white glue into each cell of an egg carton, adding a drop of one or more colors of food coloring to each, and mixing with cotton swab “paint brushes.” ### **Make paper-plate sand pictures.** For some good fine-motor practice, have your child glue some sand to the bottom of a paper plate. Then ask them to decorate the plate with different items that might be found underwater. (You can use small plastic animals, cut the photos out of nature magazines, or draw your own.) Wrap the whole plate in a film of blue plastic wrap to represent the water. ### **Sharpen STEM skills with bubbles.** Here’s a cool indoor/outdoor STEM activity: Make some geometric bubble wands with pipe cleaners and straws. These wands are an excellent tool for early geometric exploration. Their frames form the outlines of geometric solids like cubes and pyramids, which are revealed when children dip them into the bubble solution. ### **Explore the nooks and crannies of your neighborhood.** On your next walk around the neighborhood, peek into little places you might not ordinarily think to explore. Study sidewalk cracks, turn over a rock, peer into a storm drain. When you’re home again, encourage the child to represent these new discoveries by telling stories or drawing pictures about it. ### **Collect and study rocks.** Have your child collect a variety of interesting rocks. Set up a simple scientific exploration center with supplies like a magnifying glass, egg cartons, and clear bowls of water. Show kids how to examine the details and texture of each rock with the magnifying glass, see what happens to the water level in a container when rocks of different sizes are dropped in, and sort the rocks by features like color, size, and texture. ### **Set up an outdoor show.** If you have a TV screen, laptop, or tablet you can bring outside, have an outdoor movie night—or, if you have enthusiastic performers in the family, set up a puppet theater outside or make one together from a sturdy box or cart. Ask the kids to set up a ticket booth and a concession stand. ### **Test a boat’s buoyancy.** Buoyancy is an interesting STEM concept for kids to explore. Start by reading a children’s book together on the concept of sinking and floating. Then fill a small pool or tub with water and bring along two plastic boats or other containers of different sizes. Have children add marbles to the boats and predict how many marbles it will take for each of their boats to lose buoyancy and eventually sink. ### **Take an architecture tour.** Take your child to a neighborhood or part of town where there are lots of different types of buildings. Point out that there are many different shapes in the buildings and see if your child can find squares, circles, rectangles, and triangles. We hope this post gave you a couple new ideas to test-drive with kids at home this summer.