Use It or Lose It!
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19 ways to keep mind and body active this summer.
For nine months of the year, kids live their own version of the rat race. School, homework, tests, lessons, and extracurriculars crowd their days and nights (and yours too). Summer is the much-needed antidote. Which is as it should be. Still, "school's out" doesn't mean learning and doing are out, or at least it shouldn't. Not to be alarmist, but recent studies show that children risk academic and physical setbacks during July and August if learning and activity aren't regular parts of their summer days. And since exercise has been shown to bolster learning (as well as memory and mood and, okay, everything), helping your child stay active over the summer pays off in multiple ways.
With the help of a few experts (and staff parents), we've gathered some easy ideas for keeping your child's mind and body active without making anyone feel like they're in summer school or boot camp. Take what you like, leave what you don't, and have a fabulously fit summer.
Jump start. Researchers think the rhythmic beat of jumping rope mimics patterns of language, helping with language skills, reading, and staying fit.
Read. Every day. Establish regular times when your family sits together and reads — aloud or silently. Give your child a notebook to list the books she reads, with comments, ratings, new vocabulary words.
Rock out. Get a guidebook and start collecting your mica, your shale, your feldspar. Contact the American Federation of Mineralogical Societies to find the nearest rock club.
Walk the walk. Commit to a twice-a-week walk/run with your child. Do at least a one-mile loop (same route or different) and give her a pedometer to keep track of distance and speed. Find a local charity road race to do together at summer's end.
Start a weekly game night. Play board games, card games, dominoes. Lots of games require some form of math: counting, logic, adding, and subtracting.
Get buggy. Don't fight insect season; join it. Catch (and examine and release) different species in a bug jar by day. At night put up a sheet outside with a light a few inches behind it to attract moths and other nocturnal buggers. Chase lightning bugs through a meadow.
Crown a chef. Every, say, Tuesday, put your child in charge of dinner. Have him plan the menu, make the shopping list, estimate the total cost (a practical way to learn about measurements, fractions, conversions, and thinking ahead). Then you play (safety) sous-chef to his chef. Make a family cookbook inspired by his dishes.
Track the weather. Record the temperature at the same time every day for a month, then calculate the average.
Watch the stars. Learn to find Polaris and never get lost again. When are the Perseid meteor showers this year? Is that a star or a planet? (Night-sky observation logs can be found at school.discoveryeducation.com/schooladventures/skywatch.)
Ride bikes to the library. Or wherever you can ride bikes to that ends in a nice payoff (the playground, a friend's house, an ice-cream stand).
Make a family tree. Your child can interview relatives using a voice recorder or camcorder. The resulting stories go into a family scrapbook complete with timeline. (Click for a downloadable template.
Follow a news story. Let your child pick one she's drawn to (e.g., improving school lunches) and have her track it for the summer. Get a bunch of newspapers and talk about why they print different information about the same story. Use Internet, TV, and radio in your research. (Check out scholastic.com for kid-oriented news.)
Go into business. Brainstorm ideas (neighborhood weeding, dog walking, ice-pop vending). Have your child create a business plan, track revenue, record expenses in a ledger, and figure out profits.
Bird-watch. He can look up, then list the species he sees at the backyard feeder. (Listen to more than 550 birdcalls at enature.com.)
Encourage inquiry. At dinner, have your child jot down questions about the world in a blank book (How do you get seedless watermelon? Why do people burp?), then research the answers later. Plan a family quiz show.
Get all theatrical. Put on a sock puppet show, stage an improv, or mount a full costume-and-props production, and sell tickets to your 'hood.
Grow a garden. Botany, plotting, deep knee bends, grubbing in the dirt — gardening has it all. Visit gardens around the neighborhood to get ideas for what to plant. Your child can keep a gardening log (including snapshots and drawings) detailing progress.
Host a neighborhood outdoor game night. Red Light Green Light, Kick the Can, Simon Says — think rowdy and rambunctious.
Build a fort. Or a treehouse (or a rabbit hutch or a chicken coop). These hands-on projects involve measuring and geometry, with some basic carpentry thrown in.
Did You Know?
A 2007 study of 5,380 children at 310 elementary schools nationwide found that kids gain weight two to three times faster in summer than during the school year, probably because school days are more structured with less time for snacking.
During summer, the average child loses 2.6 months of math computation know-how.
Teachers spend the first four to six weeks of the school year reviewing and reteaching rusty skills.
