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COVID has officially been around for over a year now.
It’s the second summer for everyone staying home. It has taken a toll on the whole family’s physical, emotional and mental health. Moreso, the kids are losing out on the best years of their lives when they would have normally been at school in-person throughout the year and summer is family time. However, the whole year has been family time and staying at home.
What can you do now as a family to beat the COVID blues for another summer? What new activities can you engage in as a family? Here are some of our suggestions:
Make your own ice-cream
Who doesn’t love ice cream? ‘I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!’, this time you make your own as a family. Take your taste buds and imagination to an experiment and create your own new flavours. Kids would enjoy their time with the family, engage in some cooking in the kitchen and be creative.
Have a backyard or indoor scavenger huntScavenger hunts don’t require much and can be easy, inexpensive and fun to do with the whole family, including kids. You can choose to do it indoors or if you have a backyard to your house and the weather permits, do it outdoors. Make it themed or keep it general, all up to you!
Sign up for our Virtual Summer Camp
Our virtual summer camp allows for an excellent balance between academics and summer fun. Each course meets for one hour and forty-five minutes, two days a week - no child can complain about that. When your child is breezing through the review materials at the beginning of the next school year, it will be evident that it was worth every minute.
Create an exercise routine
Exercise must be an essential part of our daily routine, and getting your kids into the habit early on is great. Create fitness routines, dance sessions or Zumba workouts that the whole family could enjoy together. Summer is good weather to be outside and get some sun with your workout, while you can!
Books and reading
Read a chapter book together and discuss the characters, plot, and storyline with each other. Ask questions and encourage critical discussion and thinking skills with the kids.
Create some artwork
Get the creative juices flowing within the house and create artworks to showcase around your home. Get some art supplies like crayons, coloured pencils, markers, or paints, whatever the family needs for their personal art show.
Spring cleaning
Hold a deep-cleaning challenge with tasks assigned to everyone in the house. Set up a prize or losing team's task to-do, ending in a fun way, whilst getting your spring clean done quickly! This will get the kids to learn some important skills for when they grow up as well as busy for now.
Learn a foreign language
What a better time to learn a new language than the whole summer break?! Learn with the kids or enroll them in a virtual camp to learn a foreign language which will help them in their future careers or develop personal interests. Moreover, research suggests that learning a foreign language boosts many core skills such as problem-solving, critical thinking, listening, memory and the ability to multitask. Children also become more appreciative of cultural diversity and expand their global view.
Summer is a great time to invest in your child’s skill development while keeping it fun to keep them engaged. Additionally, COVID has added to that additional family time throughout the year. It is important to understand that children have had a major learning loss throughout the pandemic by not interacting with others of their age, in-person learning at school, especially more losses on the skill development front. However, you could use this summer to engage your kids with fun and learning activities or virtual summer camps.