14 Skill-Building Summer Activities To Do with Young Children - Brookes Blog

14 Skill-Building Summer Activities To Do with Young Children

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.

Bring the beach 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.

Practice patterns with undersea shapes.

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 hooks to create simple patterns.

Tell a story through photos.

Before an outing, 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. Encourage 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.

Pack foods that take the form of standard geometric solids: big marshmallows, grapes, cheese sticks, melon balls, and cheese cubes. Name and talk about each shape as you enjoy your picnic.

Brighten the day with rainbows.

Make paper-plate sand pictures.

Have your child glue sand to the bottom of a paper plate and decorate it with different underwater items. Wrap the whole plate in blue plastic wrap to represent the water.

Sharpen STEM skills with bubbles.

Make some geometric bubble wands with pipe cleaners and straws. These wands are an excellent tool for early geometric exploration.

Explore the nooks and crannies of your neighborhood.

On your next walk, explore little places you might not ordinarily think to check out. Encourage your child to represent their discoveries by telling stories or drawing pictures about it.

Collect and study rocks.

Set up a simple scientific exploration center with supplies to examine details and sort the rocks by features like color and texture.

Set up an outdoor show.

Have an outdoor movie night, or set up a puppet theater outside. Ask the kids to set up a ticket booth and practice their math skills as they manage pretend money.

Test a boat’s buoyancy.

Fill a small pool with water and bring along two plastic boats or 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.

Take an architecture tour.

Take your child to a neighborhood where there are different types of buildings, and point out various shapes in the buildings. Then extend the activity by constructing a model of a building with blocks.

We hope this post gave you a couple of new ideas to test-drive with kids at home this summer. If you try an activity your kids especially enjoy, let us know—we’d love to hear from you!

EXPLORE THE BOOKS

The activities in this post were adapted from and inspired by the following books: