Last Friday, I was on View From the Bay talking about 5 tips to engage your child this summer (watch the TV clip here). I am a big believer that wonderful learning can happen outside the classroom, and each of these five ways is a fun way to promote learning – and often encourages family communication and interaction in a fun way. Watch the TV clip or read the five tips below:

1. Create a comic strip: To improve handwriting and penmanship, young students need to work on their fine motor skills. Creating comic strip works on humor, creativity, and also encourages use of those fine motor skills so important for handwriting – something that is being lost as many young students are spending more and more time on a computer. Fine motor skills are still crucially important, as is penmanship, and this is a fun way to encourage kids to develop those skills.
2. Get into the kitchen: At the beginning of the summer, have your kids figure out their favorite breakfast, lunch and dinner meals – and then, over the course of the summer, have them master creating each meal from scratch. So, if their favorite dinner is spaghetti, perhaps having them learn how to make the sauce from scratch. Then, get them each a receipe box and index cards so they can write down (again, practicing handwriting) their own notes and adaptations of the recipes they followed – this helps kids with their math, science, critical thinking and writing skills.
3. Plan a weekly local excursion: Give each child a budget to plan an itinerary for a weekly day trip. If you live near a city, perhaps have them figure out all the public transportation options if the trip involves a museum or something similar. The trip could also involve the outdoors – you as a family can come up with a theme, or rotate (city museum one week, country hiking the next) each week. The key is that the child use their research skills to budget and plan the itinerary – which works on developing math, critical thinking and problem solving skills.
4. Bring back the Traditional Family Board Game Night: Traditional Family Board Games like Yahtzee, Monopoly and Scrabble can be fun ways of encouraging learning – scrabble can work with vocabulary, and Yahtzee and Monopoly are all about strategy and critical thinking as well as basic math skills. Make it fun with popcorn and snacks and sitting around a circular table even for an hour can encourage conversation and communication as well as skill building.
5. Create-A-Story Contest: Similar to an old camp game where kids went around and each wrote a sentence of a story and went around in a circle and had the next kid write the next sentence, and so on and so forth, until a creatively hilarious story was developed, work on a short story as a family this summer. As a family, pick a genre (sci-fi, sports, etc), and then have each person write a few paragraphs on the computer and then pass it on to the next person in the family. Kids can get really excited about this activity, and the whole family can get involved to see what happens next to the characters that they are collectively creating. This works on creative writing, critical thinking development.