While being on summer vacation can be a fun time for kids when they get out of school, it is also important to encourage the learning process even outside of the classroom. Planning cool science experiments is a great way for parents and children to spend time together, while making it interesting and productive.
Taking field trips to local science museums can turn learning into an exciting field trip, and also a way to get out of the house! Girls and boys can be exposed to many different learning subjects, but often, girls lose interest in science while boys find it much more interesting. The key to involving girls is to make it fun for them, using the things they like or subjects they may be interested in.
Science can affect or explain many things that are used day-to-day, so showing how it works can be relevant and exciting for any child in school, especially those in the younger elementary levels. Encouraging your child’s interest in science, even if you, the parent, aren’t “good” in the subject, is important.
Planning trips to the park to do explorations or scavenger hunts can help girls and boys identify items in nature, or even serve as a potential source for many fun summer projects or science experiments. A great activity that can be done outside is creating a unique leaf collection. Even parents who are not “experts” can help with this one.
Together, parents and children can learn to identify each of them, using reference sources. Girls and boys can go exploring, finding leaves that interest them and then laying them between wax paper. They can then add heavy books on top of the paper, pressing them for about a week. Once the leaves have dried, they can glue them into a fun scrapbook with their common and scientific names.
Another great outdoors activity that many kids (and adults) would like would be creating their own fossils. Most kids are really interested in dinosaurs, so showing them how fossils are formed is not only interesting, but also informative. Make a fossil by shaping a sheet of aluminum foil into a bowl, and then fill it with plaster of Paris. Take rocks, shells or other hard objects and press them into the plaster, wait about 30 minutes to remove the item from the plaster and kids then have their very own fossil!
Taking a field trip to the local science center can also be a fun trip that incorporates learning with each exhibit. Many of these exhibits are hands-on, which can help a child put an idea into perspective. Activities about weather, astronomy, botany, and chemistry are all covered, with not only informational pictures and writing, but also their application in real life.
It is really important to keep children learning, even when they are out of school. It is up to the parents to keep children busy with educational activities, especially those ideas that may have not been covered in the classroom. Involving both girls and boys can make any subject fun, especially science. Encourage children to try their own experiments, which can teach valuable information as well as increase creativity in younger kids. Parents don’t have to be experts in science but like children, they should always be open and willing to learn.
