The advent of the summer holidays gives panic attacks on parents. Children running around the house all day with absolutely no interest to pick up the books is a horrible experience altogether for parents. However, summer also provides a wonderful opportunity for kids to learn with a creative, fun, and innovative approach.
Therefore, we bring to you a list of 41 summer camp educational activities for your rescue. These activities are useful for all ages. Moreover, most of these activities involve learning of various subjects in the most illustrative as well as simple manner.
Summer Camp Educational Activities for Kindergarteners –
1. Find Objects
Give your child a project to find a thing in your house that starts with each of the alphabets. This will not only keep them busy and entertained but also helps them improve their vocabulary. This is because they will ask names of things they do not know and end up learning many new things.
2. Fun with Jigsaw Puzzle
Just click a picture, print it on a glazed paper, stick it on a cardboard, and cut it into jigsaw pieces. And whoa! Your kid’s jigsaw puzzle is ready. It can keep your child busy for hours and help him improve his creativity, shape recognition, and imaginary skills.
3. Half Kg Experiment
This is one of the best summer camp educational ideas to teach your kids about weight and volume. Take half kg (or lesser but equal weight) of cotton, bell pepper, and onions or potatoes and explain to them the significance of weight, volume, and a number of different things.
4. Enhance Creativity with Legos
Did you know a sting in your foot while walking barefooted has the power to create the most wonderful summer camp educational activity for your kindergartener? Legos are actually very helpful in enhancing your kid’s fine motor skills, which in turn are useful to learn writing.
5. Hand Painting
Kids love colors. Moreover, no matter how much we, as parents, hate it; but they also love the mess around them with colors. Why not give them a colorful afternoon break with all their favorite colors in their hands, a canvas or a cloth, and let them be playful and creative.
6. Story Telling
Kids enjoy listening to stories. Read to them good stories. Further, encourage them to build up their own stories and narrate them to you. This is a good idea to increase your bond with your kid as well as boost your kid’s communication and confidence.
7. Water Xylophone
This is one of the best musically enriched summer camp educational games for toddlers. Take 7 glass or metallic jars of the same size and shape. Fill water in each one of them in such a way that the previous jar holds around 10-20 ml more water than the next one. Remember to keep the same difference in water levels for each jar. Your water xylophone is ready to be played with a stick.
8. Bread Painting
Provide your child with numerous edible colors, a clean brush, and some bread. They will enjoy coloring the bread, thereby eating it without any fuss or complaint. You can also teach your kids about rainbow colors through this activity.
9. Macaroni Rainbow Necklace
Another colorful activity to tell them about rainbows is this one. Paint macaroni in different rainbow colors and make a necklace out of them by placing macarons in rainbow patterns. Your daughter will simply love wearing this macaroni necklace.
10. Bubble Solution
You can make a bubble solution at home by mixing 10 parts of water and 1 part of detergent or shampoo. You can also add some colors to make colorful bubbles from the solution. Further, you can use various tools to blow bubbles out of this solution. Some of them can be your kid’s hands, metallic jars, jar lids, strings, etc.
11. Making Play-dough
Mix 4 parts of flour and water, 2 parts of salt and 1 part of tartar, and 1 part of vegetable oil in a pan and heat it. Continue stirring until the mixture is thick and sticks on the spoon. You can also add food coloring to it to give it some color. After cooling it down, your playdough is ready to be molded to become your kid’s favorite animal.
Summer Camp Educational Activities for Middle School Students
12. Balloon Rocket Project
This is an interesting activity to demonstrate to your kid the force or pressure of air and the concept of the rocket. All you need is a straw, a long string, a tape, and a balloon. Pass the string into the straw and tie the two ends of the string to two corners of a room (tie it to doorknobs or table legs). Then stick the inflated (but mouth untied) balloon to the straw with the help of tape. Leave the mouth of the balloon to let it deflate and follow the path of the string.
13. Colouring Calendars
Ask your child to create a picture for every month of the year. They can use the season, grand festival, national festivals, or a special day of the month to paint a picture for that month. For example, they can paint a wintery morning for January, a birthday scene for the month of their birthday, a parade scene for August, a Christmas scene for December, etc. You can also ask your older children to color calendars for different parts of the world, rather than India.
14. Word Hunt
To play this interesting summer camp educational activity, all you need is a pen and sticky notes. Hide some sticky notes in your home on different locations with a word on each of them. Ask your child to collect all of them and make a sentence or a short story out of those words.
15. Math with a Dice
For this game, you need two dice, paper, and a pen. Write some household chores (that your child is capable of doing) and some awards (like extra playtime/screen time, or chocolate, a picnic, etc.) against different numbers on the paper. Roll the two dice and ask your child to add the numbers (or subtract, multiply or follow a certain equation) and see what task/award he gets. The child will then have to perform that particular task in the house and will thus get rewarded for the same.
16. Creating a Flip Book
There is no better way to explain to your child about the Physics behind animation and videos other than this one. Many educational summer camps for middle school students include this activity in their list. Ask your child to create a flipbook with their favorite cartoon character and they are going to have some real fun.
17. Learning with the Globe
Ask your child to pick a random country on the globe every week and both of you discuss the culture, currency, Geography, climate, topography, economy, etc. of that country for a week. Let your kid search from the internet or books or from his friends who might have visited the place. With this game implemented, you can be rest assured to raise a wizard in your home who knows a lot about the whole world!
18. Botany in the Garden
Ask your child to go to your backyard or garden and collect leaves from every plant. They can create beautiful art with these leaves by sticking them on paper or simply a small bouquet. In addition to it, you can tell them which leaves belong to which plants.
19. Kid’s SuperMarket
A simple summer camp educational game is to give the extra groceries and packaged things at your home to your kids. Encourage them to set up a small supermarket store. Then pretend to play with them. Buy some stuff and ask them to total up the price. This game helps kids improve their Maths.
20. Gardening
Children like playing in the mud and getting messy. You can make use of this interest and ask them to help you with gardening. Not only will they slowly understand the different needs of each plant but this will also help them improve their Biology.
21. Cooking with Kids
Food is a basic necessity for everyone and thus cooking is the most essential survival skill. Ask your kids to help you out in the kitchen and observe you while you cook dinner for them. They can also make some simple things like sandwiches or milkshakes for the whole family. This way, gradually they will learn this art of cooking.
22. Plan a Birthday Party
Kids enjoy birthday parties the most. Therefore, you have this opportunity to provide them some basic managerial lessons by letting them plan their (or their younger sibling’s) next birthday party. Let them decide about the themes, decorations, menu, cake, etc. Ask them to make a detailed plan that can come handy whenever you start preparations for the party.
23. Formal Family Dinner
Plan a formal dinner for the whole family and teach your kids about table manners. Summer holidays are the perfect time to teach such difficult yet essential etiquettes.
24. Plan a Factory Tour
Planning a factory tour is very important for your kids to understand the significance of limited resources. Also, they get to know that every article or stuff that they are using carelessly is a result of a very long and tiresome process. They start valuing money, resources, and things with this small gesture.
25. Make Butter at Home
An easy method to explain reversible and irreversible changes to kids is making butter. Making butter from thick cream is an old age process in Indian households. You can ask your kids to whip the cream and then stir it continuously until butter is formed and buttermilk gets separated from it. Rinse the butter with ice-cold water to remove traces of buttermilk to make it last longer. Add some salt to it and the butter is ready to be spread on your kid’s bread.
26. Learn Self Defence Techniques
Today, it is important for everyone to be self-dependent when it comes to defense. Therefore, it is mandatory for every child, girl, or boy, to know certain self-defense techniques so that one can save oneself in tough and challenging situations. Hence, do not forget to send your kids to at least a basic martial arts or any other self-defense art class.
27. Learn Yoga
Since ancient times, yoga has been keeping not only our bodies but also our minds healthy and fit. It is important for a kid’s mind to be healthy so that it can observe more and absorb things faster. Encourage your kid to join a yoga class and learn yoga to experience a transformation.
28. Inculcate Writing Habit
Many teenagers cannot talk to their parents about everything they experience in and around themselves. If you encourage your child to maintain an account of their feelings and emotions through a diary from a young age, you are going to raise an emotionally strong individual. To start with, ask your kid to write anything like a story, or his best friend, or parents, etc.
Summer Camp Educational Activities for High School Students
29. Learn a Foreign Language
You can get your kid enrolled in a foreign language class like French or Spanish. Not only is it fun learning about new languages but it also opens up many career options in a foreign country as well.
30. Study a Programming Language
Five or ten years down the line, knowing programming languages will become a part and parcel of our existence. Hence, it’s never too early or late to learn anything new. Start your child’s IT journey right now. Let him choose and decide what he wants to learn and enroll him in a suitable class.
31. Attend an Academic Camp
There are various educational summer programs for high school students that are specialized in niches like Science. You can help your kid join one of these academic camps that demonstrate different experiments to explain numerous science concepts.
32. Problem Solving Discussions
Give your child some real-life problematic scenarios and discuss possible solutions. Tell him why you would choose or not choose an option suggested by him. Such discussions augment problem-solving and decision-making skills in kids.
33. Group Discussions
During family time, discuss with your kids about general problems prevalent in current times. For example, what is their take on ecological balance and whether it is correct to destroy forests in the name of development? Also, discuss what are possible ideas to implement in order to save forests as well as climb up the developmental ladder.
34. Teach Younger Students
The best way to stay in touch with the basic Math and Science concepts is to teach younger students. This will help your kid a lot in preparing for various competitive exams that contain questions mostly from the basic concepts of school.
35. Book Club
Suggest your child start a neighborhood book club where his friends can exchange books and read as per their interest. Check if you can participate too with him and get a chance to interact with kids of the younger generation.
36. Budgeting of the Party
Remember the birthday party planned by your middle school child? Why not ask your elder kid to help the younger one in budgeting for the party? Give them a budget and ask them to prepare a rough report about the plan and distribution of money in various things like decoration, cake, catering, etc.
37. Re-design your Kid’s Room
Take suggestions from your child about his likes and dislikes and re-design his room. It will be fun as well as challenging. Let him decide about the furniture, paints, curtains, etc. but do not forget to limit his ideas with a budget. There might be certain things that would not be possible to fit in space or budget constraints. Discuss with him to find alternatives.
38. Attend an Adventure Camp
Attending an adventure camp is an amusing way to spend one’s summer holidays. Additionally, adventure activities also instill different life skills like confidence, team spirit, leadership qualities, trusting a team member, etc.
39. Volunteer Planting Trees
Maintaining the ecological system and reducing pollution is the need of the hour. We need to today itself and we need to act fast. Numerous NGOs are doing fabulous jobs in doing these tasks. You and your child can volunteer in such an NGO that plants trees.
40. Volunteer for a Social Cause
High school students or teenagers have tremendous energy, streams of ideas, and empathy. You can channelize all of this by proposing them to help the needy. Ask them to volunteer in an NGO that helps the poor, old, orphans, sick, etc. On the other hand, if your kid is an animal lover, there are numerous animal NGOs as well that take care of the stray, sick, handicapped, and left out animals.
41. Create a Hobby Club
Recommend your child to find people of his interests online or in the neighborhood. He can then make a group of people who can start a hobby club-like photography, painting, dancing, playing musical instruments, etc. Each person in the group can learn something or the other from the other people in the club.
