Luckily, there are plenty of ways you can help your kids enjoy their summer while supporting their education at the same time. 

Together, Babysits and Brother are launching “Brother Babysits this summer”, to bring parents resources and tips to help support educational fun. 

There are a few factors we’ll focus on in this article, including:

• How to structure the summer
• How to make learning fun
• Resources for learning aides and fun activities

How to structure learning activities

While summer is synonymous with throwing away the school schedules and embracing the lack of structure that kids usually have in a school environment, it can still be useful to give some structure to the summer holidays. 

This can be daily structured activities, or weekly goals, depending on your preferences and situation. The schedule can also be designed to be flexible, with certain times allocated to free play, and other times allocated to get your children in the habit of doing learning activities.

In general, structure helps keep some order and organisation in children’s lives, which can also make it easier to get kids to focus on specific tasks and eventually can make the back to school transition smoother. 

How to make educational activities fun Many “educational activities” that may seem like a bore can actually be really fun and exciting for kids, the biggest part is framing. 

Some tips to consider when framing activities as fun include:

• Make sure you treat the activity as fun. If you act really negatively about doing math, the kids may pick up on this and be less likely to deem it as something fun or interesting.
• Make a story out of it. Give your kids some greater goal, mission, or story and it can help them naturally get more interested and excited, and less reluctant to do a learning activity that may feel like work to them.
• Another great way to get kids motivated to do educational activities and to make it fun for them is to focus on their interests. If the child is naturally curious about an educational topic, it is much easier to help them have fun while learning more about it. For example, if a child loves animals, then learning facts about animals and wildlife may be exciting and fun on its own to them, without any motivation.

Resources where you can find learning aides, fun activities, and more 

There are plenty of resources available for fun learning activities:

Brother Creative Centre: here you can find tonnes of learning aids and fun activities such as colouring, 3D craft figurines, origami, and more.

Babysits DIYs and Activities: here you can find lots of educational DIYs and activities.