How to Blend Fun and Education for Your Next Vacation

How to Blend Fun and Education for Your Next Vacation

They call it the summer slump. Studies show that each year, between the time when your children break up from school for the summer and the time when they resume class, they will forget a significant proportion of what they learned during the previous year.

One way to compensate is to insist your children continue to learn and study during the long summer break, but this doesn’t mean they have to spend long hours working their way through textbooks or completing assignments. By adding a strong educational element to your next family vacation, you can ensure your children enjoy the best of both.

Bring the Lessons to Life

If you want your children to experience rock formations and other geographical phenomenon first-hand, a trip to the spectacular cliffs and canyons of the Zion National Park will provide a fully immersive lesson they are unlikely to forget in a hurry.  Similarly, if you want your children to fully understand some of the lessons of history, taking them to the battlefields and historical buildings where major events took place will help to better understand the context.

Such activities can be such fun that they hardly seem like education at all and this too can be of benefit to a child, especially one who is not fond of school, as it provides a new context for learning that can lead to greater enthusiasm and engagement when they return to school for the start of the new term.

Use Every Opportunity

Are you taking a ride on a roller coaster at a theme park? Why not have a discussion with your child about the physics involved in creating the attraction. Heading to the beach? It’s the perfect opportunity to talk about the variety of flora and fauna that you find there and to study individual sea creatures more closely. Even cooking or eating out provides an opportunity to talk about the chemistry involved in the preparation of food.

If you want your children to take part in a more organized activity, there are plenty of exciting and dynamic options available courtesy of museums all over the country, ranging from learning about glass making or spending a night among dinosaur bones to finding out about the mechanics of space flight or making your very own movie.

The Whole Family Benefits

The fascinating journey of educational discovery is one that is best shared, so being able to accompany your children as they see, hear and feel the concepts and theories they have previously only read about in books coming to life around them can also bring the whole family closer together.

By being there with your child, you have the opportunity to answer questions about new discoveries as and when they happen and if you don’t know the answers right away, you can have fun looking them up together, providing valuable lessons about how to research information that will benefit all students throughout their school and working life.