3 Tips to Merge Learning with Holidays
Canadians love to travel. In fact, last year, almost 4.4 million Canadians travelled during the December holidays!
If you’re planning a trip this season, it’s important to keep your children learning and engaged on the road. Maintaining a learning routine is crucial to making sure that valuable lessons aren’t forgotten and can set your children up for success in the new year.
But how do you keep children interested in learning while they’re on vacation? Kumon has prepared three great tips to make sure your children actually look forward to learning and have fun doing it!
1. Use Downtime
It doesn’t matter if the journey includes a plane, train or automobile – there’s likely going to be some downtime en route to your destination. Plan ahead and avoid the standard “are we there yet?” question by having educational materials on hand to help beat the boredom. Fun and easy reading materials can help pass the time and provide a good distraction while you travel.
Take pride in knowing your child is learning and enjoy quiet time on the road!
2. Make It Fun!
Don’t forget: you’re on vacation! Vacations are about family time and enjoyment – it’s important that the process of learning is fun.
Creating a challenge is an easy way to engage children, especially during the downtime mentioned above. For example, don’t just ask your children to read, instead challenge them to read a certain number of pages or chapters before you get to your destination.
Asking children to teach you what they’ve learned is another great trick because they’ll naturally feel more invested if they get to share what they’ve read with a captive audience.
3. Make It Relevant
If possible, make at least some of the reading relevant to the vacation.
This is especially easy during vacations to new and exotic locations, as your children will already be curious about the place you’re going to, but it can also be applied to local trips by finding materials about a city’s history, sports team or monuments.
You can combine tip #1 and #2 by asking your children to teach you about the location you’re visiting during your downtime. You can even prepare some simple questions in advance to help get the conversation started.
If you use these three tips, your children will be jumping at the chance to learn on your next vacation and will return to school in great shape to start the 2017 year off right!
Happy holidays and safe travels from your friends at Kumon!
Looking for inspiration? Check out our recommended reading recommended reading list.