A parent’s responsibility to keep their children learning goes way beyond the class room at school. In fact, a child who sits around all summer long without any activity is most of the time, the one who is a slow learner in the beginning of the school year and sometimes all year long. But for those children who are engaged in summer fun and educational based activities, getting started in the classroom is never a daunting task, because their brain remained in a learning state and did not become lazy and cumbersome during the summer months.

This article is not intended to preach childhood laziness, instead to center on the great things kids can do for themselves learning throughout the summer months. As I grew up back in the 70′s and 80′s, the Internet era had not yet beckoned everyone’s homes in the world, so we as children found great things to do that kept us engaged throughout the summer time. From taking a very long day trip on our bicycles, to camping and canoeing on our favorite rivers and streams. We always had adventurous and educational, but most importantly fun summer’s to talk about when we returned to school. Being in the 21st century we have to come to the realization that those days are pretty much over now due to the Internet revolution. Our children today are drawn to the fact that they can actually turn on a computer to interact with their friends, find out interesting information and play games online, something we thought would never be possible. So what do we do to keep them educationally engaged?

Well, the first thought was to make them sit at the dining room table for at least a couple of hours a day to learn. But I soon realized that children are just not receptive to that approach, at least mine weren’t anyway. Well, then I decided to allow my children a few hours on the Internet playing fun educational games and guess what? It worked! Games like Teach Bally, Fish a Word and US Cities were the games they were interested in. They even played games called Brain Test, Speed Words and Word Blix to stimulate their young minds. Soon I realized that these types of summer activity was going to mandatory for my young one’s, by making it a fun learning summer tradition.