If Camp Is Closed, Kids Can Spend the Summer on a Passion Project

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- After home schooling for months, many parents are faced now with having to occupy kids all summer. How do you segue? “Put away the textbook,” says Elizabeth Kanna, co-author of Homeschooling for Success: How Parents Can Create a Superior Education for Their Child and founder of Homeschool.com. “Stop worrying about learning loss.”

Kanna, who has three adult daughters, was long done with home schooling. Then the pandemic hit. “I had so many friends who were like, ‘I need advice. Tell me what you did.'” So Kanna wrote a summer guide to child-led explorations that foster curiosity. A three-step plan:

Step 1: Ask your kids what they'd like to do—then take a deep dive. Have they wanted to read the Harry Potter books (4,224 pages in total, according to this article)? Build a backyard rocket ship? “Now's the time,” says Kanna. “What are they passionate about? What piques their interest?”

Step 2: Read, read, read. Start the morning with books on their favored topic. Let them pick. This could be when they read up on how to build that rocket ship. Or maybe it's all dinosaurs all the time. You read to them, or they read, or Audible reads to them for free.

Step 3: Plan activities around their interest. Life is stressful right now; the summer is a chance for kids to develop beyond academics. The activities should be fun, child-led, family-oriented, light, and decompressing. “When you get a child engaged, it isn't a chore or a struggle,” says Kanna. And if you start any project and your kid has a meltdown, just bail and find a new one.

Two examples of deep dives

If your kid likes to cook, bake bread. There are a summer's worth of questions to consider:

• What is bread?
• What are the names of the breads you've tried?
• Which ones should we bake?
• Do we have the ingredients in the house?
• What's our budget? What ingredients do we need to order?
• What do the labels say?
• What breads are from the regions our family's from?
• What religious ceremonies involve bread?
• What's a good bread cookbook for us to check out?
• Could we make one with our favorite recipes?
• Why do you let the dough sit?
• How does yeast rise?
• What does the heat do?
• Should we watch The Great British Bake Off?
• If we start a bread business, how much should each loaf cost for our neighbors?
• Who would enjoy this bread as a gift?
• How can we get it to them safely?
• What do we need to do while bread rises or bakes?
• What is Fahrenheit?
• What's a quarter cup?
• How much weight did Mommy and Daddy gain eating bread all summer?

If your son or daughter is into dinosaurs:

• Should we watch Dino Dan and Dino Dana?
• Want to draw in dinosaur coloring books?
• Want to do a dino dig kit?
• Could we create a diorama of a dinosaur habitat?
• What if you did a presentation about your favorite dinosaur?
• How about we write a story about dinosaurs, make a collage, or sew dinosaur costumes?
• What if we visited some natural history museums online, like the American Museum of Natural History in New York?
• Could we throw a dinosaur-themed family party?
• Are there dinosaur board games we could play?
• Could we track ongoing archaeological digs?

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