A Parent’s Survival Guide to Keeping Kids Entertained All Summer

Between balancing work and childcare and ensuring your kids stay busy and eat healthily, the six-week summer holidays can feel like a marathon for parents. To take a few things off your plate and fill your children’s calendars with endless fun, read on for our most valuable guidance and inspiration.

Summer Camps

To ensure your kids a fun-filled time for some or all of the summer break, summer camps can be an excellent solution. The fantastic roster of activities on offer will ensure your kids have plenty to do during the summer school holidays, aside from playing on iPads or watching TV. Summer camps also simulate a regular school day, enabling you to work, get groceries, or get through any other tasks on your to do list without worrying about entertaining your children at the same time.

Designed to boost confidence, foster friendships, and provide non-stop entertainment through adventures, activities and play, summer activity camps are a space in which your child can truly enjoy their school holidays. But summer camps aren’t just days of endless fun: they’ve been created to ensure your child is getting the opportunity to develop social skills, critical thinking abilities, and getting stuck into sports and exercise, all while enjoying every second! 

Summer Projects

Whether your child is a science whizz or a creative wordsmith, creating fun summer projects that they can get invested in is a surefire way to keep your kids entertained. Setting up fun projects for your children to fall in love with is the best way to get them running back to their creations each morning with a spring in their step and an eagerness to play and learn.

Build a Cardboard City

For younger children with a big imagination, creating a cardboard city from your leftover cardboard allows your children to create their own little world in their bedroom or a spare room of your house. From using colouring pens and pencils to add vibrancy and creative flair to their castle walls to cutting and sticking entrance signs and wall murals, encourage your children to get creative and bring their imaginary world to life.

This is a project that can easily take a week or more. From creating the city itself to making a story book, colourful maps, or even a “news channel” for updates, there are so many layers to this adventure for your children to embark on during the summer break.

Write and Illustrate a Book

For slightly older children, writing and illustrating a book is a fantastic way to channel your kids’ creative energy. Over time, your children can develop their story from concept to completion, with help from mum or dad along the way.

On the first day, encourage your child to come up with the story they want to tell, whether that be a fantasy princess story or something more autobiographical! The next few days can be spent planning out their story, developing their characters, and drawing pictures and maps to help set the scene for their story. Once this is complete, your child can embark on the mission of writing their story. Younger children can focus more on the illustrations whereas older children may want to be wordier with their endeavours. Finally, creating pictures to go along with each part of the story can fill up the following few days before, after a week or two of hard work, the whole finished product is complete!

Not only can this create weeks of fun for your child, but it will help them with their confidence through a sense of pride and accomplishment with their own finished book.

Garden Science Festival

For children who are fascinated by science, a garden science festival is a fantastic way to give your kids a week of fun-filled experiments and activities whilst enhancing their school education and enjoying the summer weather.

Depending on age suitability, your science festival’s itinerary could involve absolutely anything! One classic choice is creating mini volcanoes and eruptions with baking sugar and vinegar. Your child can spend time creating their volcano with cardboard or paper mâché and paint and then learning about chemical reactions before the big explosion! Another popular idea is to encourage your child to be at one with nature by embarking on a garden bug hunt with a magnifying glass. If they find any bugs especially interesting, they could create a bug hotel using recycled containers, soil, moss, and twigs.