5 Ways to Keep Your Kids Sharp During the Summer

This post is sponsored by iD Tech

Summer is quickly approaching, and what are you doing to help keep your kids stay sharp? Try one or more of these five things that we’re doing this summer that help our kids stay sharp until they head back to school in the fall.

Help your kiddos keep their sharp minds this summer with these five simple tips

It’s easy for all those smarts to slip away from our kids during the summer when they’re out of school for a few months. I definitely don’t want to be a crazy mom during the summer, but also I want them to have regular opportunities for learning to keep them sharp.

These are a few things we keep in our routine or add to our routine in the summer to keep the kids sharp during the summer months

Read to them

I grew up with a mom who read to us almost every night. We read dozens and dozens of books together and separately, and I’m doing the same thing with my boys. I love reading to them at night before bed — it’s such a perfect way to end the evening and erase any kind of motherly frustrations or quarrels from the day.

There are so many benefits of reading to your children, among them being their level of comprehension goes way up, but also it improves their cognitive skills, helps them learn to sit still, helps them connect with you, and learn to read aloud themselves. I’m sure there are tons more benefits.

This month we’re reading a cute novel book about Yellowstone to prepare ourselves for our upcoming family trip! Learning about the location before we visit helps their travel experience be so much better!

You can see all of our favorite read aloud books HERE!

Get outside!

Feeling, touching, seeing, exploring — these are some of the best teachers! Maybe getting outside means a hike. Or maybe it’s a family vacation. Possibly it’s just sending your kids in the backyard to look for bugs.

Whatever it looks like for your family, being outside helps imagination, focus, connection with the world, and major mental clarity — this applies to both kids and adults!

Incorporate education into your daily routine

We do a family economy in our home (you can read about it HERE), and during the summer, we continue to keep it as our daily routine, although it looks a little different than during the school year.

During the summer months of family economy, we continue to do our educational computer programs (typing, coding, etc), but also piano and reading time.

We also sing educational songs, like a jingle that helps them memorize the presidents of the United States, and the capitals of each state, do educational puzzles, play geography, math, spelling, or memorization games.

I want my boys to have learning be a huge and important part of their life, and incorporating it into daily habits and also fun family time is so effective.

Make your kids do quiet time.

It’s been too long since I’ve talked about quiet time. It’s my favorite parenting trick, because it’s so simple, it can be adapted to your liking or your family’s needs, it sets everybody’s reset button, and it gives me sanity.

Quiet time is a minimum of one hour everyday where the kids are by themselves and play quietly. They can read, play toys, listen to an audiobook, color — whatever they want, but no electronics.

This time, alone, just your child inside his or her head allows them to develop creativity, stretch their imagination, and learn to be calm and quiet.

I shared all my tips for starting quiet time on THIS POST, so even if you think your child will never do it, never say never cause it works and you’ll all love it.

Send them to an educational summer camp like iD Tech

We just discovered a really amazing summer tech camp called iD Tech. It’s been around for 20 years, it’s all STEM education based, and it’s held at 150 prestigious campuses around the country so there’s probably one near you!

Their mission is to create life-changing tech experiences that embolden students to shape the future, and they share tons of success stories of children who attended camp, went into the tech field, and now work very successfully at some high level tech companies. So cool!

We found an engineer robotics camp for B that he’s so incredibly excited about. They have week long summer camps for ages 7-19 with class sizes under 10 kids and also year round private tutoring.

These camps teach kids to design a video, produce videos, create with engineer robots, print and model 35 characters, work with AI, and so much more.

B has been old enough to go to a summer camp for the last few years, but our community centers have never had anything that was really worth the time and money. It was more like babysitting for a week than anything.  By contrast, iD Tech camps are so educational and help your child prepare for a future in technology. They’re using top of the line software and hardware, learning in-demand skills, and also having lots of fun.

Watch this video RIGHT HERE to learn more about these awesome camps, and CLICK HERE to see if there’s a location near you.

You can also get up to $75 off any camp with code MERR19!

I’d love to know what you mamas do during the summer to help your kids stay sharp!