What to do with your children during summer break?
June is the time when students of all levels enter the summer vacation after 9 months of hard work at school. This is also the time when many parents are worried about where to send their children while they still have to go to work.
Summer vacations vary from school to school, some schools have 3 months, some have 2 months. Regardless of whether my child’s summer vacation is 2 or 3 months, I choose to let my daughter go back to her hometown to visit her grandparents for at least 1 month. I think that letting my child go back to her hometown for the summer has many benefits such as:
Firstly, after many months of studying under a lot of pressure, the summer is the time to return to the countryside to rest and have fun. In the countryside, children can immerse themselves in nature, run freely, play freely, and enjoy many interesting things in the village that cannot be found in the city.
Second, parents don't have to worry about their children being glued to the TV, phone, iPad watching YouTube, TikTok, and harmful movies.
Third, it is an opportunity for children to love their homeland and roots more, to care for and love their grandparents. From there, build strong family relationships. The close relationships between relatives and the games in the countryside will be beautiful memories of childhood that will last a lifetime for children.
Fourth, this is also an opportunity to help me observe, interact with reality, get acquainted with the fields, know what it is like to catch crabs, snails, herd buffaloes, and cut grass that I only know from books. That is also a practical lesson as well as useful knowledge that I have and collected during the summer vacation. Thanks to the trips back to the countryside, my essays describing rice fields, villages, buffaloes, cows... are more realistic, without having to read sample essays. The experience from reality has helped me write sentences that are both very real, rustic but also very lively and flexible. I put into them the dear, pure feelings of a child that if I had not seen with my own eyes, lived and experienced, I certainly could not have written such meaningful essays.
Fifth, this is a way to relax children's minds, completely free from pressure from studying, exams, or school achievements and scores.
After my child had a month of summer vacation in the countryside, I let him take extra classes such as dancing, piano, swimming at the Cultural Development Center to enhance and develop his physical strength as well as equip him with necessary life skills. Combining study and play reasonably during the summer helps my child have a vacation full of experiences and develop more skills. Or more simply, let my child do housework during the summer vacation months such as going to the market, cooking, cleaning the house, doing laundry, taking out the trash, watering the plants... to help my child become independent, caring, and helpful to others...
Along with activities for children to experience summer in the countryside or participate in life skills courses, talent learning, swimming lessons, English summer camps or military training courses, parents should arrange a suitable study schedule with a fixed duration each week or each month to maintain a scientific study and play habit. This helps children develop better thinking and less likely to be afraid or lazy to study after a long break.
In addition, parents should also practice the habit of reading books for their children during the summer as a way for them to experience new knowledge. This will help children gain more vocabulary, language, practice reading comprehension, memorization skills, and develop thinking ability. This is an effective way to help children "learn and play" during the summer with a comfortable mentality.
Each family has different circumstances. Some families do not have a hometown to return to because their grandparents live in the city. Some families have elderly grandparents who are in poor health and cannot take care of their grandchildren. Parents cannot send their children back to the countryside for a whole month. They can only register their children for summer school or summer camp during the summer break so that parents can go to work.
Whether choosing to let your children go back to their hometown to live with their grandparents during the summer vacation or stay in the city, parents need to pay close attention to give their children a meaningful and safe summer vacation. Using the summer properly so that children have a complete experience and many memories is worth thinking about and choosing. Hopefully, parents can learn, consider, and choose the most suitable program for their children so that they can have the conditions to develop physically and mentally as well as ensure the necessary safety and have a truly meaningful summer.
