Whenever your children have a break from school, there is a tendency to either try to do too much or to end up accomplishing too little. Here are smaller projects to keep you and your kids busy during their spring break, without over-scheduling your time.
- Organisation
When the kids are home for spring break, this is a great opportunity to help get your kids organised and ready to face the rest of the year. Even if you started off the school year with everything perfectly organised, that has probably slipped away as the school year progressed. Over the Christmas holidays, there are so many other things to do, there usually isn’t a chance to stop and revisit organisation before the children start back to school.
Since the start of the school year, your children have probably outgrown clothing and received replacement items and gifts. Take time to go through each child’s clothing, toys, backpacks, and sports gear and put school name tags on each item. This will help prevent their belongings from becoming lost and help lost items find their way back home again.
Sort through school supplies, clothes, and other belongings and make sure everything is clean and orderly. By this time in the school year, organisational problem areas have probably become clear. Add baskets by your door or in each child’s room to help keep items sorted. Hooks to hang jackets and bags can facilitate easy access while reducing the number of last minute delays on school mornings that would otherwise be caused by a hunt for a missing bag or shoes.
- Spring Cleaning
Along with organizing comes the perfect opportunity to do some spring cleaning. Make more room in closets by donating items your children have outgrown or that have become too stained or damaged. If your children received new bags, jackets, or other items for Christmas or birthdays, sort through and remove the old items. Donating these to charity (or hosting a sale of used items) can give unwanted items a new life while making it easier to organize the remaining items.
Rather than making cleaning a stressful experience for your children, try to make it a more positive experience. Point out how much more room they’ll have once they eliminate unwanted items. Purchase fun new storage boxes, as needed, to keep everything neat and organised. Get feedback from your kids on the most convenient places to put their belongings to keep your kids interested in the process and to make sure the new arrangements work for everyone.
- Art
School can be stressful for children and parents. Why not use the break as a time to do fun projects your family can enjoy the rest of the year? You can check online for great family art projects, get creative on your own, or find community classes in art your children can take during the break. Completing art gives your children a different way to achieve and the creative projects can provide an important mental break from your child’s time studying for school.
- Reading
One of the most important gifts you can give your children is a love of reading. Unfortunately, for many kids reading becomes exclusively associated with boring books from school, laborious efforts to produce book reports, or stressful times studying for exams.
Make reading more of a treat during school breaks by doing fun family outings to your local library or bookstore. Rather than trying to convince your kids to read so-called important works of literature, let them try different types of books and find the types they enjoy. If they enjoy reading comic books, they are more likely to eventually expand their reading to other types of reading materials. Even if they don’t the type they spend reading anything will help improve their reading comprehension and speed. That will provide tremendous benefits to your children as the progress through school and probably throughout the rest of their lives.
Another way to spend quality time together and improve your children’s reading skills is to read together. Most parents stop reading to their kids once their kids learn to read on their own. Meanwhile, studies have found that continuing to read to kids will improve their reading and vocabulary skills. This time reading can also create great family memories you and your kids will treasure. Just remember to be patient if your kids are reading and understand they are still developing skills.
- Paint
Painting can be the quickest and easiest way to update the look of your home. Even one accent wall in a child’s room can make a huge difference in how the room looks. Take advantage of the warmer spring weather to get your children involved in painting a few walls, bookcases, or desks. The addition of a bit of colour might help your kids feel better about the time they spend in their rooms studying or give them a sense of pride with they look at the cheerful feature wall in your kitchen.