Summer vacation. When you were younger it meant a time to relax, play, swim, dig in the dirt, hang with friends, stay up late reading all night, and eating popsicles until your stomach hurt. If you grew up going to school, odds are when you heard that last school bell ring at the end of the summer, your one thought was: freedom.
But what you didn’t realize at the time, the thing that lay just beyond your consciousness, was the incredible amount of learning that you would be doing during your summer break. If you were blessed to experience a large amount of freedom during those months and weren’t signed up for every structured camp or program your parents could get you into, you had a large amount of time to devote to whatever you wanted to do. You could explore and discover and create to your heart’s content.
And then, about two months later, the ads on T.V. started. You know the ads I mean. The “back to school” ads, usually designed to help you look “cool” when you returned to school. Many of those ads also proclaimed that it was time to get back to “learning.” But what they didn’t want you to know was that you had been learning all the time.
Schools like to think they have an exclusive edge on “learning” and that you need to be “taught” in order to learn, but the truth is the best learning takes place when you invite it into your life in a relaxed, enjoyable way, like having a never-ending summer vacation filled with new experiences, long periods of uninterrupted time, and room to dream and discover.
My family just returned from a three week trip to Las Vegas (with my husband’s work) and then San Diego. Our days were filled with fun things like splashing in the ocean, visiting science, history and maritime museums, going on rides at Legoland, exploring tidepools, learning how to fish, watching the first three Indiana Jones movies, visiting the mission at San Juan Capistrano, and a ton more.
I can’t even begin to list the new things the kids learned on our trip, things that came up naturally during conversations, reading or discovering. Here’s just a few: discussing the Nazi party and what they stood for (Indiana Jones), how tides work (the ocean), what a marine biologist does (IMAX Galapagos movie at the science center), how big a megladoon tooth was (history museum), how to pan for gold (mission), how a family of six had to cram into a tiny cabin for a journey across the ocean a hundred and fifty years ago (maritime museum), how to cast (fishing), the amount of skill and creativity it takes to build with Legos (Legoland) and much more. And I freally can’t begin to list all the new things I learned.
But besides being in a different part of the country and spending all day long with their father, my kids’ days were not much different than what they experience at home. My daughter read lots of books on vacation just like she does at home. My son worked on building things just like he does at home, too. We had great conversations, saw new things, played outside, asked new questions, and learned how to do new things in the same way we do every day.
When there is no pressure to perform, to take “tests,” to do a required amount of work assigned by someone else, our kids are free to feed their curiosity. They know they have time to dig into something as deeply or skim through it as quickly as they want. This is the time lifelong passions are born and develop.
When kids are left alone about reading, they often soar quickly ahead of where they were just a few months ago. Unfortunately, many schools now have a required summer reading list so even in the summer most kids don’t have a choice in their reading material. Often the desired goal of encouraging kids to read more backfires when their choices are not respected. Most kids don’t want to read in the summer at all because they are tired of how much reading had been forced on them during the rest of the year. Or they might be interested in doing other things, which are just as important, and maybe even more important than reading for them.
Give your kids the gift of living and learning in a relaxed, passion-filled environment filled with new experiences, lots of interesting things to see and do, and a large amount of uninterrupted time, and watch how they are learning all the time.
There is no one place where learning takes place. It can happen on vacation, in the backyard, in a new country, watching a movie or playing a game, during a conversation, and even in a structured class if the child is a willing and excited participant. Live life like it’s the most exciting, interesting and fun-filled vacation you’ve ever had and watch how open you are to embracing all that life has to teach you.
What things have you learned while on vacation? While watching a movie? While playing at a park?
Photo credit: psyberartist