Parent Panel - Our Favourite Summer Activities

Meet Laura, mother of two and a member of our fantastic Parent Panel*, a diverse community of Bright Horizons parents sharing their experiences of raising happy, thriving, and confident children. In this blog, Laura shares her favourite things to do over summer with her little one.

*Incentivised content

I got the title of this blog post and thought I’d start preparing by asking my daughter, “What’s your favourite thing to do in the summer?”. Her answer was “Eating ice cream and drinking drinks.” Her response made me laugh, shortly followed by me wondering if she’s having too many ice creams! But she’s right because it is one of our favourite things to do on a hot summer day. Here’s a list of our favourite summer activities we do as a family that blend play, creativity, and learning.

Making ice lollies

So apparently my daughter loves ice creams - I’m sure a lot of parents are in this boat! As well as eating ice creams we’ve had fun making our own ones. We got some watermelon-shaped moulds from a supermarket and filled each one up with diluted squash and some small, chopped pieces of fruit. You can also blend up fruit and make it more of a puree. Children can learn about healthy foods, how to cut up the fruit safely and how to measure out the water. It’s a lovely activity to do when you all fancy a cool treat.

Nature scavenger hunt

We love outdoor adventures and especially love doing a bit of a scavenger hunt. To do this, we created a list with pictures of items for our daughter to find, for example, a leaf, a rock, a flower and a bird, and then went exploring (depending on your child’s age, they could draw the pictures themselves.) This helps little ones to get outside in nature and learn about their local surroundings, checking off all the interesting things they see on their adventure. If your children are anything like mine, I welcome an activity that helps to burn off some energy, too!

Messy sensory play

We recently had some friends over and thought it would be fun to do some messy play in the garden. We got a large bowl and poured a couple of packets of dissolvable jelly into it. We then got some of the toys we had around the house, like cars and animals and put them in the jelly. We also put in plastic ice cream cones and ice cream scoops and let it all loosely set. Then we had three smaller bowls with flour and food colouring mixed in them. The task for our children was to put their hands in the jelly and feel around to find the ice cream cones and scoops. Then wash them down and use the scoops to scoop up some of the coloured flour as if it were ice cream to go in the cones. Have to say this was super messy after a while, but the children loved it. You can get children to name the objects they find and the different colours of the ‘ice cream’ while enjoying getting a bit messy.

DIY musical instruments

If it’s a rainy summer's day, which let’s face it, is more the norm in the UK, then you might be looking for some indoor activities too. There’s the usual arts and crafts, but something extra that we found fun was to make our own musical shakers. We used a small drink bottle that was no longer being used and half-filled it with lentils (an old spice bottle works quite well, too, for little hands). Then my daughter decorated her bottle with stickers and some ribbons. We put some music on and had a dance party with the little musical instrument we’d made together. This was a really fun way to pass a rainy afternoon. It teaches children about music and rhythm, and doing things like cutting ribbons is a good way to practise using scissors safely.

Other summer activities

Some other summer highlights for us:

• Going to the local zoo and learning about the animals
• Making sandwiches or nibbles together to take along for a picnic at the park
• Drawing numbers, letters or pictures with chalk on the floor outside
• Helping mummy and daddy with some gardening to earn treats
• Having a water day in the garden with a paddling pool or water table and splashing around while measuring out water
• Beach days and building sandcastles
• Play dates with friends

Hopefully you’ll be able to enjoy some of these ideas with your family too. Have a brilliant summer!

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