The holidays are upon us! That means time with family and friends (hopefully!), lots of yummy food, and...the kids home for break!
While the holiday breaks are a nice time for relaxation, they can also be difficult for parents. Many kids see holiday breaks as a great opportunity to catch up on their screen time.
However, parents want their children to remain active in their learning and it can be hard to find a balance during school breaks…
But fear not - Be Able Learning is here to help! Here are 8 creative activities to get your child in high spirits about learning this holiday break. The best part is they’ll keep coming back for more.
Digital Activities
1. Wordwall.
Wordwall.net is a great resource for educational activities online. It is free to make an account, you can even sign up with Google. Don’t worry they are good at not sending junk or spam mail. How do I know for sure… I signed up too 😀. Once you sign up, you have access to the site’s community of games. They have word sorts for vowel teams, hangman for spelling practice, parts of speech games, math facts games, and more. (And guess what… we made a short video tutorial of this down below 👇)
2. Fun 4 the Brain.
Fun4thebrain.com has a plethora of math games for children to have a blast learning. This site provides a videogame-like experience for kids while they practice a variety of math skills. The games focus on math facts of the four main operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. It also has some games on some higher-level skills, such as Least Common Multiple and Greatest Common Factor. You can also generate quizzes to test your child and turn it into a game with prizes. Hands down - this is one of our favorite math gaming sites!
Worksheets
3. Super Teacher Worksheets.
Superteacherworksheets.com is a great site! It has been around for quite some time, so many of you may have heard of it. This is a subscription site, but it is only $25 for a year of membership--which is quite reasonable...especially for all of the resources they provide! They have such a wide variety of ELA and math worksheets at different levels. They also have printable games and academic coloring sheets for students that need something a bit more creative to enhance their engagement.
4. K12Reader.
K12Reader.com is amazing and provides many writing and reading worksheets for kids of all ages...at no charge! This site separates its worksheets into five categories:
Reading Skills, Grammar, Vocabulary, Composition, and Spelling; this makes it easy for parents to identify exactly the sheets they need for their child. In addition, once a category is selected, the ideal grade level and learning standards are shown for each individual sheet. This is a really wonderful “one-stop-shop” for ELA worksheets!
5. Interactive Math with K5 Learning & Kuta Software.
K5learning.com & Kutasoftware.com are fantastic website resources for free math worksheets. I have listed them together because K5 Learning has a wide variety of worksheets for students grade six and younger, while Kuta has worksheets for middle school and high school students. K5 lists their worksheets both by grade and by subject, so it is easy to find exactly what you are looking for. Kuta organizes their free worksheets by math level: pre-algebra, algebra, geometry, etc. These sites provide in-depth practice sheets in just about every math concept a student could need.
Hands-on Learning
6. Playing Cards.
A deck of cards is something most households have in their games cabinet...but did you know that it is a great way for kids to practice working with positive and negative numbers! The black cards in the deck act as positive numbers, while the red cards and negatives. The deck is shuffled and dealt out. Each player flips over two cards at a time and your student adds the numbers together...whoever has the higher total gets to keep the cards. The person with the most cards wins!
To see how this would work...check out our VLOG below!
7. Oreo Cookie Moon Phases.
This is such a fun one! Your student splits Oreo cookies and, depending on the phase
of the moon, is how much cookie or frosting you see on each half. Your kiddo gets to learn about the different moon phases while munching on some yummy cookies!
Go >>HERE<< to download the Oreo Cookie Moon Phases so your child can start their learning fun.
8. Cooking.
A fun, hands-on way to practice math is cooking! Cooking and baking involve measurement, capacity, and fractions. Students can practice conversions such as, how many teaspoons are in a tablespoon or how many ounces are in a cup. Kids can also practice increasing and decreasing amounts by altering the servings of a recipe. An added bonus of cooking activities is that it allows parents and children to work together and, in the end, you have something yummy everyone can enjoy. The link below will bring you to some recipes you could use at home:
Looking for a visual on how these activities look in action? Great! Watch some of these activities come to life 👇
I hope you have a wonderful holiday season full of an abundance of family learning fun.
Have any questions or blog ideas you would like to share, let us know on Facebook or Instagram. Oh and don’t forget to catch us on our new YouTube Channel for more insightful tips, hacks, and learning fun.
‘Til next time...Thanks for stopping by. I’m Brittany. See you every other week here on the Be Able Learning Blog and every day on social.