Some summer vacations stretch endlessly with kids sleeping late and wandering around finding interesting things to do. \u00a0Others seem to be more strictly scheduled than the school year. \u00a0What is the goal?<\/p>\n

Goal? \u00a0For summer vacation? \u00a0Am I nuts? \u00a0Maybe. \u00a0But why wait until they are long grown to help our kids use blocks of unstructured time to explore new ideas and activities.<\/p>\n

There’s the “phew! \u00a0I can be lazy” approach to vacation and that certainly has some value. \u00a0But teaching our kids to be life-long learners begins with letting them know that they can choose to learn about things that aren’t in anybody’s lesson plan.<\/p>\n

Why not help them by asking what they’d like to learn about in the next few weeks; often people want to accomplish something, but they don\u2019t know how to start or \u00a0what to do next.<\/p>\n

Start by helping them get a good, clear picture of what it is they want to accomplish. \u00a0Are they going to build or read or write something? \u00a0Plan a trip? \u00a0Improve a skill?<\/p>\n

They can develop that picture by making a picture or vision board or writing about it. \u00a0Different methods work for different people. \u00a0Next of course, is starting to look at the steps that they would need to take to achieve their goal and to figure out what comes first — another great discussion!<\/p>\n

Then comes the hard part for most parents — ask about and support the effort without taking over and ‘taking it away’ from them. \u00a0If you can do that, you will have given your kids a wonderful gift — the ability to decide about and create something on their own. \u00a0How’s that for confidence and self-esteem???<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Are your kids having a lazy summer vacation or will they have time for self-discovery and real learning?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[278,298,474,520],"post_folder":[],"class_list":["post-1368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-parenting","tag-kids","tag-learning","tag-self-discovery","tag-summer-vacation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreapatten.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreapatten.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreapatten.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreapatten.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreapatten.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1368"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreapatten.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1368\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreapatten.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreapatten.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreapatten.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1368"},{"taxonomy":"post_folder","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreapatten.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_folder?post=1368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}