Family vacation time is sacred because it does not only help improve your family’s physical and mental health due to stress relief. It’s also a perfect opportunity for bonding as people connect better when they have to rely on each other in a foreign land. However, you can add more benefits to your family trip by including some educational elements into it. This will be very important for your kids because traveling provides them with experience that will help them succeed in studies and life (Journal of Travel Research). But you’ll need to plan how you can interest them in studying during the vacation.
Get children involved in the planning
The first learning opportunity comes at the planning stage. Get children involved in creating the itinerary as well as budget for your vacation. This will not only be a chance to learn how to do those things but also a help in motivating your children for the trip. They will need to research the country’s main attractions in order to work on an itinerary, so you can easily slip in some lessons on history and culture.
Working on the budget with you is even more important. According to Chris Ceballos from Bright Star Credit Union, learning money management from a young age can help prevent impulse spending in the future. It’s also an essential life skill that one should master as early as possible. Learning through creating vacation budgets will definitely be more fun than creating a grocery budget at home.
Take walking tours through the cities you visit
A walking tour is one of the best methods of learning about a new city and its history. They are even more useful for families with kids because walking through the streets will provide enough of visual input to keep them from getting bored. Anthony Jones from Strawberry Tours also points out that “The best way of learning a city is to walk its streets, breathe its air, and meet its people.” This allows you to immerse yourself into the foreign life around you and observe it from an outsider’s position.
For kids, such observations will be an important lesson. All of us are the same, yet all of our cultures and traditions are different. Therefore, one must always learn where the person comes from and what their culture and traditions are before passing judgment on their behavior. Observing details is another handy skill that can help one in life. You should turn this into a game. For example, observe your tour group and share details over ice cream afterward. Whoever noticed most details about the other tourists wins.
Read together about your destination
Reading to your child, or better yet with your child, is essential for their mental health and intelligence. According to data from the University of Melbourne, reading to children from age 4 provides significant benefits to their cognitive development and helps them develop necessary academic skills.
Reading interesting stories about your destination will do that as well as get the child more excited about the trip. But most importantly, visiting the places you’ve read about can help make children more interested in reading itself.
If your kid looks at a book as if it will bite them any moment, creating positive associations with the activity is a must. To achieve this goal, you should focus on fiction because it’s more exciting and easier to understand for kids. For example, read Harry Potter books before your vacation in London where you will take one of the Harry Potter tours.
The main goal of any vacation is to relax and enjoy yourself. However, traveling presents such a fantastic learning opportunity, you can’t afford to miss it if you want to help your children grow up the best and happiest they can be.
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