Supporting your child’s learning in summer can be much easier than in winter. In summer, you can go on nature walks, visit zoos, or do chemistry experiments in the back garden where any mess isn’t a problem. In winter, stuck indoors, it might seem like there’s not much to do except read.

In fact, there’s more that you can do to enhance your child’s learning in the cold winter months than you might expect – and all that without making too much of a mess of the house.

Cooking

Cooking and baking are life skills, and they can be educational too. There’s a lot of science in the kitchen, from understanding why steaks can be eaten medium-rare but chicken should be cooked through, to learning which herbs and spices go with which ingredients, to understanding the effects that different types of cooking have on our food. 

Got a whole day to spare? Try baking batches of cookies with subtle differences, such as batches with more butter, an extra egg, or a different type of sugar, and see the effect that each change has on the recipe.

Craft Projects

There are all sorts of crafts that are easy to pick up and satisfying to learn, such as cross-stitch, basic weaving, or crochet. For older children, sewing, knitting or jewellery-making are possibilities, or even up-cycling old furniture with decoupage. 

What’s particularly good about crafts is that the end result is something tangible and enduring; great for kids who need that extra encouragement to learn.

Board Games & Word Games

Games don’t have to be explicitly educational for your child to learn from them. Any board game that requires strategy can be a good learning activity, as can word games such as Taboo or Scrabble. 

Some games can even be played in a different language. Person Do Thing (persondothing.com) challenges players to explain a complex idea in just 36 common words, and can be played in English, German, French or Spanish even by players with a limited grasp of the language, improving their confidence. 

Indoor Gardening

You might not be able to get out into the garden, but your child can still learn about plants from growing things indoors. 

If anything, it can be more educational, because your child will have to choose where to put the plant in terms of light and humidity, and how often to water it, rather than leaving it up to the elements. Try something like a sensitive plant or Venus Fly Trap for added interest!