Preventing Summer Slide with a #KidsintheKitchen summer pack

I am almost halfway through the summer holidays, and filling our #60DaysofSummer has not been too bad so far. We made a trip to Peppa Pig World, stayed with friends and visited Cadbury World as well as The Stratford Butterfly Farm and are just back from a few days in France with family: lots of swimming for small children and wine for Mamma.

There’s still another thirty days to go until 3rd September though so it’s helpful that Betta Living sent us a #KidsintheKitchen summer pack, rammed full of ideas and activities to keep my girls occupied and all for under £50. That should balance out the “essential” spending at the Dairy Milk store. And no wonder: The cost of keeping a child entertained over the six-week school summer holiday is estimated to be a whopping £1,000 plus, which researchers have broken down to roughly £450 on entertainment, £340 food & drink, £119 on petrol and £100 on treats/misc costs (toys etc)*.

If you follow Domestic Goddesque on Instagram, you will have seen some of our summer fun. Some of the images are published on twitter.

 

Marshmallow engineering #60DaysofSummer#kidsinthekitchen#STEMactivity#momsoninstagramhttp://t.co/41tBiUmsBT

— Kelly Innes (@domesticgoddesq) July 27, 2014

 

So far we have grown cress, designed a race course for table tennis balls, made lemonade and ice-pops. We have made spoon puppets and had movie nights, made obstacle races on the lawn and- redolent of my childhood- a band with kitchen “instruments”. The average child child can lose up to 25% of their academic year’s learning in the time they have off school over the summer: the phenomenon recognised in America as “summer slide” so anything that helps reinforce the skills that they have developed during the academic year is worth investing time in.

For more ideas of things to do to alleviate boredom and consolidate learning this summer, check out the Betta Living Blog which is packed full of suggestions for Kids in the Kitchen, or click here to download an Activity-checklist-Kids-in-the-kitchen. And there are several competitions running online for you to win your own Kids in the Kitchen summer pack.

 

 

*fact provided by BettaLiving, who also sent us a fun packed summer pack for the purposes of writing this post.