101 Frugal Activities To Keep Kids Entertained In The Summer Holidays

The school summer holidays can often be a time of dread for many parents. As a mum of 4, I know that the key to beating boredom, stress and fights is to plan the days well ahead so that we have something to do every day of the 6 weeks. Below I have put together 101 activities that are suitable for the whole family and should either be free or cost very little.

So get outside (even if it is wet) and have fun!

  1. Plant a herb garden
  2. Make a bug hotel
  3. Paint rocks – our local town paints and hides rock for us all to find. See if your town does similar. If not, create your own group!
  4. Sow lettuce
  5. Go blackberry picking
  6. Make mud pies
  7. Join the library summer reading challenge
  8. Learn a dance
  9. Make a bird bath
  10. Create a puppet show
  11. Make book marks- perfect to use during your summer reading challenge!
  12. Have a DIY photoshoot
  13. Make a movie
  14. Sketch the view
  15. Make sock puppets
  16. Make sun catchers
  17. Go bird spotting
  18. Create a scavenger hunt
  19. Make junk models
  20. Sow flower seeds
  21. Make salt dough
  22. Create leaf prints
  23. Make a button necklace
  24. Create leaf and pinecone bunting
  25. Record some music
  26. Make a collage from magazine cutouts
  27. Create a maze
  28. Have a water fight
  29. Play a football match
  30. Have a cake stall in your front garden
  31. Clear out the toy box
  32. Donate the toys to charity
  33. Make musical instruments
  34. Wash the car
  35. Sew bunting
  36. Make a fairy den
  37. Invent a machine
  38. Create a terrarium
  39. Go fishing – or magnet fishing is fun!
  40. Take tree bark rubbings
  41. Go litter picking
  42. Pick the weeds
  43. Plant a tree
  44. Bath the dog
  45. Chalk drawings on the pavements
  46. Play a new board game
  47. Have a Fashion Show
  48. Create a circus
  49. Upcycle some furniture
  50. Redecorate your bedroom
  51. Paint a plant pot
  52. Learn to knit or crochet
  53. Make a wormery
  54. Go to the market
  55. Invent a smoothie
  56. Learn to ride a bike
  57. Make a robot
  58. Go on the train/bus/tram
  59. Learn about something in history
  60. Make paper hats/planes/boats
  61. Have a go at Whittling
  62. Go star gazing
  63. Watch the Sun set
  64. Sleep in a tent in your garden
  65. Make a tiny wildlife pond
  66. Hatch sea monkeys
  67. Go fossil hunting
  68. Go pond dipping
  69. Make a den
  70. Build a hedgehog house
  71. Visit your local RSPB
  72. Go on a hike
  73. Make pompoms and turn them into something cool
  74. Visit an airport and watch the planes
  75. Have a bake-off
  76. Have a pamper session
  77. Create a rockery
  78. Make handprints in salt dough and bake to make a keepsake
  79. Choose a new houseplant
  80. Jump in puddles
  81. Take a walk in the woods
  82. Create your own magazine
  83. Make your own music festival
  84. Make a teepee from garden canes and bedsheets
  85. Learn yoga
  86. Make a kite
  87. Visit the beach- and collect litter
  88. Write a letter to your favourite actor or popstar
  89. Make icelollies
  90. Have a huge declutter
  91. Visit a free museum
  92. Throw a friendship party
  93. Create a dolls house
  94. Make a leaf mandala
  95. Watch bats at dusk
  96. Visit an animal sanctuary
  97. Make a treasure hunt and follow maps
  98. Look for geocaches
  99. Press flowers
  100. Make a stop-motion movie
  101. Take part in The Big Butterfly Count

Could You Run Your Own Educational Institute?

If you have something of a passion for education, then there’s every chance that you might be able to benefit yourself and those in your local community by turning that passion into a reality. More and more people are starting their own schools, and yet there is a good chance that this is not something you have ever considered doing. The truth is however that you can start your own school, and in most places it is not even that hard to make sure that you get the right permissions to make it happen. If you feel driven to do this due to a lack of trust in your local school system, or just because you think you could bring something unique to the table, then read on. Here are some of your top concerns when you are thinking of opening up your own school.

Have Patience

First of all, you should bear in mind that it will take not just a little patience to ensure that this happens. At first you need to get permission from the government to be able to start the school and the truth is that that process alone can take up to a year to go through. Nonetheless, in that time you could easily begin to design your school and start planning – so long as you are relatively sure that it will actually be approved after that year-long wait. Of course, you can always try again the following year, so it might be a good idea to think about that anyway. All in all, you will need a good degree of patience to be able to make sure that it happens and it is worth bearing that in mind from the start so that it is not too much of a shock for you further down the line.

Be Business-Minded

Even though you are clearly not going into this venture for profit, you will find that there are many ways in which you have to think of the school as a business. At the very least, thinking of it in these terms will ensure that you can achieve much more with it, and it will certainly make it easier to separate it out from other more charitable ventures. As long as you have your business head on when you are setting it up and running it, you will find that it is run much more successfully, so that is a useful marker to go back to whenever you feel you are getting a little lost as to how to run the school. Ask yourself: what would a business do in this situation? And you will find that you can easily come to the right answer that way.

Get Marketing

One of the very first things you will need to do is to get marketing your school, even long before it has opened. Clearly this is important because you want to make sure that you have some pupils coming in in the first year, and that requires that you have successfully spread the word around in advance. There are many ways to market a school, and again you will find that it helps to think of it like a business. That means focusing on what the branding is like, and how it is likely to be received, and making sure that the branding is consistent at all times with itself. This means the need to focus on details such as letterheads right up to larger things such as finding the right school signage for the building itself. All of this will need to be considered early on, and you will also need to make sure that you are thinking about how to actually get the word out as well. That means advertisements in local newspapers, speaking on the local radio, as well as the good old simple word of mouth. As long as you do all this, your school will have a much better start in life and that will mean you have many more students to teach straight off the bat as well.

Staffing Right

In a school, the staff are amongst the most important parts of the whole procedure. If you don’t get the right people to be teachers, then it is unlikely that you will be able to actually provide for your students the kind of education that you feel they deserve. Of course, it can be notoriously difficult to get hold of the right staff, but as long as you are keen to spend some time on the recruitment process then you should be able to find passionate teachers who can do a good job. This passion is the main thing to look for, but of course the right qualifications are necessary too if you are going to provide a decent education for your pupils.

You also need to think about the very important issue of safeguarding, which requires that your teachers have a DBS check carried out recently and that they have a clean criminal record in all ways. As long as you do manage to find the right staff, you will be able to be much happier with your school on the whole, so this is incredibly important and not something to overlook at all.