We already know why it’s important to make learning part of your holidays, so, with the holidays fast approaching, we compiled 12 ideas to keep your kids mentally engaged over the holiday season. Check in often for new ideas, and if you have your own idea, we’d love to hear it!

Day 1: Get Crafty Together.

Crafts are a great family holiday activity because they reinforce many important school skills such as attention-to-detail, following instructions, and maintaining focus, as well as encouraging creativity and imagination. Plus, kids have a great take-away that they can feel proud of!

There are many great craft sites available. Check out Oxford Learning guest blogger Secret Agent Josephine’s many great crafts on Alpha Mom. This one for holiday wreaths is budget-friendly and uses many supplies that you have around the house. Families with older kids might like her recent holiday artwork project.

As soon as children learn how to talk, they start asking questions. This is a good thing, despite how exhausting it can be for parents.

Young kids’ minds are sparkplugs of curiosity—continually seeking and absorbing new information. In terms of cognitive development, the years between the ages of three and six are an immensely busy time. Children’s brains are growing at an incredible rate, continually forming new neural connections. As the brain develops, so does its ability to process information.

As neural connections form, children begin to better understand their worlds—the more they understand, the more they want to know. As the brain becomes more and more capable of forming neural connections, the more connections that it wants to make. That’s why the questions never seem to stop. The questions keep coming because the more that the brain understands, the more it wants to know, and the more that it is capable of knowing.

The more questions kids ask, the happier the brain is—the more it develops and strengthens neural connections.

Why? How come? When? Where? Young children are thirsty for knowledge. They want to understand their worlds and know everything that they can about everything. When they encounter something new, they aren’t okay merely with filing it away for later use. They want to touch it, know it, and name it—to understand it.

This period in a child’s development is a unique opportunity to challenge the developing brain to become an actively learning brain. Parents can, and should, challenge their children to think logically about answers to their questions, and to come up with answers on their own.

The ever-questioning minds of young children are the foundation for tomorrow’s active thinkers, which is important, as active thinking and learning is a trait common to the most successful students.

This week’s Secret Agent Josephine post explores what life is like with a four-year old who is smack dab in the middle of the questions phase. Enjoy!

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Learning the days of the week may seem like a simple exercise in memorization.

Tuesday comes before Wednesday, which comes before Thursday, etc.

And in many ways, it is. But it is also one of the first lessons that children learn about time management and the idea of sequence: this comes before that. Y has to happen before X can occur.

Even more importantly, the days of the weeks are an early introduction to higher-level concepts such as placement, structure, and order.

The days of the week are also a major player is establishing a reliable routine—a critical part of childhood development for children and parents alike.

As soon as children learn to ask “why?” the question “when?” is sure to follow.

Children are naturally curious—they ask a lot questions! Which is a good thing, because that’s how they learn.

While children have an endless amount of curiosity, they don’t always have endless supply of patience, as this week’s post from Secret Agent Josephine shows.

The process of acquiring language requires an immense amount of desire—a drive to make sense of the world, and a desire to see connections between the sounds that people make and the objects that the sounds refer to.

It’s a huge task, and it’s accomplished when we are little more than babies.

But that’s just the beginning. With this major accomplishment under young children’s belts, kids embark on the biggest journey of their lives—learning to read.

Learning to read calls on the same driving force, the same desires that infants use to acquire language: a need to understand and make sense of their worlds.

Children have an insatiable curiosity. They are limitlessly hungry to figure out their world. To see connections. To make the pieces come together. To figure it out.

With the ability to speak and a basic understanding of the rules of our language, children begin to fit the pieces of written language together. Often, this happens even before they have ever set foot in a school.

Kids make up words, switch prefixes and suffixes, and read the same book over and over. They may not have the mechanics down, but what they are actually doing is developing the reading skills that they will use for the rest of their lives.

It takes time. It takes effort. It takes drive. And it takes patience from parents.

It’s a huge effort, but it’s worth it. Because the pay off is the biggest pay off of all: the ability to read. And with reading, the adventure continues forever.

This week we are pleased to have another guest posting by Brenda from Secret Agent Josephine! Brenda shares the ups and downs of her daughter Bug’s reading journey.

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