Spring showers ruined your outdoor activities once again? Many parents dread rainy days because there’s not much room for creativity and play. Children easily get bored and distractions get into the way of learning – especially when the initial plan was to play tag in the yard and then go for a swim.

However, indoor activities can help your child learn new things and master essential skills. Indoor time doesn’t necessarily mean online games time. You can use technology in ways that are educational and constructive.

Vocabulary Improvement

Vocabulary is one aspect of language we never truly master. You can learn a new word every day and still have thousands of new words left to learn by the time you’re fifty. Why not invest in a vocabulary improvement software and play vocabulary games to improve the entire family’s vocabulary? People of all ages will benefit from adding new words to their lexicon.

A vocabulary exercise sharpens a child’s language skills and gives them new words and concepts to communicate with.

Spelling Improvement

Your child’s teacher might be doing an excellent job teaching students how to spell, but the true secret to spelling mastery is to learn to love spelling. Half the children in any given class probably hate spelling exercises, and most of the rest are generally indifferent. To get children interested in spelling the activities you engage them in must be fun. Did I say fun? I meant SUPER FUN.

Again, this is where a spelling program or website could come in handy. Create a two-hour spelling session with 3 to 5 brain breaks in between and play spelling games and other fun-based spelling activities like a spelling bee stand-off!

Keyboarding

While most online games don’t really help children learn to type, it’s a good idea to think of touch typing as a fun indoor activity that will entertain and educate at the same time.

Touch typing is crucial for your child’s academic performance this year, and will be needed until they graduate from college – and beyond. As technology becomes more entwined in every aspect of our lives, skills like keyboarding become the norm. The earlier your child learns to touch type the better off they will be.

Use indoor time to engage with a skill your child will benefit from throughout their entire life by helping them enhance their typing skills. The great thing is that keyboarding is one skill you can have a lot of fun with when practicing. In fact, you don’t even have to structure a keyboarding lesson as a lesson. After your child has learned the fundamentals, the entire learning practice can take place through typing games!

Reading Improvement

Reading has been touted as the key ingredient for personal success. Warren Buffet, the well known success maven, has testified to this, asserting that all he does all day is read in his office.

Unfortunately, cultivating a love for reading and learning in children can be a real challenge for teachers and parents. The secret is to make reading fun and effective.

What makes students dislike reading is often their lack of good reading skills. More often than not, they find reading boring because of bad reading habits, such as subvocalization and regression.

If children were to get rid of these reading-sabotaging habits then their reading speed would improve and they could effortlessly get through lots of reading material in less time.

Speed reading is more than the goal, it’s also a means to an end. When a student is a speed reader this further motivates them to study and learn more things. Essentially, a child enters a self-motivating circle of self-education and progress through the simple act of eradicating bad reading habits and improving their reading speed.

Indoor activity time shouldn’t be limited to sterile, uninspiring entertainment and passive pastimes like video games. Technology has spread out into the realm of education, and it is a parent’s duty to instill in their children a predilection for learning and self-development.

There are many online resources available where parents can find constructive, age-appropriate activities for their children. Here are some suggestions:

DiscoveryEducation.com,

PrimaryResources.co.uk

FamilyEducation.com

topmarks.co.uk.

Smarttutor.com

Raz-kids.com

Scholastic for Parents

These free, quality resources for parents will give you many ideas for learning activities and games for children from kindergarten up to 12th grade. For a more focused and structured learning experience on a particular skill, it’s wise to invest in the appropriate software. For instance, if you want to improve your child’s vocabulary you should consider getting a vocabulary program like Ultimate Vocabulary™.

Cross-posted on the Ultimate Vocabulary blog.