What should your child be doing during the March school holidays?

If you’re stressed over finding the right holiday classes to give your child an edge in the future, it’s time to pause and think differently!

The truth is that we don’t know what will happen in the next decade. In the last year, AI tools like ChatGPT have not only displayed the ability to replace repetitive and mundane tasks — they’re also capable of handling assignments requiring creative and analytical thinking. For some of us, this shift prompts a deeper reflection on what it means to contribute meaningfully in a world where technology can replicate many aspects of our current jobs.

What does this mean for your child? 

Well, AI can’t do it all. For instance, it falls short in understanding complex human emotions and making ethical judgements. For your child to develop the skills that matter in the long run, you can look at activities that enhance emotional intelligence, spark moral reasoning, and promote real connections with people as well as the environment. This approach doesn’t just prepare your child for a career, but also for living a rich, empathetic life in a tech-driven world. 

Below are three activity suggestions for the March holidays, which you can carry out with your child without signing up for a class!

School Holiday Activity: Innovating with Nature

Objective: This activity encourages children to observe and appreciate the complexity of the natural world, and link their observations to real-world applications.

Materials Needed:

• A notebook or sketchbook
• Writing and drawing materials
• A magnifying glass
• A camera or smartphone for taking photos 
• Reference books or a mobile device for researching plants and animals

Activity Guide:

1. Preparation: Choose a local nature reserve, park, or even a well-planted area within your neighbourhood. Ideal settings for this activity include popular green spaces like the Singapore Botanic Gardens, Gardens by the Bay, and the Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve.
2. Introduction: Start by explaining biomimicry to your child — how designers, architects, and scientists take inspiration from nature to solve human problems. Give examples like the structure of a lotus leaf inspiring self-cleaning materials, or how the kingfisher bird influenced the design of high-speed trains.
3. Exploration: Take a leisurely walk with your child through the chosen location. Encourage them to look closely at the shapes, structures, and behaviours of plants and animals. Use a magnifying glass to examine details like the veins of leaves, the patterns on insect wings, or the way certain plants respond to touch.
4. Documentation: Ask your child to choose several natural elements that intrigue them and document these observations in their notebook. They can draw, write descriptions, or take photographs. Encourage them to think about why these features exist, for example, how certain leaves are shaped to collect or repel water, or how the colouration of an animal might serve as camouflage or a warning.
5. Design Challenge: Back at home, encourage your child to design their own invention based on what they have observed. They can imagine a new building inspired by the structure of a tree, clothing that mimics the adaptive camouflage of an animal, or a new tool that incorporates the efficiency of plant or animal designs. They can draw their invention, describe it in detail, or even build a simple model using household materials.
6. Reflection: Have your child share their invention and the natural inspiration behind it. Discuss how nature solves problems efficiently and how we can learn from these solutions. Encourage them to think about how their invention could be used in real life.

To adapt the activity for different age groups, try this:

• Younger children (6 to 10): Focus more on the exploration and drawing, simplifying the concepts. Their inventions can be imaginative, and do not need to be practical.
• Older children (11 to 16): Encourage deeper research into the scientific principles behind their observations, and challenge them to think about the feasibility and environmental impact of their designs.

School Holiday Activity: The Adventure of Trial and Error

Objective: This activity helps children to embrace failure as part of learning and growth. By engaging in challenges where failure is seen as a step towards innovation, children can develop resilience, enhance their problem-solving skills, and learn the value of perseverance — these are all essential emotional intelligence skills.

Materials Needed:

• Basic craft supplies (paper, cardboard, glue, scissors, etc.)
• Building blocks or LEGO
• Access to a coding platform (for older children)
• Timer 
• Reward tokens 

Activity Guide:

1. Preparation: Set up a “challenge zone” in your home. This could be a table for crafting, a floor space for building, or a computer area for coding. Choose a series of challenges suitable for your child’s age and interests, ranging from LEGO challenges to programming a simple game.
2. Introduction: Explain the concept of gamification and how incorporating game elements into learning can make the process fun and engaging. Discuss the importance of persistence and learning from mistakes, using examples from real life where successful people have overcome failure.
3. Challenge Rounds: Present each challenge to your child, clearly stating the goal and any rules or limitations. To add a sense of urgency, use a timer. After each round, regardless of success, you can celebrate the effort with a reward token.
4. Building Challenge Example: Task your child with building the tallest possible structure using only a limited set of materials. After each attempt, discuss what worked and what didn’t, encouraging them to try different approaches.
5. Craft Challenge Example: Provide your child with craft materials and a theme, e.g. create an animal that could live in a future world. Emphasise creativity and iteration, allowing them to make adjustments based on what they learn with each version.
6. Coding Challenge Example: Using a coding platform such as Jupyter Notebook, challenge your child to follow a coding tutorial that includes exercises, or jump straight into solving beginner-level problems. Celebrate debugging as a key part of the coding process, and encourage your child to view errors as clues rather than setbacks.
7. Reflection: At the end of the activity, ask your child if failure brought them closer to a solution. If this was not the case, did failure provide any takeaways?

Here’s how you can tweak the activity for different age groups:

• Younger children (6 to 10): Keep challenges simple and focus on the fun aspect of trying and retrying. Praise effort and creativity over achieving the perfect outcome.
• Older children (11 to 16): Introduce more complex challenges that require planning and revision. Encourage them to document their process and reflect on their learning journey, fostering a deeper understanding of the value of resilience.

School Holiday Activity: Ethical Quests in Everyday Life

Objective: This activity guides children to develop their moral reasoning and empathy by encountering and reflecting on everyday dilemmas. 

Materials Needed:

• Writing supplies
• A list of daily ethical quests (suggestions below)

Activity Guide:

1. Preparation: Create a list of relatable “ethical quests” that can be encountered during a typical day. These should be age-appropriate challenges that provoke thought and discussion, such as whether to return a found item or how to respond to unfair play at the park.
2. Introduction: Sit down with your child and discuss the concept of ethical dilemmas — situations where deciding what is right might not be straightforward. Emphasise the importance of empathy, honesty, and respect for others’ feelings.
3. Ethical Quest Examples: Each day of the school holidays, introduce a new ethical quest for your child to engage with. This could be as simple as choosing whether to share a snack with a sibling or friend, or deciding whether to use extra allowance money to buy something for themselves or someone else. 
4. Reflection: Ask your child to describe how they arrived at a decision, and what they feel about the outcome. They can also use a journal to record their thoughts. At dinner or during family time, share the ethical quest with the whole family. Encourage everyone to offer their perspectives, and discuss how different choices might have led to different outcomes. This not only helps in understanding the dilemma better, but also strengthens family bonds through shared values and empathy.

Here’s how to approach the activity with different age groups:

• Younger children (6 to 10): Keep the dilemmas simple and directly related to their daily experiences. Focus on the feelings involved, and the basic concepts of fairness and kindness.
• Older children (11 to 16): Introduce more complex scenarios that may involve societal issues or abstract concepts like integrity and accountability. Encourage them to think about the broader impact of their decisions on their community or the environment.

Need more school holiday activity ideas? Check out the resources that we’ve previously shared!