NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State
University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665
June 25, 1998
Kim Bushaw, Parent Line Program Specialist
NDSU Extension Service
[This is the second of four Best of the Parent Line columns, articles that have run previously but focus on timeless ideas.]
School is out, and the kids are celebrating that their formal book learning is over for the summer.
This is the time of year parents scour newspapers, flyers and brochures for educational, entertaining and recreational activities for their children. While some will be cooking, running the household or doing farm work, other children will be bussed to camp. Yet others will roam with friends from their neighborhoods.
The variety of choices during vacations is limited only by the imagination. While children set their sights on freedom, parents are returning the enrollment forms for everything from baton to golf to dance line lessons with the idea of keeping bodies and minds moving in a positive direction.
Parents often worry that children will regress during the long three months of unscheduled time.
I recall learning more about the ecosystem, especially frogs, by playing in a shallow gully next to the lake. The textbooks listed snakes, fish and skunks as the natural predators of frogs. I quickly learned that cars at night and children with sticks should have been mentioned too.
We scavenged for hours to find ant colonies under rocks and experimented with what they might like to eat and how big a piece of food they could carry back through the hole.
We learned how many times each of us could go around in a circle on the tire swing in the neighbors' yard before we were too sick to walk home.
When the lake warmed up, we trained schools of fish to gather at the end of the dock and eat leftover pancakes from our hands. We netted hundreds every weekend and let every one of them go to catch again, for we knew that if we didn't return them they would soon be gone.
Once when I visited my grandma I learned that I was the only one nimble enough to pick the best raspberries from the top of the old brush pile. I felt very important and needed. I also learned not to show off at the top of that unforgiving brush pile.
When I spent a week with my cousin, I learned how to wash clothes in a wringer machine and cook for 10 people every meal. We got to smell a rotten cracked goose egg and watch a mother cat give birth.
On family vacations I remember hearing about or meeting relatives I didn't know I had. My parents would tell stories from their own childhoods during those long car trips from here to there because there was finally time enough to relax and reminisce.
The lazy days of summer also gave us time to explore national parks; practice our swimming strokes; experience those harmful rays of the sun up close and personal; and experiment with sand, water, air, insects, and relationships with relatives and friends in a variety of new ways.
Extracurricular summer activities can be wonderful. Teams are formed, skills practiced and hobbies discovered. Children learn a great deal from these types of experiences.
Children also learn a good deal from the great outdoors, relatives, chores and hanging around the universe. It's a big classroom where learning can take place wherever there are curious minds.
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More than 100 Parent Line columns are in the book "Please Tell Me This is Just a Stage." To order, send $9.95 per copy to Distribution Center, Box 5655, NDSU, Fargo, ND 58105-5655.
Kim Bushaw answers the Parent Line, an information and listening support warmline for North Dakota parents from the NDSU Extension Service. Call the Parent Line at 1-800-258-0808 (231-7923 in Fargo) with questions about this column and other parenting topics.
Source: Kim Bushaw (701) 231-1070
Editor: Becky Koch (701) 231-7875