What do you do on hols? Feel I'm not giving them enough opportunities

[falconrising]

What do you do with your kids during school holidays? We have 2 dds, 9 and 6. We've got a mix of things planned, with family coming to stay, and us visiting them, church holiday club, and lots of play dates with friends. Currently on camping holiday in holland , we're staying in a park with a theme park and water park. We've not done anything remotely educational, and I worry that I'm not giving them enough experiences to show them the world and educate them. My parents dragged me around stately homes and I hated it. I would have loved this holiday as a child, but seeing everyone else's fb pics of educational castles, museums , boat trips, I worry I'm not doing enough for them. This holiday has consisted of; overnight ferry to holland, lots of trips to the ice cream cafe in town, a day trip to Rotterdam zoo, trips to the pancake house, hiring a 4 seater go kart to cycle to the beach, day at the beach, bbqs, kids cycling around the campsite, rides at the theme park and trips to the water park. We barely speak any Dutch (a few words to get by), so visiting educational places is tricky as we can't understand all the info. Do holidays really need to be educational? What do you do?

Hey teacher - leave those kids alone!

Children learn many things by experience, by participating, by watching. Getting my dc to say hello/goodbye in foreign language is lovely. Handing over money in a shop, helping pack a bag, working out foreign words for rheir favourite ice cream. Going on the ferry - the process, the tickets, the engine and how powerful it could/should/might be.

Don't forget children aren't (necesarily) passive things that just bob along through life like frogspawn on a pond.

So far my 6yo has learnt how to meet new people in his summer camp (just 4 hours/day), just learnt to swim by going to the beach (free!), he's counting money to buy a chupa chup, he draws and colours and Legos and goes a bit cardboard box mad in his less organised time at home (Lidl/Aldi great for their big cage of dufferent-shaped boxes).

In a very waffly way, imho, learning stuff through doing and experiencing and seeing is just as useful as books.

We went to a museum last year ds was 5.5yo. I wanted to see the oldest skeleton if early human (about 40, 000 years old). I have a nice big fancy camera but also a small handbag-sized one which i lent to ds. He proceeded to take some crap interesting photos as we went around - a cavebear skeleton, model cave people, me under some massive oryx antlers (or whatever they were!). And then we found the old skeleton - he was speechless! We bought a piece of (fake) flint rock used for skinning animals and making arrows - he still has it and still talks about the Oldest Man. But... The visit was quite disorganised - point click, read a bit, point click. I'm under no illusion that he'd have looked around a museum like an adult does.

We 'll visit castles cos he loves running around grounds and looking at canons and anything that looks remotely like a jail

Your children will be picki g up things and ideas and memories from random places. Let them have a lovely month or so of relaxing.

Wiw that was long

Thanks for your reply.

Mine just needs to chill out to be honest and I'm just going with the flow. I do worry about enrichment usually but he just wants to relax. Lots of water fountain s, beaches that sort of thing.