sA holiday is an opportunity to take time away from the stress of daily learning, work and life. It improves physical and mental health, motivation, relationships, and performance. It helps refresh, recharge your batteries, change perspectives, inspire and equip you to better handle whatever comes up in your everyday life. Holidays provide new experiences, opportunities to learn new things, and think differently. Holiday insights are therefore valuable to bring into, share and applaud in the home and classroom.
Here are some holiday discussion prompts to help you get underway.
Here’s an easy question to warm-up the class and welcome them back to school. Where did everyone go, and why? You could also create a long list of places, and via a show of hands, see which places rank highest. But be sensitive to those who didn’t travel far. Many parents choose UK shores for the youngest of children, not least to avoid the harsh effects of the sun (for which some countries, such as Australia go to great extents to champion the importance of sun protection to mitigate the risks of cancer). Cornwall and the Lake District are popular UK destinations. In Spid the Spider Goes On Holiday, Spid travels by train to a beach camp at a coastal location near his home. It could easily be like Cornwall or Wales. In 2022, top overseas foreign destinations were Spain (16.5m people), France (7m) and then Greece (4m).
This type of question will reveal insights on both the children and their experiences. These are fun things to share, and everyone should feel able to contribute. Encourage them to create vivid pictures of their experiences, emotional feelings, what and why? Thinking this way will inspire creativity, freedom of expression and provide a starting point from which to write in an emotionally engaging way.
Ask everyone to write something down as a starter for ten before moving on. However, uncovering what was learnt may require some prompting. So consider using one or more of the following prompts:
All these holiday discussion prompts encourage contemplation and questioning minds, and in turn a ‘growth mindset’. So conclude the session by checking and celebrating that all children learned something! Now help your children tell compelling stories about their holidays
Click to download an A4 version of our holiday discussion prompts