For kids, summer is not only a perfect time to do, let’s say, absolutely nothing, but also a great opportunity to work on their “craft”, practice and deepen their knowledge in areas in which they’re really interested or improve their skill-set where they feel a little bit stuck.If you think about it, that is almost the case for professional athletes as well. After a long, grinding season they still need to prepare for the next challenge both mentally and physically, which makes it essential to improve every aspect of their game as much as they can during the “off-season”. This is even more true of this year as the best football players in the world are currently playing on the biggest stage in their career thanks to the FIFA World Cup, so their well-deserved break is yet to be taken.

That being said, let me give you some ideas and recommend a couple of randomly selected tools from mozaWeb that you can pass along to your children in order to get them ready for the next season at school or just to pass the time on rainy days during the vacation period!

1) Translators and interpreters of the future - Lan(g)ame

What is the most important when learning a foreign language?

“Words, words, words”, says Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and rightfully so.

Learning a new language is really cool and fun, especially if you get enough positive feedback to make you feel that learning comes easy. However, if we’re not using the language every day, it’s equally easy to get out of rhythm and forget most of the expressions we picked up previously. Any language teacher can tell you that active and passive vocabulary are not the same at all so we have to make sure that we keep our “database” as up-to-date as possible.In Lan(g)ame, just select the language pair you wish to practice and try to score as many points as you can by determining the meaning of words.

Kids will surely enjoy it, because it’s quick and truly fascinating. What’s more, the wide array of available languages in the app may give them some extra motivation to start learning something new as well!

2) Euler would be proud - Maths games for the Summer

“Counting and multiplication? Can’t think of a better way of spending the afternoon.”

Well, sometimes it’s more than difficult to make our children feel that way, but combining something so... let’s put it nicely, theoretical with a cool game might just be the right solution.Oh, and if we’re talking about Maths, we have to mention the all-time favourite, the one and only Number Hero, which is also a sneaky way to get the kids to practice mathematical operations.In this game, the rule is pretty simple: if your answer is correct, you are free to jump to the next island. If not, well… you’ll be eaten by a weirdly satisfied shark who is gentleman enough to wear a handkerchief in the water. Tough luck.

3) Hobby historians and skilled experts of human history - Time Machine

The good news is that there is a whole variety of ways to expand your knowledge in the subject of history outside of the classroom, such as visiting museums, historical buildings, going on a sightseeing tour or talking to your grandparents to learn more about local and contemporary history.Besides that, we can offer the Time Machine tool which is basically an interactive timeline where you can search for any historical individual and put them in the center of a diagram. Around the selected person a whole bunch of similarly significant people will appear, but you have the option to manage the results as the profession, nationality, or time period can be also set.Once you have the whole crew on your plate (for example, William Shakespeare with his contemporaries and fellow writers), you can generate an exercise with one click . The goal is to match the names with the images on the tray which is an exceptionally good way to refresh the memories about important historical dates and figures.

What else can be done for an active summer?

• Spending 15-20 minutes with these apps each day,
• going out into nature,
• reading for fun,
• taking up a sport as a new hobby.

The possibilities are of course endless...but let this be a motto: learning can and does take place everywhere. Not only for us, adults, but also for our children, two and a half months are just too long and too much precious time is wasted on being completely off.

On behalf of the whole Mozaik Team, let me wish all of you a wonderful summer full of memories and adventures... see you in September!