Six Weeks of Summer: Screen-Free Things to Do at Home

Stop planning days. Plan three fortnights.

Quick answer: The Australian summer break is six to seven weeks, which is far too long to fill with a list of activities and exactly long enough for a child to finish something real. Split it into three fortnights with one job each:

• Fortnight 1: try things. Short, varied, no commitment. The goal is to find out what holds their attention.
• Fortnight 2: pick one. Narrow to a single idea and take it as far as a prototype.
• Fortnight 3: build it. Make it properly, work out what it costs, and show or sell it to someone who is not family.

Everything below works indoors, needs nothing bought that week, and survives a 38-degree day.

How long your break actually is

Summer holiday dates vary by more than three weeks across the country, which matters if you are pacing something.

Government school dates. Independent and Catholic schools often finish a week or two earlier, so check your own school's calendar. Queensland's break is the longest at around 46 days.

If yours runs short of six weeks, compress fortnight one to a week. Do not compress fortnight three, which is the one that produces something.

Fortnight 1: try things

Ten to fifteen short activities, thirty to sixty minutes each, nothing bought. You are not trying to fill the day. You are running a series of small experiments to see which one they come back to unprompted, because that is the one worth building on.

1. The annoying list. Everyone writes down five things that are annoying about the house, the car or the walk to school. No solutions, just the list.
2. Fix one with the recycling. Cardboard, tape, whatever is in the bin. It does not have to work.
3. Cost a sandwich. Work out what one round of sandwiches actually costs. Bread per slice, butter, filling. Most children guess wildly wrong and find the real number interesting.
4. Map the house. Draw the floor plan and mark everything that is broken, missing or badly placed.
5. Interview an adult about their job. Ten questions, written beforehand. Grandparents are usually the best subject.
6. Price their own room. Walk around and put a realistic second-hand price on ten things they own. Good preparation for a later declutter.
7. Design a shopfront. One page, on paper, for a business that does not exist.
8. Write a sixty-second ad for something ordinary in the pantry, then perform it.
9. Teach someone younger something. Fifteen minutes, one skill, prepared in advance.
10. Count their money. All of it, sorted, totalled and written down.
11. Redesign something they own that annoys them, on paper.
12. Run a blind taste test of two supermarket brands and record which won and by how much.

Keep a note of which ones they extended past the time, asked to do again, or talked about at dinner. That is your data for fortnight two.

Fortnight 2: pick one

Narrow, then go deeper. Three questions, over the first day or two:

• Which of those did you want to keep doing?
• What could you make that someone outside this house would actually want?
• What would you need, using only what we already have?

Then spend the fortnight on that one thing. A prototype, not a product. Rough, wrong, and finished is the target.

Two rules that make this fortnight work:

Test it on one real person. Not a parent. A neighbour, a cousin, a friend from down the street. Ask them what they would change, and write down the answer without defending anything.

Work out what it costs. One unit, with actual numbers. This is the single most valuable half hour of the whole six weeks, and it is the step that turns a craft activity into something else. Teaching kids about money covers why this lands better than any conversation about saving.

If the idea collapses in fortnight two, that is a normal result. Pick the second-favourite from fortnight one and carry on. Do not extend fortnight two to rescue it.

Fortnight 3: build it

Make five. Set a price. Find one moment to sell or show them.

The selling moment matters more than the product, and the summer break provides several without you organising anything: an Australia Day gathering, a family barbecue, a street where people are home, a local market, the first week back when everyone is buying things anyway. One session, a start time and a finish time.

Three questions that evening:

• How many did you sell or give away?
• How much money is there, after what it cost?
• What would you change?

That is the end of the project and the beginning of the useful part. Our guide to starting a business as a kid covers the same sequence in more detail if the idea has legs beyond January.

The 38-degree day list

Indoors, no purchase, no screen, and mostly quiet.

• Sort and photograph everything they want to sell at a later market
• Design and draw packaging or labels for the fortnight two idea
• Write instructions for something they know how to do, then watch someone else follow them exactly
• Build the tallest freestanding structure possible from newspaper and tape
• Plan a menu for a family dinner, with a budget, then cook part of it
• Make a family quiz with twenty questions researched from books in the house
• Draw the same object five times, each in a different style
• Learn to count to twenty in a language nobody in the house speaks, from a library book
• Design a board game and playtest it once
• Write a letter to a business about a product they like and post it

Pick two or three and let boredom do the rest. Children who are never bored rarely invent anything.

About screens, honestly

Six weeks with no screens is not a realistic plan and pretending otherwise makes the rest of the advice easy to dismiss.

What works better is defending one block. Ninety minutes in the morning, before the heat and before anyone has opened anything, reserved for the project. Screens after that are not a failure. A morning block is achievable, it is when children are most able to concentrate, and it is enough to finish something across six weeks.

Common mistakes

Filling every day. A fully programmed holiday produces a child who waits to be told what happens next. Empty afternoons are where the interesting things start.

Buying the kit. The temptation in week one is to buy something that will solve the holidays. It will be finished by week two. Use what is in the house for the first fortnight at least.

Starting the build too late. If fortnight three begins in the last week, it will not finish, and an unfinished project teaches the wrong thing. Work backwards from the return date.

Rescuing a failing idea. Let it fail in fortnight two, name it, and switch. Cheaper than propping it up for a month.

Making it a holiday program. No schedules on the wall, no marking, no photos of the plan. The moment it looks like school, it stops being theirs.

At a glance

Questions parents ask

How do I keep kids busy at home for six weeks without screens?
Do not try to fill the time. Give the six weeks one structure, three fortnights with a different job each, and leave the afternoons empty. Structure across the break works better than activities within each day.

What can kids do at home when it is too hot to go outside?
Anything design, planning, costing or making with materials already in the house. The 38-degree list above is built for that: quiet, indoors, no purchase required.

My child says they are bored. Should I fix it?
Not immediately. Boredom is generally the precondition for the interesting part, not a problem to be solved. Wait twenty minutes before offering anything.

What age does this work for?
Six to twelve. Younger children need you alongside for most of it and the fortnight three selling step should be very short. By eleven or twelve most of it can be run independently, and the costing step becomes the most engaging part.

What if nothing holds their attention in fortnight one?
Then the answer to fortnight one is useful information rather than a failure. Repeat three of the activities that came closest, and shorten the build to one week. Some children need the second pass.

Where to start

Do the annoying list on the first morning of the holidays, before anyone has settled into a routine. It costs nothing and it produces the raw material for the next six weeks.

If you would rather have the first week structured for you, the free 7 Day Startup Challenge is one prompt a day at about fifteen minutes each, which covers roughly the first half of fortnight one. For a child who generates ideas faster than they can choose between them, My Ideas Log gives each one a page so the shortlist is visible rather than imaginary. If they reach fortnight three and want to keep going after school goes back, the Kids Business Bundle pairs the workbook with the planner.

None of it is needed for the six weeks. Paper, the recycling bin and an empty afternoon will do.

References

• Tourism Australia, Australian school holidays, for the state-by-state 2026 to 2027 summer dates