If you’re a teenager, it’s safe to assume that you love summer. And why not? It’s the time of the year where you can pretty much do whatever you like. Summer is the grand time where the months-long prep and countdown for family vacations actually come in fruition.
But there’s danger that lurks during summer. It’s the trap of monotony where sleeping late, waking up later, watching endless TV, and playing video games for hours become a routine. If you’re a teen (or have a teenager) who’s getting bored this summer, here are fun activities you (or your kid) can do to have a memorable time-off from school.
Go on a Trek
Summer is the perfect season to explore your surroundings. Plan a trek to a nearby location with your family or friends. You can even make it more fun with a picnic.
Look for the best trekking spots in your city – you don’t really have to go far for this activity to be exciting and memorable. If you’re serious about it though, you can join trekking groups that visit remote and challenging locations. Just make sure to tick off your safety checklist first before having a trekking adventure with other people.
Create A Music Video
It’s almost impossible to find a teenager who doesn’t like music. Creating a music video is a fun activity you can have with your friends. It’s like getting the best slices of life in one event – listening to your favorite music and having you and your pals hanging out together. You don’t need to shell out money to create a summer music video. You can use your smartphones to create snippets or full videos of all of you rocking out summer tunes. You can be the singer or the director or both. You never know, this may actually spark a passion for music that you can nurture for years!
Lose Yourself in a Great Book
Vacation from school is probably the only time you have to read something of your own choosing. You can experiment with different genres and see what catches your fancy. Reading is always fun, but it gets more interesting if you don’t have a book report to complete. You don’t even have to buy new books to get into this activity. Go to your local library (it’s really something you should do!) and borrow a book or two. You can even read full stories online. Also, summer reading is one way of making sure your mind stays sharp even when you’re on a break from school.
Join a Local Theater Community
Most towns have a local theater community, and some offer summer programs. If you have a heart of a thespian or want to explore the world of plays and musicals, summer theater is an activity for you. You don’t even have to be part of the cast to enjoy the program. If you like working behind the scenes, you can be part of the crew as a stagehand.
Participating in your local theater is a fun way of going out of your comfort zone and meeting new people of different ages.
Go Camping With Your Friends
Some teenagers think that going to camp when they’re over 13 years old is an uncool thing. But, that’s not the case. There are a lot of camps that specifically cater to teenagers. These sites have tons of activities that are centered on ways to keep teens on the right track of life. Now, if you think you’re “too old” to go camping, you can be a camp facilitator or volunteer instead.
Learn A New Craft
Summer is the best time of the year to learn something new: hobbies, crafts, languages, and so on. You don’t have school responsibilities, so you can fully concentrate on whatever recreational activity you want to learn. Learning a new craft or hobby can also help you figure out your future. Like, if you’re interested in fashion, you can learn how to saw, cut clothes the right way or remake old clothes to whatever new design you want. If you become good at it, you can continue learning new sewing or fashion skills. If you decide to take a fashion degree in college years later, you already have the goods to help you with your education.
Make Your Own Money
Summer jobs never go out of style. There are tons of ways to make money during summer – from the oldie-but-goodie babysitting to work-from-home data encoding. You can be a dog walker, a personal shopper (for groceries!), a research assistant, anything really. Look for a summer job that interests you so you don’t think of it as “work.” If you can’t find one, you can make (or bake) things and sell your goodies yourself.
Summer for teens is a wonderful time of the year! Get your summer vibes on with these inspiring quotes.
1. “And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
2. “It was June, and the world smelled of roses. The sunshine was like powdered gold over the grassy hillside.”
—Maud Hart Lovelace, Betsy-Tacy and Tib
3. “In the long dusks of summer we walked the suburban streets through scents of maple and cut grass, waiting for something to happen.”
—Steven Millhauser, Dangerous Laughter
4. “Everything good, everything magical happens between the months of June and August.”
—Jenny Han, The Summer I Turned Pretty
5. “When people went on vacation, they shed their home skins, thought they could be a new person.”
—Aimee Friedman, Sea Change
6. “One benefit of summer was that each day we had more light to read by.”
—Jeanette Walls, The Glass Castle
7. “August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.”
—Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
8. “The spring rains woke the dormant tillers, and bright green shoots sprang from the moist earth and rose like sleepers stretching after a long nap. As spring gave way to summer, the bright green stalks darkened, became tan, turned golden brown. The days grew long and hot. Thick towers of swirling black clouds brought rain, and the brown stems glistened in the perpetual twilight that dwelled beneath the canopy. The wheat rose and the ripening heads bent in the prairie wind, a rippling curtain, an endless, undulating sea that stretched to the horizon.”
—Rick Yancey, The Infinite Sea
9. “Now the windows, blinded by the glare of the empty square, had fallen asleep. The balconies declared their emptiness to heaven; the open doorways smelt of coolness and wine.”
—Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles
10. Hot weather opens the skull of a city, exposing its white brain, and its heart of nerves, which sizzle like the wires inside a lightbulb. And there exudes a sour extra-human smell that makes the very stone seem flesh-alive, webbed and pulsing.”
—Truman Capote, Summer Crossing
11. “In early June the world of leaf and blade and flowers explodes and every sunset is different”
—John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent
12. “Life, now, was unfolding before me, constantly and visibly, like the flowers of summer that drop fanlike petals on eternal soil.”
—Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy
13. Green was the silence, wet was the light, the month of June trembled like a butterfly.
—Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets
14. “August has passed, and yet summer continues by force to grow days. They sprout secretly between the chapters of the year, covertly included between its pages.”
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Tree of Codes
15. “The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summertime cannot last for ever. Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year – the days when summer is changing into autumn – the crickets spread the rumor of sadness and change.
—E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web
16. “If it could only be like this always – always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe and Aloysius in a good temper…”
—Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
18. “The summer stretched out the daylight as if on a rack. Each moment was drawn out until its anatomy collapsed. Time broke down. The day progressed in an endless sequence of dead moments.”
—China Miéville, Perdido Street Station
19. “It was rapture enough just to sit there beside him in silence, alone in the summer night in the white splendor of moonshine, with the wind blowing down on them out of the pine woods.”
—L.M. Montgomery, The Blue Castle
20. “At these times, the things that troubled her seemed far away and unimportant: all that mattered was the hum of the bees and the chirp of birdsong, the way the sun gleamed on the edge of a blue wildflower, the distant bleat and clink of grazing goats.”
—Alison Croggon, The Naming
21. “The castle grounds were gleaming in the sunlight as though freshly painted; the cloudless sky smiled at itself in the smoothly sparkling lake, the satin-green lawns rippled occasionally in a gentle breeze: June had arrived.”
—J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
22. “The morning heat had already soaked through the walls, rising up from the floor like a ghost of summers past.”
—Erik Tomblin, Riverside Blues
24. “Again and again, the cicada’s untiring cry pierced the sultry summer air like a needle at work on thick cotton cloth.”
—Yukio Mishima, Runaway Horses: The Sea of Fertility
25. “In the summer, the days were long, stretching into each other. Out of school, everything was on pause and yet happening at the same time, this collection of weeks when anything was possible.”
—Sarah Dessen, Along for the Ride
26. “The beauty of that June day was almost staggering. After the wet spring, everything that could turn green had outdone itself in greenness and everything that could even dream of blooming or blossoming was in bloom and blossom. The sunlight was a benediction. The breezes were so caressingly soft and intimate on the skin as to be embarrassing.”
—Dan Simmons, Drood
27. “I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer – its dust and lowering skies.”
—Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
28. “Summer was on the way; Jem and I awaited it with impatience. Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the tree house; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape; but most of all, summer was Dill.”
—Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
30. “The summer night was settling upon the neighborhood like a dark lace veil, casting dappled shadows on the roofs and sidewalks and lawns.”
—Victoria Kahler, Luisa Across the Bay
31. “The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color.”
—Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting
32. “Summer, after all, is a time when wonderful things can happen to quiet people. For those few months, you’re not required to be who everyone thinks you are, and that cut-grass smell in the air and the chance to dive into the deep end of a pool give you a courage you don’t have the rest of the year. You can be grateful and easy, with no eyes on you, and no past. Summer just opens the door and lets you out.”
—Deb Caletti, Honey, Baby, Sweetheart
33. “Summer set lip to earth’s bosom bare; And left the flushed print in a poppy there: Like a yawn of fire from the grass it came, And the fanning wind puffed it to flapping flame.”
—Francis Thompson, “The Poppy”
34. “Everything good, everything magical happens between the months of June and August.”
—Jenny Han
35. “Overhead hung a summer sky furrowed with the rush of rockets; and from the east a late moon, pushing up beyond the lofty bend of the coast, sent across the bay a shaft of brightness which paled to ashes in the red glitter of the illuminated boats.”
—Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
36. “Summers had a logic all their own and they always brought something out in me. Summer was supposed to be about freedom and youth and no school and possibilities and adventure and exploration. Summer was a book of hope. That’s why I loved and hated summers. Because they made me want to believe.”
—Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
37. “Spring flew swiftly by, and summer came; and if the village had been beautiful at first, it was now in the full glow and luxuriance of its richness. The great trees, which had looked shrunken and bare in the earlier months, had now burst into strong life and health; and stretching forth their green arms over the thirsty ground, converted open and naked spots into choice nooks, where was a deep and pleasant shade from which to look upon the wide prospect, steeped in sunshine, which lay stretched out beyond. The earth had donned her mantle of brightest green; and shed her richest perfumes abroad. It was the prime and vigour of the year; all things were glad and flourishing.”
—Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
39. “We thread our way through a moving forest of ice-cream cones and crimson thighs.”
—Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
40. It is easy to forget now, how effervescent and free we all felt that summer. Everything fades: the shimmer of gold over White Cove; the laughter in the night air; the lavender early morning light on the faces of skyscrapers, which had suddenly become so heroically tall. Every dawn seemed to promise fresh miracles, among other joys that are in short supply these days.”
—Anna Godbersen, Bright Young Things
41. “Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.”
—John Lubbock, The Use Of Life
42. “All in all, it was a never to be forgotten summer — one of those summers which come seldom into any life, but leave a rich heritage of beautiful memories in their going — one of those summers which, in a fortunate combination of delightful weather, delightful friends and delightful doing, come as near to perfection as anything can come in this world.”
—L.M. Montgomery, Anne’s House of Dreams
43. “Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability.”
—Sam Keen
44. “In summer, the song sings itself.”
—William Carlos Williams
45. “Summer afternoon — summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”
—Henry James
46. “There shall be eternal summer in the grateful heart.”
—Celia Thaxter
47. “Summer means happy times and good sunshine. It means going to the beach, going to Disneyland Paris, having fun.”
—Brian Wilson
48. “Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air.”
49. “To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie –
True Poems flee.”
—Emily Dickinson
50. “When the sun is shining I can do anything; no mountain is too high, no trouble too difficult to overcome.”
—Wilma Rudolph
