There is a mix of outdoor and indoor activities on this list, so whatever the weather your teen is sure to find something to do this summer.

Encourage your teen to visit older family members and interview them, they could use their smartphone to video some of the conversations. Things to ask about:

• What was it like when you were a teenager?
• Were your parents strict?
• Who was your favourite family member?
• What did you eat?
• What did you do to amuse yourselves?

Irish Geneaology Toolkit has free templates for your family tree. Ancestry.com is also a good site to get started exploring your family’s ancestry and offers a 14 day free trial.

We all know many artists such as Lorde and Dua Lipa launched their careers on YouTube. Your turn to create and produce a new music video.

Now read How to Make Your Music Video go Viral.

As well as the standard cutting grass / washing cars / babysitting options to earn some extra cash, how about

• dog walking / pet sitting while the neighbours are away to save them kennel fees;
• digital photo sorting and printing;
• or offering to pick up and sort out all the lego for busy parents?

You can find lots of ideas for teen jobs here.

Have you had any inklings about starting your own business? The Student Enterprise Awards website has some useful information.

A Haiku should have seventeen syllables, in three lines of five, seven, and five. This is not as easy as it sounds. Learn more about haikus here.

A teen writing a

haiku could be a challenge

but you can do it

Not only will you make your parents extremely happy but you will find all those lost cds/books/must have items that are buried under the heap.

You can now have a car boot sale/sale of work/garage sale to get rid of the non-essential non-teen stuff you no longer want and make yourself some cash at the same time.

See #6 now that you have cleared out your room.

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Try a new colour if parents will allow. If not, try a furniture rearrange and appropriate some small furnishings from elsewhere in the house.

Here are some other tips for quick and easy fixes.

You might like to try out a course in something you might be interested in doing in college as a taster.

There are lots of engineering / IT / animation / acting / language courses for teens.

If you’re in Ireland, check out our Summer Camps for Teens article.

Here’s the rules:

• Create 3 new menus and practice them
• They must include starter, main + dessert
• They must be tried out on your family
• They must be of a high standard i.e. empty plates at the end.

Check our Family Recipes for lots of ideas and How To Make Family Dinner.

Pick a night forecasted to be warm, clear and rain free and grab a sleeping bag, blanket and pillow and head out for a night outdoors.

Are you familiar with the constellations? See how many you can find in the night sky.

Make a Dream Destinations Board if you’re on Pinterest. Or hang out online on Lonelyplanet.com and create the best ever round the world itinerary.

• Where to go
• How to get there
• What to do
• Where to stay
• Where to eat

Rules:

• It must be tuneful
• It must be lyrical
• Witty is good

Either write your own or do a karaoke style number. Now record yourself singing it and file away for viewing in 10 years’ time.

This is a good one if you’re planning to do some babysitting, to be able to tell prospective parents that you know first aid.

St John’s Ambulance Brigade run first aid courses as well as Irish Red Cross and there are lots of private organisations running them locally as well.

Check out our list of 10 of the Coolest Classic Books for Teens. From old classics to new, all of them thought provoking and inspiring.

Now that you have read your way through a bunch of classics how about trying your hand at a short story? And if you thought writing a short story was hard, try a short story in 100 words.

Writer John Scalzi gives useful tips for writing.

Skating is fun and you get to exercise at the same time without realising. If you’ve never skated before, here’s some good advice:

If you have read a book and loved it, time to create a Booktok. Here are some popular YA booktoks.

If you’ve never tried skateboarding, you have plenty of time this summer to give it a go and keep practicing to get better. Baseball caps worn backwards and baggy pants are not compulsory.

Fill balloons with water and get on some swimming togs for a water fight in the backyard.

Try out some new topping combinations on homemade pizza. Making your own dough is easy to master. Here’s our own super easy dough recipe:

Ingredients:

• 450g strong white bread flour or Tipo 00 flour (the Italian pizza or pasta flour)
• 500 ml warm water
• 2x7g sachets of dried yeast
• 2 tblsp olive oil
• pinch of salt

Method:

1. Put flour in a large mixing bowl.  Stir yeast into warm water in a jug. Make a well in the middle of the flour and add salt, olive oil then stir in yeast mixture until a dough forms (add a little more water or flour depending on if your dough is too sticky or too dry). Knead for up to 10 minutes. Place back in the bowl and cover with tea towel and leave for at least 1 hour to rise.
2. Divide into 4 balls and knead them a little to make them smooth.
3. Roll out flat to about 1 cm thick and place on your oiled pizza sheet or tray.
4. Now go wild with the topping combinations.

Maybe you like animals. Or are happy helping homeless people. You can do this through a local volunteer centre or at a local event or for a local charity, they always need people to help. (PS good for the resume/CV too!)

Offer to help at a local gallery or museum. Many galleries offer teens the chance to curate or help put exhibitions together.

Get a hold of a fishing rod and head off to a local stream, river or lake for the day.

Get down and mucky on the farm or at the stables and have a bit of fun. You never know you might love driving tractors and feeding cows and horses. If nothing else, it will give you a good appreciation of what a tough life farming is.

If you’re not familiar with Geocaching, it is basically a modern-day treasure hunt that uses a Global Positioning System (GPS) to guide you to the treasure. People all over the world have hidden trinkets and objects at various locations, which you can go out and find.

There’s a good chance that there is a geocache hidden somewhere that you pass-by everyday !! When you find the treasure (cache), you trade items in it – swap an object of your own that has similar or higher value, before returning the cache to its original hiding place.

Check out nearby golf clubs. Many have good coaching deals for teens and some clubs let members collect stray golf balls as well.

Or head to nearest Mini Golf or Crazy Golf and see how many holes in one you can get.

Ever fancied yourself as a playwright? Summer holidays are the perfect time to get writing and create a cast of characters and have a bit of fun as well.

Organisations do it all the time so why not you, create super-summery cover images for your favourite social media page.

What would your dream house be like? What would it look like outside and in? Where would you situate it? Money’s no object in this exercise in dreaming so fire away with indoor cinemas and swimming pools and separate motorbike garages. Now file it away for when you have made your first million.

Get up in time for sunrise and record it on video or as a series of Time Lapse Photos (see #33).

Find a safe place to set up a bonfire (the beach is a good place away from driftwood and shrubbery) and have a simple cookout with sausages and smore’s.

Head on out to a nearby pavement and spend some time with chalks creating a mural.

We challenge you to skip 10 in a row on a river/lake/at the sea. And if you can manage 10 in a row, we challenge you to do 15 in a row and tell us (honestly) below on our comments if you managed this amazing feat.

Over the space of e.g. a week take photos of a plant growing or the same street scene.

If you’re not familiar with Pitch & Putt it’s like a mini version of golf, and considerably cheaper to play as you only need 2 clubs, an iron and a putter, and you can usually pay as you go.

Take your camera or smartphone out with you and take a series of photos on a theme. For example, try our Alphabet Photography Hunt or take photos by a colour theme. Then print and frame your creative pictures for your room.

Create a playlist of the best ever summer songs (then go and ask Mum or Dad what a compilation tape is).

Here’s how to create a stop motion film. Take inspiration from these 50 incredible Stop Motion Videos.

You always wanted to fly through the treetops on a zip wire or roll around in a giant ball, didn’t you?

Put together a memory book. Could be about a special time during your life or about primary/junior school if you’re heading to high school:

• friends made
• best memories
• favourite teachers (or not!)
• favourite subjects
• hopes/feelings about going to secondary etc. (It will all be forgotten so quickly!)

There are lots of free online tools for helping you to create cartoons or comic strips. Maybe you could develop your cartoons into a graphic novel?

Decide on your film genre, broad story and characters and make a storyboard. You could film your neighbourhood, a day in your life or get friends to be characters in a fictional film.

An excuse to research a long ago decade like the 70s or the 50s

• check out the rock-glam or hippy costumes worn in the 70s or the rockabilly outfits from the 1950s
• find the soundtracks to a cool film eg Mamma Mia / Grease and
• create some of the past food miracles such as cheese and pineapple hedgehogs

Have you ever been surfing, body boarding or kayaking? Even if you don’t live by the beach, if there’s a river or lake nearby you may find a company that does water sport training.

Ask Mum or Dad nicely to drop you off for a day’s mountain cycling, don’t forget to take plenty of water with you (and your helmet…).

Coillte Outdoors has lots of bike trails and maps for different counties.

Organise a rounders or tag/touch rugby tournament at nearby green space/field. Someone bring the ball/bat/food/drinks.  Get everyone to bring camping chairs or picnic blankets to crash on while waiting for their turn.

Unfamiliar with the rules of touch rugby? Check out the Tagrugby Ireland website.

Construct your own sailing vehicle from plastic bottles or containers and then sail it on the local river or lake. Rule for this task: must not sink.

Walk somewhere with a group of friends for a day (bring a picnic and drinks), see how far you get and nicely ask Mum or Dad to pick you up at the end.

Touch typing is a great skill to learn, not only will it stand you in good stead for your own computeration but you will get access to lots of temp jobs if you can type fast and with few mistakes. It also means you’ll get school projects done much quicker too.

Pick a new language, such as Arabic or Mandarin (current on-trend languages to learn), and master 10 phrases well.

Katie O’C from Clare aged 13 was the winner of our writing competition on the topic of A Teenagers’ Guide to Living with Parents.  Here’s her article: “A simple survival guide for teenagers on how to live and deal with parents“.

Get in touch if you’d like to write for us!