9 Summer Solstice Activities for Students

The summer solstice marks the longest day of the year and the start of summer. It’s also a timely way to keep students curious and engaged as the school year winds down. 

[Summer solstice STEM activities](id-sci)

Help students connect the summer solstice to Earth’s movement, seasons, sunlight, and weather patterns. These STEM activities make the science behind the longest day of the year easier to see, discuss, and apply.

Teach the science behind solstices and seasons

Teaching the summer solstice helps students understand why seasons change. Start with the basic ideas of Earth’s tilt, orbit, and sunlight hours. Ask students what they notice about the length of summer days and when the season happens across the globe.

Students can read, watch, or compare resources to answer questions about the causes of a solstice, how the Northern and Southern hemispheres differ, and why the Earth’s tilt matters more than its distance from the sun.

Seasonal STEM projects to celebrate summer

Summer is a great time to connect science concepts to activities students already recognize, like making ice cream or mixing a cold drink. These seasonal STEM projects help students explore chemical changes, freezing points, mixtures, and reactions through hands-on learning.

Use these activities before summer break, during summer school, or any time you want students to see how science shows up in everyday routines. Each project works well as a standalone activity or as part of a larger lesson on physical and chemical changes.

Make your own ice cream 

What do you do when students are craving a summer treat, and you want to keep science learning going? Make ice cream in a bag!

This activity helps students explore freezing points, chemical change, and physical change. Students can see how salt lowers the freezing point of ice, which helps chill the mixture enough to turn it into ice cream.

Before students start, set up the materials so each group has one large bag, one small bag, ice, salt, and the ice cream ingredients. Keep towels nearby to make shaking the bags easier and less messy.

You can also pre-measure the half-and-half, sugar, vanilla, salt, and ice to save time. That helps students focus on the science rather than the prep work for the experiment.

Students can work in small groups to complete the activity. As they follow the steps, have them pause to observe what changes and what stays the same. Then, ask them to explain whether they noticed a physical change, a chemical change, or both.

Try a fizzy lemonade recipe

Fizzy lemonade is another summer-ready activity that helps students see chemical reactions in action. When lemon juice and baking soda are mixed with water, they produce carbon dioxide gas. Students can see that reaction as bubbles form in the lemonade.

Use this activity to connect a familiar summer drink to science vocabulary like mixture, chemical reaction, carbon dioxide, and gas.

Set up the materials so students can mix the lemonade safely and observe the reaction right away. The baking soda is what creates the fizz, so keep it separate until students are ready to test and observe.

After students mix the drink, have them focus on what they can see and explain. The bubbles are evidence that a gas formed. That gives students a concrete way to connect a summer activity to chemical reactions.

Add more STEM lessons for the first day of summer

Use these Newsela STEM text sets to extend your summer solstice activities beyond a single lesson. Students can explore seasons, climate, sunlight hours, and the way major natural events can affect Earth’s systems.

These resources work well for small-group reading, data exploration, or end-of-year STEM stations.

[Summer solstice ELA activities](id-ela)

Use summer solstice activities in ELA to help students explore seasonal themes, story elements, poetry, and personal writing. These texts give students a timely way to connect summer experiences with close reading, discussion, and creative response.

Teach about story elements using “Summer with Papaji”

Use “Summer with Papaji” to turn a summer-themed fiction text into a focused lesson on story structure. Students can read for meaning first, then use a plot diagram to track how the setting, conflict, climax, and resolution work together.

This lesson also gives students a natural connection from reading to writing. After analyzing the story, they can use the same organizer to plan a short story or personal narrative about a summer memory, tradition, or experience.

Explore summer poetry

Poetry gives students another way to study the season. Use summer poems to help students notice imagery, mood, theme, figurative language, and word choice. 

Students can read one poem closely or compare two poems about summer. Ask them to look for details that show how the poet feels about the season, then have them explain how specific words or images shape that feeling.

[Summer solstice social studies activities](id-ss)

Help students explore the summer solstice as both a seasonal event and a cultural moment. These social studies activities invite students to think about how summer affects daily life, traditions, community needs, work, food, and the way people experience the season.

Use these social studies resources for the first day of summer

Start with a mix of resources that help students see summer from different angles. Some texts explain the solstice and seasons, while others show how summer affects communities, food access, culture, and work.

Use the table to choose resources by grade level, format, or Spanish availability

Turn the resources into a summer social studies lesson

After students choose texts, guide them through a simple lesson sequence that moves from discussion to close reading to text-based responses. The goal is to help students explain how summer changes both the natural world and people’s choices.

The lesson plan works best when students read two texts: One about seasons or the solstice and one about community, food, work, or culture.

Bring the season into your lessons with Newsela

The summer solstice is more than just the first day of summer. It’s a chance to help students explore science, literature, culture, communities, and seasonal change. With Newsela, you can turn seasonal moments into meaningful instruction with ready-to-use texts, videos, activities, and differentiated resources across subjects.

If you’re not a Newsela customer yet, sign up for an account and get a 45-day free trial of all our premium and differentiated content and activities to plan more engaging lessons for summer and beyond.