San Antonio KidsOutAndAbout Newsletter
June 25, 2026

Local in-person events this weekend

FREE events this weekend

Local in-person events next weekend

2026 Summer Camps

Birthday Party Locations

Fruit picking

Pride Activities

Post your organization and events to our site (It's all FREE!)

Sat, Jun 27: The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Fri, Jul 3: Fireworks Fiesta
Sat, Jul 4: July 4th - Independence Day at the Alamo
Sat, Jul 4: Fourth of July Fireworks Spectacular - Sponsored by H-E-B
Sat, Jul 4: San Antonio's Official July Fourth Celebration
Sat, Jul 18: Bricks Family Day
Sat, Jul 25: San Antonio Reggae Festival

Dear KidsOutAndAbout readers:
 

The summer I was 5, my parents took our family to Cape Cod for a week. In Provincetown, we bought a kite, then headed to the dunes in North Truro, where my sister and I spent hours running full-tilt up and down the bare white hills. We’d scramble to the top, turn, and launch ourselves downward, legs windmilling, hair flying, lungs full of salt air and triumph. Invariably, we’d fall, slap into the soft, sun-warmed sand, pop back up, and do it again.

Tumbling down the dunes was gravity. Sand was friction. The kite tugging on our arms was air on the move. We didn't have words to describe these phenomena—we were little kids, not tiny physicists with notebooks. A decade later, my calculus teacher would give me the words and symbols to process motion conceptually, but experiences like this had already taught my body that I was an actor in the physics of the world. My body understood.

Summer is the perfect time for kids to learn motion from the inside out. Motion is in amusement park rides, in waves bobbing ducks and inner tubes up and down at the lake, in trains pulling you forward in one dimension and airplanes moving you through three. It’s in bikes and swings and Frisbees and trampolines and slip-and-slides, in tumbling through the days without realizing that learning is happening.

As tour guides to our kids’ universe, we can point gently: Feel how the swing slows at the top? Notice how the wave lifts you before it lets you down? See how leaning changes the bike’s path? But the point is not to turn summer into physics class. The point is to help kids notice how the world feels as they move through it. The equations can come later; now is the time for motion, and for the emotion that accompanies it. Summer’s gift is the body’s memory: wind, water, speed, balance, falling, landing, and getting up to run again.

—Debra Ross, publisher of KidsOutAndAbout.com, co-author of The Eclipse Effect: How to Seize Extraordinary Moments to Build Strong Communities

KidsOutAndAbout.com: Discover more. Do more. Connect more.

If you like my publisher's column, you can easily scroll through past columns in the "Notes from Deb" section of our site.