How to Turn your Child’s Summer Around Before the School Year Begins!
What is there not to love about summer? The blue skies, sunshine, car shows, beach trips, zoo visits, festivals, and the feeling of warm air than any other season of the year!
Oops, probably one thing about summer is not so desirable… The summer education gap!
The summer education gap unsurprisingly has the power to cause your child “summer brain drain.” A nonacademic summer can cause your child to drop up to three months in their academic skills.
Setting 30 minutes to one hour aside every day during the summer vacation can help your child close learning gaps, strengthen their academic skills, and perform highly for the new school year while enjoying other summer activities.
Our educational experts came up with tips to help your child maintain and develop sharp academic skills before summer ends and the new school begins. They are fun and relaxing learning ideas that will make the summer school break resourceful.
Tips to Help your Child Maintain Academic Skills During Summer:
- Keep your child’s or teen’s activities hands-on and exciting. The activities don’t have to belong to specific learning subjects. However, they must be active and engaging.
- Help your child connect what they learned in the classroom with real-life situations. You can use the activities as the best place to ask questions and start a discussion. Ask open-ended questions over ones that only require yes or no answers. For example, you can integrate some learning activities during cooking, shopping, or bedtime.
- Minimize your child’s non-academic activities such as watching television, playing video games, or chatting on a cell phone. Instead, introduce them to more academic activities such as reading and watching educational videos.
- Importantly, emphasize physical activities and nutritious diets to improve physical and mental health wellbeing.
Tips to Grow your Child’s Academic Skills During Summer:
Engage them in Reading:
Reading is an effective strategy for reducing summer learning loss and improving your child’s reading skills. However, it can be challenging to keep your young reader interested, especially when they are so many other activities competing for their attention. You can help your child engage in fun reading through interactive reading games, free internet, reading programs, reading aloud outdoors, and enrolling them in reading summer camps. You can also keep their reading interests high by using rewards and reading clubs, among other strategies.
You can also utilize the library since numerous reading resources such as comic books, book clubs, and magazines are available at your local library. Librarians can help you get resources that fit your child’s interest levels and age. You can also include a daily reading by integrating articles and newspapers on online platforms. You can also encourage your child to read directions, recipes or board game rules, and everything that will sharpen their reading skills.
Encourage Learning-On-The-Go:
Your child can sharpen their academic skills during the summer holidays from anywhere. Encourage them to engage in academic activities on a family road trip, from the living room fort, on the lounging poolside, or from the yard.
Empower your Child to Learn Independently:
Many children believe that summer is a time of independence, which is an excellent time for them to start taking control and ownership of their studies. When empowering children to become an independent learners and giving them freedom without dictating to solve a problem set the tone for a mature learner. Praising your child for their effort when working independently and rewarding them when they accomplish tasks with little intervention goes a long way toward their growth.
You can also ask them to rate their ability to work independently on a scale of 1 to 10. This way, they will reflect on their work and recognize where they need improvement. Assuring they will have a growth period, but that’s the fun of becoming independent. You can also encourage them to set goals and achieve them, and if need be, involve the service of a tutor.
Just Count!
There are many ways your child can improve their math skills during this summer holiday. For example, you can ask your child to help you with baking and help to measure the cooking ingredients, estimate the mileage to their favorite destination, play a board game, or solve a jigsaw. In addition, introduce them to outdoor memory games such as matching, practice words, math problems, etc. You can also use words, colors, shapes, or numbers when learning, depending on your child’s learning level.
Enroll them in Summer Programs:
You can also enroll them as summer campers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). An excellent STEM program includes hands-on, activity-based activities such as science labs, robotics, coding, or building, making them better problem solvers. Such environments should not have passively sitting by or long lectures. Instead, kids enjoy summer learning by doing and integrating games.
Summer programs allow students to explore and develop skills and interests they don’t get time to work on during regular school programs. You can get summer learning programs from parks, recreational centers, public schools, zoos, and museums. Find programs that match your child’s needs and fall within your budget and location.
Connect with Your Child’s Soon to be Teacher:
Connect with your child’s teacher about their summer learning progress and ask them for more learning ideas. They can help you identify more activities and resources to build your child’s academic skills. You can also find out if your child’s school offers learning support and tutoring services during the summer holidays.
Maximize on Internet Learning:
The internet comprises many safe, engaging sites. They can provide your child with information on fun and educative topics and activities. For example, the internet is a good source of math and word games, educative videos, art and craft projects, and exciting photography activities. You can visit the internet sites with your child and help them identify the best learning activities.
Take Educational Trips:
Visit nature parks, the zoo, and the museum with your child at a low cost to learn, engage and have fun. You can also take your child to the community library and local city website to learn about their locality. To make educational trips fun, give your child some activities they should do after their learning experience.
Frequently Asked Questions:
-
What is a summer slide?
A summer slide, also known as summer drain or summer learning loss, is the decline in academic skills such as reading ability or the tendency of students to lose some achievement gains during the long summer holidays. The learning loss is primarily measured in math or reading but could also be observed in classroom discipline and social skills. Due to the summer slide, teachers are forced to re-teach the content they taught in the previous academic year.
-
My child only wants to play sports or have fun with friends and refuses to engage in learning. How will physical activities and sport improve their academic life?
It is an essential part of summer to go outside and play and engage in physical activities simply. Parents can find exciting and fun ways to keep their academic skills sharp by using their love for play and sports. For example, encouraging them in sports programs that enable them to be physically active and disciplined positively affects academics. The structure of games and sports rolls over into many parts of our children’s lives, including shaping their academic discipline.
-
Why is summer reading important?
Summer reading is essential since it helps students retain skills and knowledge learned in the previous school year. Students who don’t read risk falling behind their peers. Summer reading is also essential for the following reasons:
Reading defeats summer learning loss: While many children may not be keen on reading during the summer vacation, you should prioritize reading for your child. Summer reading allows children to retain the information they learned the previous year and develop critical thinking skills in the upcoming academic year. In addition, reading daily can help students avoid the summer slide and be confident when they resume school.
It strengthens learners’ reading skills: Reading skills are sharpened by encouraging students to read frequently. Just like physical exercise strengthens body muscles, reading keeps the brain sharp and shaped. If your child does not read, they will lose literacy skills.
Increase Knowledge: Reading helps to build up your child’s knowledge in various subject areas, including history, science, math, and English. Reading daily grows a child’s spelling, math, and vocabulary, and it is also a powerful tool in comprehension skills development. As a result, students who read during the summer region tend to stay ahead of their peers once they resume school.
-
Why is summer learning important?
· Summer learning allows students to learn basics and to close existing learning gaps.
· It is a good time for your child to learn elusive concepts and overcome challenges they have been experiencing with some subjects.
· It allows students to concentrate on a subject and discover new talents, boosting their self-confidence and giving them a sense of accomplishment.
· Summer learning mainly exposes children to new passions as they learn at their own pace and style.
· Finally, learning helps your child hold on to routines and discipline, making it easy for them to quickly re-adjust after school resume.
Our Parting Shot:
Summer is an excellent time to help your child turn things around by overcoming learning challenges and improving their academic achievements. It is also when they develop good social and communication skills as they interact and learn in new settings.
Your child needs to keep learning during the long summer break to avoid brain drain. According to research, students who don’t engage in learning during the summer holiday lose up to a third of what they learned in the previous academic year. In addition, teachers spend about five weeks re-teaching content that students forget during the vacation.
Please visit our website to learn more!
We would also like to hear from you! You can call us at 844-902-4242 Toll-Free.
