As a parent, you may welcome summer as a respite from the whirlwind of homework, sports events, test-stress, and carpool shuttling, or you may dread the dragging days of whining and boredom. Either way, there’s one truth that cannot be avoided: All those idle hours add up to a calculable step back in academic skills and knowledge.
Educators call this the “summer learning loss.”
A Slick Summer Slide
Back in the red schoolhouse days, the academic calendar revolved around the agricultural seasons, with children released in the spring to help with plowing and planting and the fall to aid in the harvest. As the U.S. population shifted to cities, that calendar shifted as well. The lack of air conditioning dictated the need for an extended hot-weather break. Thus, the standard nine-month school year was established for practical reasons, not for educational ones.
As early as a century ago, educators noticed a significant drop in academic retention after the extended summer break. More recent studies have quantified a measurable drop in test scores. The loss in reading skills varies, but math skills can show a grade equivalency loss of more than two-and-a-half months. Low-income and special needs students are particularly hard hit.
Long, Lazy Days
Educators and academic administrators have long advocated for year-round education, but many parents have met this suggestion with a howling wail, and for good reason.
Summer has never been about book-learning. Creativity—that seed that leads to innovation and Big Ideas—grows in its own boundless time. Summer is its breeding ground, a stretch of hours spent exploring one’s own interests, hanging out with friends, and developing ways to entertain oneself during long, unstructured hours. Many folk’s best childhood memories revolve around balmy days spent lakeside, in the woods, or at a beach.
Nobody wants to short-circuit those pleasures in favor of tutors, math skill drills, and spelling tests while lying on the sand. Fortunately, there are ways to keep kids’ minds active without making July seem like summer school.
Check out these five ideas on how to stop the summer slide without stopping the summer fun.
Read Like Nobody’s Watching
During the school year, your kids aren’t just reading literature in English class. They’re also reading science textbooks, social studies worksheets, and blackboard instructions, all of which have been forced upon them. Summer may be the only time they have the opportunity to choose something they’d like to read for themselves.
If your child loves novels, a trip to the library to gather an armful of books is like a trip to the candy store. If your child isn’t much of a reader, consider superhero comic books or age-appropriate non-fiction about cars, volcanos, bugs, outer space, or whatever piques their interest. If they’re addicted to their tablet, check your public library for their eBook borrowing policy. Many libraries use open-book apps that allow you to download books on your tablet for two-week borrows. Most public libraries also have summer reading programs that provide prizes and other incentives for meeting certain reading goals.
Easy Listening
Got a reluctant or a non-reader? Try audiobooks. Educators have been using audiobooks in the classroom for a long time to encourage reading among a wide variety of students, including:
Students for whom English is not their first language.
Students who are reading-impaired due to dyslexia, alexia, hyperlexia, or other learning disabilities.
Students who simply struggle with reading.
Audiobooks can be used to hook kids into on-going narratives, to develop comprehension, and to introduce them to new and different genres. Listening to books can also build vocabulary and serve as an easy step-up to a higher reading level. Audiobooks are a great alternative to the backseat fighting over who gets to pick the radio station during a road trip.
Terrific Technology
Like most parents, you probably need a scraper to peel your child away from a gaming cube or a computer screen of one kind or another. Consider taking advantage of their obsession, as well as the hours of time provided by summer break, by steering them toward learning games and apps that make reinforcing basic academic skills fun.
Preschoolers will enjoy rhyming games, counting games, and matching games. Elementary school students can keep up with math skills with Math Missions or the Jump Start grade-specific games. Middle schoolers may enjoy exploring the Oregon Trail or the Amazon River while learning geography and history.
If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.
Make Math A Mission
No skill slides faster over the long summer break than math proficiency. Some kids lose up to three months in grade equivalent proficiency. Since math is a cumulative skill, future success is dependent on the firmness of the foundation. Consider these three easy and fun ways to shore up shaky skills and fortify the basics.
• Shake And Bake. Who doesn’t like to bake cookies on a rainy day? For younger students, baking a cake involves fractions of sugar, flour, and other ingredients. Are you doubling or tripling a recipe? Make your elementary age child do the math to get the correct proportions. Test older students with units and conversion factors. How many teaspoons are in one tablespoon of baking powder, anyway?
• Consider Commerce. You’ve already baked three batches of chocolate chip cookies, so how about selling them? They’d taste fantastic with a cold glass of lemonade. Your kids will happily calculate the cost of ingredients, set a reasonable price, and hawk product in the neighborhood if tempted with the possibility of keeping the profits.
• There’s No Bored In Board Games. In the rush and hustle of the school year, who has time for family board games? Those long, lazy days are the perfect time to pull out Sequence, Yahtzee, Chess, Othello, Rummikub, and many other games that use strategy, patterns, logic, and general mathematical thinking.
Twenty-First Century Camping
For most parents, summer means sleepaway camp, invoking memories of canoe races, woodworking projects, archery, and late-night bonfires. Although many of those activities are still available, most millennium-era summer camps have evolved to include a whole lot more.
• Overnight Camps. Most traditional summer sleepaway camps make it their mission to nurture independence and self-reliance by giving their campers a safe, structured place to make new friends, build confidence, and explore new interests. These days, most overnight camps offer additional amazing amenities which are often reflected in their cost. Some focus on a theme, like performing arts, sports camps, or computer camps. Others have facilities that rival some small colleges, like photographic darkrooms, radio stations, performance spaces, and recording studios. Offerings can be as exotic as glass-blowing and spelunking. The goal is to keep minds, as well as bodies, fully active.
• University Sponsored Camps. Rising high school sophomores or juniors with college in their sight may want to consider the many two-, three-, and even five-week SAT and ACT prep programs available in higher educational institutions nationwide. Middle schoolers or above exploring possible future majors might want to check out math, engineering, journalism, government, leadership or computer camps. Have no doubt, these programs are pricey. They’re also so immersive there’s little chance of a summer slide.
• Local Day Camps. Day camps aren’t just for daycare anymore, nor are they all about finger-painting, lanyard-making, and quick trips to the public pool. Innovative, creative day camps are also a great opportunity for children to explore areas of specialty outside most schools’ elective curriculum without breaking your budget. Younger kids can spend a week being part of a circus, making up stories for their handmade puppets, or learning patterns using mosaics. Older children can get a taste of architecture, fashion design, decoding cryptograms and other puzzles, or be introduced to botany by planting a garden. Kids can spend a week learning to code in HTML, java, or C+. They can take a class in hands-on archeology, or be immersed in the food, music, and arts of a South American or an African culture.
Whatever you choose to do to keep your child’s brain active during those lazy, hazy days, be sure to include some downtime in their schedule. Young, growing brains need a break more than ever in this busy, uber-structured, smartphone society. It may not be easily quantifiable, but there’s value in those hours of kicking back in the grass to find patterns in clouds.
