Give The Slide The Slip: Fun Ways To Engage Kids’ Minds In the Summer BY TANNI HAAS, PH.D. Do your kids seem a little less ready for school after each summer break? If the answer is yes, don’t worry. They’re far from alone. It’s a common experience known as the “summer learning slide.” Research shows that kids typically lose the equivalent of a month’s worth of learning over the summer break - and it gets worse the older they get! So, what can parents do to give the slide the slip? Here are seven fun activities that have worked for our teenage son, and I bet they’ll help your kids, too. Read A Fiction and A Non-Fiction Book Every Other Week -Since our son learned to read, we’ve had him read one fiction and one non-fiction book every other week to keep his reading and comprehension skills at grade level. It’s summer after all, so instead of assigning him books like he’s used to from school, we let him choose what to read. 10 July 2022| PB Parenting |
Keep A Vacation Journal - We take at least one big family vacation trip every summer, and since our son was very young we’ve had him keep a daily journal where he writes about what we did that day. It’s been a great way to keep his writing skills up-to-date and document his childhood. Email Family and Friends - To strengthen our son’s writing skills, we also have him email family and friends, especially those people we don’t get to see that much during the year. Teenagers prefer texting, but we insist that he emails them because texts are usually full of broken sentences, odd grammar, and spelling mistakes. Play Math-Based Board Games - In the evening, whether we’re on a family vacation trip or at home, we play math games like Monopoly or spelling games like Scrabble. The key is to focus on the fun part - the competition - rather than the learning. If you do that, the learning will happen automatically.
