School For Kids

While children go farewell to another school year, they dream of days filled with family, friends, freedom and pleasure. However, students at all level levels can fall two to three months late in their academic skills if they spend their summers doing nothing but having fun.

The loss of summer learning refers to the trend of a child to lose some of the skills and knowledge acquired during the school year when they are out of school for the summer.

In fact, studies have shown that during the summer break, students fall behind an average of a month. When they go to school in the fall, educators spend the first weeks considering recovering them on the right track.

The loss of summer learning is a well-documented phenomenon that has been recognized and studied by many credible organizations of education and health care. And it’s not a new problem. Educators experienced a loss of summer learning for more than a century. He is currently concerned about the pandemic that may exacerbate this problem.

Although the loss of learning in the summer is taken into account in the public school curriculum, many students are experiencing long-term repercussions. A study by John Hopkins University conducted by the Karl Alexander sociologist and his team over a 25-year period showed a link between the loss of summer learning and long-term academic success. According to Alexander, what happens during the summer break during the elementary school years, represents two-thirds of the academic realization gap between disadvantaged students and their peers more favoured in the ninth year.

The good news is that research also shows that parents can help reduce the loss of summer learning and to ensure that their children will have an easy time recovering on track when it’s time to return to L ‘school.

Make a Plan

To help your child stay on the right track, you will first want to offer a schedule so that they can always have fun, but also put aside a little time for learning activities. You can create a calendar and schedule an activity for every day or sometimes a week.

This creates a visual countdown at the beginning of the easy-to-follow school year. Rather than give them a long list of things to do for all summer, it is better to let them focus one day at a time.

Activities will depend on your child’s age. The youngest children will need simple and fun activities like sorting and counting objects, writing short notes for you and making crafts. Older students can do more complex activities involving reading, writing and mathematics, but they should always be fun.

If you do not know what activities are planning, you can talk to their teachers. They can help you come up with ideas aligned with the school curriculum and the topics your child has the most problems with.

Take Your Kids on Field Trips

Children learn the most practical activities, especially if you are there to help them give meaning to what they see. Let’s take museums, for example. A study revealed that the children who visited the museums were able to learn more about what they saw when their parents asked them for open questions during the visit.

Children consolidate what they learn by speaking, then encouraging them to share their impressions, not only will help develop their vocabulary and communication skills, but also retention.

If you do not have a lot of time to take your kids on outings on the ground during the summer, you can sign them for a day camp. Most camps include activities to strengthen academic skills and you can choose them depending on the topic. The summer camps of the stem are very popular because their goal is to stimulate the interest of children in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Summer Reading

Reading is one of the upper areas where students lose skills during the summer break.

Fortunately, there are many strategies that you can use to motivate your child to read during their summer break and actually enjoy it. We could start a reading club for them. This will give them a chance to discuss the books they read with their friends, which will also help them develop their language and communication skills. And although it is not possible to have the reading club meetings in person, you can use videoconferencing software such as zoom or skype.

You can also integrate family playback by logging in turn. To make it more fun, you can act the stories you read and that your children think for alternative, follow-up and pre-as sellers. This improves their reading skills, increases their vocabulary, encourages them to think critically and promotes their imagination, in a fun way.

Writing Skills

Writing is another valuable skill that you can help your children during the summer break. These days, students spend more time typing laptops and mobile devices. You must therefore pay particular attention to handwriting.

If your children are very young, you can write them short notes, which will suffice to practise their motor skills and to examine the structure of the basic phrase. For older children, you can encourage them to keep a newspaper or write short stories about topics that interest you, like exploring outdoor space, dinosaurs, pets or camping.

You can also take pictures or cut images of old magazines and try to connect them in a story with short legends. This can also work for the youngest because you can adjust the length and complexity of the legend according to their level of quality.

Math Skills

Studies show that during the summer break, children can lose between 25% and 50% of mathematics skills they have learned during the school year.

Although most children do not see this as the most enjoyable way to spend their summer break, working on some mathematics problems a few times a week will greatly contribute to keeping their skills become rusty. It is very unlikely that they will start doing this alone, so you will need to be the one who motivates them.

There are ways to do that fun for them so that they do not start to see it as a series of tedious tasks. You can integrate mathematics problems in stories and there are also many free or very affordable applications on iOS and Android that transform mathematics into a game filled with challenges and rewards.