How do keep kids learning during the summer?
Photo by Vitolda Klein on Unsplash
School is out for summer, but that doesn’t mean your children should stop learning. Informal learning both indoors and out over the summer months can keep your children from experiencing what teachers call the “Summer Slide” or brain drain.
Children learn best when they are having a good time. Engaging them in activities such as reading, writing, math, and science, which are fun to do, helps to keep their minds sharp. Here are 5 ways to help you with informal learning all summer long.
Make time to learn
Parents, educators, or representatives – if you’re looking for a way to help boost your students’ reading skills during the summer months, might we suggest taking them to their local public library on a daily basis?
Just like scholars learn from many different places depending on what they need to learn from that day’s lesson, this is also very true in books. The reading material housed within the libraries is full of tales to delight every fan of literature and authors who’ve graced these pages before have been known to have sparked characters having fun in the worlds they’ve created.
Make sure that time spent during the summer is used properly – make sure you don’t let valuable hours spent indoors be used for unimportant activities!
Affixes: learning and practice
Students of all grade levels can improve their reading and spelling skills by learning affixes. Most multi-syllable words include prefixes and suffixes added to a base word.
You can find a list of affixes and their meanings in a dictionary or in many online sources. To make this practice appealing, turn it into a game! Students can create flashcards of prefixes and suffixes. On the reverse side of each affix flashcard, they should write the meaning. All children love guessing games and can point out what they think the affix means. You can also use this game to help them learn new vocabulary words! A great way to track how much time your child is spending on reading during the summer months is an ordinary activity calendar.
This will keep your child’s daily reading from being overlooked because there are so many other fun activities during the vacation months!
Improve your kids math skills
Though math may be one of those subjects that seems too stuffy, dull, and uncreative to work on during their time off, summer break is the perfect way for children to become more comfortable with math.
By working on just a few problems each day during their vacation (or even after school), students can ensure that they do not lose ground in the classroom that they worked so hard to master the previous year. Parents should consider purchasing a worksheet pack at any local bookstore.
If your child likes math or is struggling with it, consider making it a daily project or challenge – it’s likely to keep your child engaged in improving his/her grades (and have them bragging about it as well). ESM programs that provide online learning in Singapore math will be a great solution for it. Singapore Math might be hard, but it takes a special kind of discipline for a student to work on just three to four math problems every day during summer break.
This is imperative if the student wants to prevent their mathematical skills from getting rusty due to too much time away from the books.
Students look at this ESM program as a daily challenge that they must complete or as a daily “to-do” task they’re proud of checking off their physical or digital calendar every day or every few days, depending on what works best for them and which way they prefer working best.
Encourage your students to write creatively
One way that parents can provide a beneficial summertime activity for their children is by having them write creatively.
By having a child write one new creative paragraph each week, parents can help their child improve his or her written language skills as well as give him or her something fun to do related to writing.
Parents can also make sure students use interesting words like changing common words in their writing by using the thesaurus – so they will not only be able to improve their vocabulary but they will make their sentences more interesting while doing so at the same time.
Concentrate on specific skills
Summer is an ideal time to set aside just 15 to 30 minutes a day for helping your student in areas that he might be struggling with. As pointed out earlier, parents can’t be helpless when it comes to their child’s education.
Online resources and teacher supply stores offer a wide variety of learning materials, workbooks, computer games, and other types of games that help reinforce and strengthen scholastic skills.
In some instances, students may wish to play learning games with friends in order to make the time fly by and make learning more fun!