Top 5 Things to Help Mitigate Summer Learning Loss for Kids

Summer learning loss, or “summer slide,” as it is also known, is a real problem. The loss of skills the kids learned in the previous academic year is “summer slide,” or summer learning loss. This loss is the reason most schools tend to revise and teach the same lessons they taught before the holidays. In fact, a study found that the loss in math skills they learned in the previous academic year can be more than 25%. Experts suggest a shortened summer holiday or many small holidays over the year to stop summer learning loss. Implementing such an idea would be difficult, but there are other ways to mitigate the summer slide. Below are the top five things you can do to help your kids:

  • Create a learning schedule – Every day, kids should take time to learn something. It can be an hour in the morning or an hour in the evening. If you are a parent, you can speak to your children and decide, but you should create a schedule. When you have a schedule, there will be discipline and kids will put in the effort to learn during the specified time.
  • Reading – Summer holidays is the time when kids read a lot. Reading should be encouraged among kids. Take them to the library and let them pick a book, read it, and ask them what they learned from the book. This interaction will help your kids a lot. Provide a dictionary for them, so they can understand what a difficult word means. If there are any summer reading programs in your area, ensure the kids are enrolled. Make reading a fun activity, and the kids will love it. Once they cultivate a reading habit, you can relax because they will be more interested in reading without your prompting and prodding.
  • Improve math skills – Kids’ mathematical skills get corroded during the summer holidays. The ideal way to stop this summer learning loss is to practice their math skills every day or every other day. Kids should solve five math problems on the days they need to learn math. This is enough for the kids not to forget what they learned. Additionally, you can also teach new math principles and concepts to keep the kids excited. Nowadays, there are many math apps and educational apps that can help kids to reduce the summer slide; you can download those apps and let the kids learn.
  • Writing and Grammar Skills – The best way that kids can improve their grammar and writing skills is to practice creative writing. You can ask them to write an essay about the books that they read or to write about the cartoon, web series, or movie they watched the previous day. The best option is to ask them to write about anything that they want to: a story, a poem, an essay, etc. When kids use their creativity, you will be amazed at the end product. You can also make the writing task fun by asking them to use synonyms and rewrite the whole thing. They will learn a lot from the thesaurus when they try to find the exact synonyms that do not alter their words’ meaning.
  • Robotics and Science Skills – There are many options to learn scientific skills. You may get a robotics kit that kids can learn to use. The best part is that they can create robots and make it do their bidding—how cool is that? Kids enjoy creating, coding, finding problems, and solving them; the best part is that you can also join in the fun. When parents and kids solve math or science problems together, kids tend to remember them. Naturally, this yields greater retention of what they’ve learned.

The present situation on the planet is of grave concern. Kids and parents do not know when schools will reopen. Given this scenario, parents should assist their kids in learning at home; the aforementioned tips will surely help in mitigating the summer learning loss and keep them ready for the next academic year.

Kristi Cathey
 

Hi everyone! My name is Kristi Cathey and I’m glad you found your way to my blog. I am a mother of 3 beautiful angels. This blog was created in order to share my personal experiences in baby care and general health care for pregnant women. If you'd like to get in touch with me, please contact me by sending me an email via kristicathey.intelligentmother@gmail.com. Welcome to Intelligentmother.com

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