The final bell has rung and the summer sun is finally here, but that doesn’t mean your child’s learnings have to go cold.
All too often, parents call on us during the summer months out of fear that their children will lose all they’d learned the previous year. Otherwise known as the “summer slide.” While we can certainly help, there are a number of ways parents can keep their children’s minds active while school is out of session. If at-home strategies aren’t panning out, you might consider an academic enrichment program such as e3 Consulting’s.
The San Diego education consultants at e3 Consulting have helped hundreds of enrichment students retain their learnings and avoid the “summer slide” through our academic enrichment program. With a mix of one-on-one coaching, social development guidance, and direct academic support, we tend to the whole child in order to stoke their motivation and desire to learn and be their very best selves.
Find out how you can steer your child clear of the “summer slide,” and to keep their learnings in their heads this summer, reach out to our office for an academic consultation.
How You Can Avoid the “Summer Slide”
Teachers like to call the two-month break between June and August the “summer slide,” because students are at the highest risk of losing knowledge from the previous school year. All those math and literacy skills they’d built can quickly slip away – but not if a couple of preparative steps are taken.
There are actions you can take at home to keep your child in “learning mode,” as well as options outside of the home and classroom, such as an academic enrichment program.
Retaining Their Learnings at Home
All too often, students will return to school after summer only to forget what they learned in the year prior. To help them get back on track, you can add an element of fun to how they learn new math and reading skills. Here are a few ideas for engaging, at-home learning:
Play More Math-Based Games
Get your child off their iPad for an hour and introduce them to the classic board games you know and love, such as Monopoly, Scrabble, or chess.
These are all math-based games, because they all either require counting money, keeping score, or using a certain strategy. These types of games can do wonders for your child’s numerical fluency, logical thinking, and understanding of probabilities – not to mention, it’s just a great way to spend time together.
Take Your Child to the Library
Give your child an escape from mindless TikToks and video games for an afternoon at the library. Most libraries will sponsor summer reading clubs, which create progressive goals for younger children. You can also find age-appropriate summer reading lists at your local library.
But really, the core benefit to introducing your child to the local library is the love for reading it can foster. As a child or young adult in 2023, libraries are a thing of the past. Research for school homework and projects is done completely online, be it through a quick Google search or peer-reviewed journal sources within research databases. With this decline in reading for the sake of reading, sparking that love for reading is more important now than ever before.
Student reading grade levels actually dropped significantly throughout COVID-19, recording the largest drop in reading scores among nine-year-old students since 1990. All the more reason to prioritize reading this upcoming summer.
Visit a Museum or Science Center
As a child, science was jaw-dropping. You learned about the world, made fantastic dioramas of Mentos volcanoes and the solar system, and felt a sense of awe at how complex the world of science can be.
It truly stands out amongst the crowd of other subjects, such as math or reading. You may still be working over the summer, but given a free day, consider bringing your child to a local museum or science center. It’s a fun and stimulating way to foster your student’s interest in learning, which directly feeds into their motivation in the classroom – and who knows? It could be the perfect place for your child to fantasize about a career in science.
Opt for an Academic Enrichment Program
Outside of the home, there’s another way to keep your child “warm” this summer and ensure that math and literacy skills don’t drop off: an academic enrichment program.
Academic enrichment isn’t quite the same as after school tutoring. The latter is subject-specific, while the former encompasses every aspect of your child; their self-regulation skills, self-advocacy, confidence, and overall socioemotional health. Through one-on-one coaching and engaging activities, we show enrichment to students the connection between their inner struggles and classroom performance – giving them the confidence they need to walk into class with their head held high.
If you fear that your child will fall for the “summer slide” in the coming months, trust that e3’s team of San Diego educational consultants will keep them on track in a caring, supportive environment.
San Diego Education Consultants You Can Trust
Children with learning and developmental disabilities such as ADHD, dyslexia, and autism deserve a tailored approach to instruction. By accommodating their learning styles with the matching instruction strategy, your child can make visible progress, whether they’re rebuilding reading skills or foundational learning skills. This is exactly what we’ve offered at e3 Consulting for the past 20 years, with some parents calling our program “One of the best decisions I made as a parent.”
Contact e3 Consulting today to request an academic consultation and get your child the help they need and deserve.
