3 Steps to Prevent the Summer Slide

Summer break is upon us. Do you want to make a difference in your child’s learning this summer? Or do you want them to go through the ‘summer slide’? Most children lose between two and four months of learning over the summer. Children that struggle typically lose between four and six months of learning.

Summer doesn’t have to be that way. You really can make a difference in not only prevent the summer slide but also create gains in your child’s skills. And, you can even have fun while helping your child improve their skills. And, they can improve their skills in as little as 20-30 minutes a day, so they can still have tons of free time.

Prevent the Summer Slide Step 1: Daily Schedule

Set up a daily time when your children are to do some reading or math work. I always had my kids spend 20 minutes after breakfast doing 2 – 3 pages in each workbook (one math and one reading) so they would have a little bit of content work and then have the rest of the day to do whatever they wanted to.

Prevent the Summer Slide Step 2: Improve Reading Skills

After they were finished, or while they were working I would pull one of my kids aside and do the Five Minutes to Better Reading Skills with them so they would have 5 minutes of fluency training to improve their fluency over the summer. Doing this made it so within 30 minutes of breakfast each of my kids had worked for 20 minutes on their own and worked with me for 5 minutes on their reading fluency.

Prevent the Summer Slide Step 3: Family Field Trips

Go on a family field trip/adventure. Get together as a family and decide where you want to go for your adventure. Then, to help your kids retain the wonderful experiences they are having, it is important to help them to process the activity. An easy way to do that is to have them write simple summary paragraphs about where you went and what they liked or didn’t like about the excursion. The fill-in-the-blank graphic organizers in Ten Minutes to Better Study Skills are perfect for this.

When children process what they have done in a written format, they make multiple connections with the activity and increase their comprehension in multiples of ways. This will also give them an enlarged memory bank of background knowledge to bring to any reading activity they do in the future.

Our Awaken the Scholar Within Programs use the same premise, watching and interacting with a video lesson each week plus 20-30 minutes a day of specific activities to improve skills. The difference is amazing. Schedule a complimentary 30-minute consultation to get your burning questions answered.