While your kids likely look forward to summer break every year, this break from school can be a challenge for both parents and teachers. After spending so much time learning and growing during the school year, many children experience a loss in their educational growth during the summer when they aren’t focused on their schoolwork as heavily. But luckily, this doesn’t have to be the case. As a parent, you can find ways to fight against this and keep your kids’ minds engaged even during their summer break.
To help you see how this can be done, here are three tips for keeping your kids’ education on track during the summer.
Get Them Involved With Preparing Meals
One easy way you can have some of the stress taken off of your plate at home while also helping your kids learn something new and practice what they already know is by having them help you with preparing meals.
Not only can having your kids help with the actual preparing of meals teach them about following directions, chemical reactions, and measurements, but by taking your kids to the store with you as you go grocery shopping, you can also help your kids learn about plant life, budgeting, and daily math that they’ll be using for the rest of their lives.
Create Your Own Summer Reading Lists
During the school year, your kids might have a reading list that they work through. But come summer, their reading might drop off drastically.
To combat this, you may want to help your kids create a summer reading list of their own. By having books that they want to read and then doing their best to read those when they’re not in school, either by setting daily or weekly goals, your kids will be sure to not lose any of the reading skills they gained over the school year and will be able to pick up right where they left off once the new school year starts.
Devote Each Week To Something New
As a parent, trying to plan something educational each day of summer vacation can be overwhelming and unrealistic. However, if you try to think about the summer in terms of weeks, you can try to devote each week to learning a new skill or a different educational theme. Some options you might want to try could include doing creative writing one week, focusing on math for another week, learning about the outside world the following week, and choosing a different vocabulary word to understand after that.
Writing with children provides numerous opportunities to develop children’s emergent literacy capacities including making meaning/expressing ideas in texts, fine motor skills, concepts of print, phonological awareness, phonics, and creating and exploring texts. It gives them early and much needed confidence with literacy. Writing first helps kids get the meaning connection because they are conveying their own thoughts, if you will like your kid to have the best writing supplies, consider the getting him or her some Sallor pens. Often, the first words kids write will use unconventional spelling and even unconventional drawing of some letters.
You could also enroll them at sisd.ae to learn new languages such as German, French and Arabic. Learning new languages can be very beneficial for their future.
If you’re worried about your kids’ education getting off track when they’re home for the summer, consider using the tips mentioned above to help keep the knowledge gap from widening during this part of the year.