ARTICLES
Summer Study Skills
Yes - the lazy days of summer!
Summer vacation and your children's minds are focused on sun, sand and endless days of play. Parent's too!
For some families, the summer holidays are too long a hiatus from schoolwork. September rolls around and hard won academic success becomes lost to summer vacation.
Parent's can bridge children’s June success to September by taking some time out to plan for September now.
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Review you child's final report card and highlight the areas of success in one colour and the areas to be improved in another. Discuss with your child's teacher ways to maintain the successes and what can be done over the summer to continue development in the areas of improvement.
- Brainstorm with your child. Have them think about what type of homework was fun, yes fun, or at least less painful. Which subjects did your child enjoy. Try to determine what type of learner your child is: Visual? Auditory? Tactile? Find activities and exercises that appeal to your child’s style of learning. Storybooks with tapes are great for auditory learners. Educational computer games are good for visual learners. Tactile learners may benefit from hands on activities like using scales to learn about weight or a jar of spare change to learn about counting. Word searches, crossword puzzles, and brainteasers are fun ways to encourage reading and writing skills.
- Make summer academic maintenance a positive experience. Associate learning with freedom. Let the child decide which subjects to pursue the most. Allow them to use colourful exercise books or gel pens where pencils and gray exercise books normally are used. Take time out to read together. Make the experience special. So what if you end up reading the comics, reading is reading. Try the shared reading method if your child is reluctant to read; you read one page they read the next. Choose some educational videos from the library and let young learners stay up late to watch them with you; add some popcorn and fizzy drinks with umbrellas to the occaision. Create a summer journal or scrapbook together. Include stories, pictures, photos, and other mementos of what was done over the summer months.
- Purchase or create a homework box that your child will use over the summer. Fill the box with creative materials: coloured and lined paper, crayons, pencils, a ruler, a hole punch, scissors etc, and exercise books that will be used only when doing summer academics. Borrow from the library or buy a series of special reading books. Try to get through the series over the summer.
- Set an expectation for continued academic success over the summer. Choose one or two days for academic maintenance and try to stick to them. Use a variety of methods and activities. Journal writing about sports camp, creating a list of what to take to overnight camp, have your child develop a budget for summer purchases, or have your child write down what is happening at 3:00 o’clock everyday for a week. Provide a camera to create photo journal.
It is important for children to maintain their academic success from the year over the summer. Two months may seem short, but for children who have had hard won academic success throughout the year, the distance between June and September can be long.
Do a little bit everyday. The results will set children up for a great start to September.
