Study Tips For School Students

Successful Study Tips and Techniques for Children | Page 4 of 7

Summer Learning Loss

Not many parents are aware about this term – Summer Learning Loss! It is nothing but staying away completely from educational activities during the summer vacation. Less than 20 percent of kids are involved in summer activities or other learning programs partly or wholly associated with education. It is not necessary that you should push a child and enroll him or her into an educational program.

Summer Learning Loss can be avoided even at home easily. An hour or two focused on some learning activity at home can do the trick, rather than a 9 to 6 class during the holidays, which could actually exhaust a child. It will be a great option to let your child learn an additional language other than the mother tongue and the global language, ENGLISH. It helps prevent summer learning loss.

Ways to Avoid Summer Learning Loss

Summer learning loss can make it difficult for your child to cope with the studies once the school reopens. Here we see tips on ways to avoid summer learning loss.

Summer learning loss – Tip 1: Harness the power of nature

Learning has no limit on age! Harness the power of nature to explore various ways to learn new things. You will find infinite options to let your child learn new things.

For instance, consider going to the beach with your child.

You can tell your child about waves and tides, how tides work, why the beach sand is different, why the sea appears blue in colour, what are the different sea animals  etc. Explaining about all these things will make them easy to remember forever. Also, after you return home ask your child to write how he / she enjoyed his / her day at the beach or some.

You can follow this simple tip to make your child learn even during vacations.

Make sure to have a clear understanding and the right information about everything that you intend to teach your kid!

Summer learning loss – Tip 2: Devoted and Active Parents!

Most children become very lazy during summer just because of excess downtime, which gets accumulated due to lack of quality time spent by parents with children. Parent should be really active and devote quality time with children during the summer, to avoid summer learning loss. Directing the kids to do a set of activities may induce boredom and make them frustrated even during holidays. So, parents, be active and allocate sufficient amount of time to spend with your little ones. Also, they will be able to return to school after vacation with lots of joy and abundant knowledge acquired from newly developed skills.

Summer learning loss – Tip 3: READ and READ and READ 

Summer downtime is a great time to inculcate the reading habit in your children. Reading need not be just limited to story books or comics. Make it a broad spectrum exercise and include reading short stories, jokes, plays, inspirational life lessons, real life examples, etc. Make reading habit, as ‘reading for pleasure.’

Base the initial readings on the favourites of your child, for instance, something about celebrities, sports stars or even comical characters. Start an interesting conversation about the favourites of your child and tell him or her that you have read something very interesting. For instance, show them news or information published in a magazine and ask them to read it.

Remember not to force them to read! Entice them to read, which brings a lot of positive impact. Just give the focus on what they like in the initial period and they will develop love for reading books!

Summer learning loss – Tip 4: Developing the habit of written Correspondence

In this hi-tech world where internet is dominating all forms of communication, you can still make your child develop the habit of written correspondence, which will be very useful to avoid summer learning loss. It could be simple, secret notes for you, the family members, thank you messages, letters to relatives especially grandparents, etc.

You can make your little one more responsible while avoiding the summer brain drain by teaching them various modes of correspondence, for instance, writing letter to a Newspaper. It also improves the writing skills.

Summer learning loss – Tip 5: Play with Water

Mathematics is a part of our lives. At every point in life, we have maths! Make it a part of learning to avoid summer learning loss, with fun!

Water play can be very enjoyable and fulfilling to the kids. With water play, you can actually let the kids learn various sizes, units of measurement, and even teach numbers.

For instance, you could show the various types and sizes of spoons – teaspoon, table spoon, scoop, etc. By filling the bathtub you can teach them the units of measurement like length, width, depth and height.

This helps reinforcement of what is learnt in the school earlier. Learning by associating with real life will be remembered by kids more than learning through books.

Summer learning loss – Tip 6: Television

Television is a great way to avoid summer learning loss. But this is not about watching cartoon! There are many educative programs telecasted on various channels, like, Discovery, Animal Planet, etc. You can teach kids about various species of animals, their food-habits, enemies, defence methods etc.

Summer learning loss – Tip 7: Read or Learn

Bring up something on academics or subjects that are part of school curriculum! Okay, summer means vacation, fun time and entertainment all the time. At times, you should make your children read or learn something related to academics as well. It may be just one or two hours in a week! For instance, if your child is poor in mathematics, you can ask the child to practice it. This will bring a change in your kids’ routine, adding a spark to the otherwise boring academics.

Summer learning loss – Tip 8: Money Management

If you have children over 5 years of age, you can teach them about family expenses and take their assistance in creating the family budget. Sit with your child, create your budget and ask them to help you, let them understand the importance of money management. Give money to your children and ask them to handle it.

Register each and every expense you make along with your children. Ask them to count the money, give change, allocate the estimated amount for expenses, etc. Inculcate saving habits through piggy banks.

Summer learning loss – Tip 9: Gardening

Make your little one a little gardener to avoid summer learning loss. Needless to say the benefits and happiness of gardening are immense, they give a sense of fulfillment and satisfaction to the child. Inculcate the gardening habit in your child. Start with easy steps, watering the plants and trees; getting rid of weeds, keeping the garden area clean, etc.

If you don’t have sufficient space for gardening, try something in pots. Buy seeds and plants that your child is most interested in, for instance, flowering plants, vegetables, herbs, greens etc. You can build your own vegetable garden at home with your kid.

You won’t be able to measure the happiness of your child when the little one develops a beautiful garden and sees it flourish with flowers, vegetables and fruits.

Summer learning loss – Tip 10: Learn a New Craft

There is no end to learning new things in the world. Arts and crafts are a great educative and creative activity. Indulging in creative activities avoids the summer learning loss. It also helps your child develop a new activity which has many positive influences.

A new craft can be anything you or your child is interested in. Some interesting craft ideas are:

• Art from Paper
• Art from waste
• Painting
• Decorative arts

Plenty of options are available online and you can sit with your child and spend time usefully. Creating something on his / her own can give immense happiness to the child as well as help develop cognitive ability.

Summer learning loss – Tip 11: Learning and Building Grammar Skills

Learning grammar is considered a very tough task, but in reality, it is rather interesting! A lot of games can be played around learning grammar.

Look at the grammar lessons and concepts of the previous year and next year. Organize a schedule to let your kid pre-learn the lessons. Also, it need not be limited to the school curriculum. Make it general like learning pre-fix and suffix, present tense and past tense, singular and plural, etc. They may make a lot of mistakes, but will learn from them.

Summer learning loss – Tip 12:  Summer learning can be personalised! 

Don’t make summer learning a boring ritual, it can be personalised to make it interesting. Identifying Summer learning loss is just a way to prevent the learning gap that your child may experience during vacation and not to involve your children all the way into complete learning. Personalise it to suit your child! Don’t make the child write on the worksheet, rather try to make it look less academic. For instance, to help learn mathematics, counting can be done by measuring the number of cups, buttons, etc.