With less than a month left of the summer holidays for some students, we wanted to talk about the importance of doing a little work whilst students are off school, so that they can avoid the dreaded summer slide! We know that the 6-week summer holiday is always welcomed by students, this year more than ever, but, switching off completely for that amount of time can be detrimental to a student’s learning.
Does summer learning really help that much?
If you think about it, 6 weeks (for some students it may even be 8) is a long time to stop using your brain in the same way that you do during the rest of the year. Keeping on top of work during this period can really help students to feel comfortable and confident going into their next academic year. Even if it is just a little reading each day, doing some mental maths or some spellings, everything that you do certainly counts!
Take a look at the facts!
How can you maintain your child’s learning and make it enjoyable?
There are so many ways to keep learning going through the summer. As well as reading a little each day, here are some other ideas:
Think about getting your child to join in with the cooking; they can then calculate the correct measurements that are needed, which will allow them to use a number of skills, including fractions, converting measurements and mental maths.
Ask them to add up the cost of things when you're in the supermarket, or even work out the change that they should be given.
Listen to audio books in the car.
Play eye-spy but get your children to spell the answers when they guess them.
Have conversations about different topics so that they can improve their vocabulary.
Summer is also a brilliant opportunity for year 10 and 12 students, who will be going into their exam years in September, to go through what they learnt last year and write their revision notes. This will make everything so much easier when they’re back at school, especially when they approach exam season in the spring; they can then focus a lot of their time on revision rather than having to write all of their notes up.
At INICIO, we can help students with revision techniques, how to tackle exam questions and skills for note-taking. We can also arrange for students to have blocks of sessions, if they want a booster before school or a taster of what’s to come in their A-levels. Feel free to email to find out more :)