Fun Ways to Avoid Summer Learning Loss.

We can all remember the feeling of the last day of the school year. Whether you were an avid learner or a more reluctant student, the excitement of six weeks where your time was your own to spend how you want was intoxicating. 

It’s natural for parents and students to switch off entirely from school (especially after the year we’ve all had), but a lack of engagement with learning during the summer holidays can be disruptive to a child’s journey through education.

Summer Learning Loss

The concept has taken on a number of different names – summer learning loss, summer setback, and summer slide (our personal favourite) – but the notion is the same; during the summer holiday young learners often don’t practice the skills and knowledge they learned the previous year. This means that teachers spend the first four weeks of the new school year re-teaching this content. 

Whilst summer learning loss is apparent across the curriculum, studies have suggested that it is most prominent in mathematics and reading. Here’s how you can keep young learners engaged with education, without them realising it, and stave off summer learning loss. 

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Give Them Control

Ensuring that young learners continue to exercise their brains during the holidays is not only important in avoiding summer learning loss, it also provides a number of unique opportunities for children to overcome obstacles that hold them back in the classroom. 

One of the wonders of the summer holidays is breaking from routine and having more control over your time. One way to encourage excitement and engagement in reading is to give children control over the content they consume. Did your child hear about a new discovery? Or get drawn in by something they saw on a road trip? Explore this interest further as a family and give your young learner control over the way you do so.

Not only will this stop you from having to force “reading time” each day, it’ll teach your child how to explore their curiosities and independently find answers to their questions.

Let Them Set the Pace

The summer break allows children to benefit from being able to learn at their own pace. In the absence of assignment and task deadlines that are so often necessary in a classroom environment, studying at home during the summer allows learners to work through content and practice their skills at their own pace.

Removing time pressure gives inquisitive young minds freedom to work at their own pace and explore a topic in greater depth on their own terms. You’ll be surprised how engrossed they get in a subject.

Personalised learning platforms that you can access from anywhere are a great tool to encourage even the most reluctant students to continue their education journey during summer breaks.

Download our Summer Resource Pack

Find Study Buddies

Encouraging your children to explore different ways of learning, outside of the daily school routine, allows them to maintain reading, writing, mathematical, and other skills that they absorb during the school year. 

If your child has siblings or peers to learn alongside, this is a brilliant way to keep them engaged with education. Find a summer holiday pack that’s designed to get them out and about – such as our Summer Holiday Resource Pack packed full of quizzes and non-fiction nuggets of news – and work through it together. Peer-to-peer learning, even if there is a difference in ages or academic level, offers opportunities for discussion and encourages the appreciation of different opinions and learning styles. If you’re not able to learn side by side with a peer, why not discuss what you’re learning via snail mail? Not only will your child practice structuring their thoughts and opinions in writing, but honestly, who doesn’t love receiving post?

As well as it being necessary (and fun) to keep learning during the holidays, getting children familiar with new platforms and forms of consuming educational content outside of the classroom encourages good habits for evenings and weekends during the school year.

By setting young learners up for a successful approach to summer learning, you can help them develop the interest and the skills needed to develop a love for learning inside or outside of the classroom, regardless of the time of year.