As kids slide into summer, help them avoid a summer slide in learning. They do need a break for sure, time for fun in the sun and time to just chill. But no one wants last year’s skills and knowledge to fade and slip away, which tends to happen over the long break.
How common and significant is summer slide? Last year, Good Morning America cited a study from the American Educational Research Association, showing “more than half of U.S. students experience learning losses year after year, with some losing up to a third of their progress in math and reading during vacation.”
Slowing or even stopping the slide isn’t a big lift. Focusing on curiosity vs. performance is key. Read on for easy ways to keep kids mentally engaged and “reviewing” through fun, low-pressure activities that blend learning with everyday play.
Be intentional about teachable moments
There are multiple terms for summer learning loss: summer slump, summer slide, brain drain, and, for the potential accumulation of loss over time, learning gap. Whatever you call it, you want to avoid it.
Play-based learning during the long school break supports continuous cognitive and emotional development. Opportunities to practice essential skills come up many times each day. It’s not hard to keep reading and STEM skills sharp over the summer if learning gets threaded throughout ordinary routines and activities—like ordering and eating pizza!
In an Edutopia article titled “11 Real World Math Activities That Engage Students,” Daniel Leonard writes, “Educators in our audience are big fans of ‘pizza math’—that is, any kind of math problem that involves pizza.” Quoting an Instagram post from an unnamed educator: “Pizza math is a great tool for addition, subtraction, multiplication, word problems, fractions, and geometry.” The article says, “If a store is selling a 10-inch pizza, for example, and we know that’s referring to its diameter, what is its total area?”
Who knew your pepperoni and sausage pie comes with a slice of geometry?!
Elementary Math Made Fun in Everyday Life
Like pizza time, lots of other everyday situations offer up math practice and fine-tune life skills. How do you double (or halve) that great recipe? How many cupcakes do you order for the birthday party? Tasks like cooking, shopping, and outdoor play involve math skills such as measuring, budgeting, counting, and problem-solving in ways that feel enjoyable—and useful—rather than academic. Think of math learning for summer as math learning for life!
Here are a few ideas:
• Use cooking, baking, and entertaining to teach fractions, measurements, and sequencing.
• Practice money skills by involving kids in grocery shopping trips, budgeting an allowance, or planning purchases on vacation.
• Encourage estimation and counting through outdoor games and travel.
• Ask kids to calculate the tip at restaurants.
• Record and chart the growth of plants in a garden.
• Introduce problem-solving through puzzles, board games, and real-life scenarios.
• Reinforce math vocabulary (more/less, total, difference) in daily conversations.
• Use safe, secure digital games like those available from School Zone, including Windows Downloads and those on the Anywhere Teacher app, for positive and productive summer screen time.
Early Reading Beyond Bookshelves
Math isn’t the only subject that rolls backwards over summer break without practice. The Reading Rockets website notes that “Our reading, writing, and thinking muscles need exercise all year round!” They say, “Reading, writing, and learning over the summer can help keep your child’s skills sharp” and help them be ready for a new school year.
Here are a few strategies for encouraging kids to read over the summer:
• Offer a range of formats and materials like comics, audiobooks, graphic novels, magazines, and digital content, both at home and while traveling.
• Allow kids to choose reading materials that match their interests and level; it could be fiction or non-fiction - if they enjoy reading it, their motivation and engagement will be higher.
• Create a summer reading challenge with achievable goals and rewards.
• Make reading interactive through discussions, questions, and shared reading time; ask kids questions about what they’re reading (“What’s your favorite character and why? What happens in the story? “) to build recall and summarizing skills and tell them about what you’re reading and what you’re finding interesting.
• Incorporate creative activities such as storytelling, journaling, and family reading challenges into daily routines.
• Set up a special book nook or designated reading spot in your home.
• Visit your local library for free books, summer reading challenges, and in-person activities.
• Integrate reading and writing into everyday life – read recipes and shopping lists, write out postcards while on vacation, and/or do some word-based games - start with School Zone’s Word Searches Workbook, packed with fun facts as well as word searches. Or grab Travel the Great States Workbook as a take-along for road trips. It includes crosswords, games, word searches, and codes. It also highlights some cities, highways, and national parks, along with fun questions like how many letters does the Hawaiian alphabet have and where were ice cream cones first served? It’s literacy learning for summer “plus”!
STEM Activities That Spark Curiosity
Easy, hands-on STEM activities such as simple science experiments, construction challenges, and nature explorations encourage curiosity, critical thinking, and creativity. Not only do these activities help with summer slide, but they make classroom learning real and alive.
Here are a few ideas:
• Explore nature through observing, collecting, and journaling findings - in your backyard, on vacation, or in your local park, etc. For example, check out School Zone’s blog post last month, “Discover 8 Simple Ways to Explore Science in Your Backyard or Playground for K-4 Students.”
• Build structures with LEGO, recycled materials, or craft supplies to develop engineering skills – Learning Resources makes a “City Engineering & Design Building Set” for ages 5+. I'm the Chef Too! has compiled projects for a range of ages in “25 Creative Kids Building Projects for Hands-On Learning.”
• Conduct simple research and science experiments using safe and common materials to cultivate curiosity - In an article by Kitty Taylor for Kids Spark Education titled “Incorporating STEM Activities into the Summer,” she suggests making slime but also oobleck, which acts both as a liquid and a solid, and links to recipes for both.
• Explore NASA STEM - Check out “Slow Your Student’s ‘Summer Slide’ and Beat Boredom with NASA STEM.” The offerings include the Four Forces of Flights, “a set of four activities explaining the forces that make airplanes work.”
• Make good use of local facilities—the library, landmarks or the museums—for STEM opportunities or programs available to kids during the summer.
• Encourage kids to read a few pages a day in a workbook like traditional-format Big Science 2-3 or Big Science 2-3 Workbook (Spiral Bound). Kids learn about weather, plants, insects, reptiles, birds, mammals, and more through activities and hands-on experiments like “condensation on a can” or a model for air pressure.
• Encourage kids to ask questions, make predictions, and test ideas.
Vacation Learning Through Play and Exploration
Unstructured play, outdoor exploration, gardening, scavenger hunts, and crafting and creative arts can reinforce learning and support development while keeping kids active and engaged.
• Design scavenger hunts that include educational clues or challenges – Scavenger hunts sharpen observation skills and give problem-solving and persistence a workout, too. Tree Tools for Schools, a U.K. organization, has pulled together a wide variety. Good Housekeeping is another resource; their ideas include a Road Trip Scavenger Hunt.
• Get involved in arts & crafts projects – They’re not just for fun! Making things nurtures creativity, develops fine motor skills, boosts self-confidence, and provides an outlet for emotional expression.
• Get kids gardening – The Kids Gardening website notes, “Gardens are living laboratories. They support hands-on exploration across science, math, literacy, art, and history while encouraging curiosity, persistence, and learning through trial and error.” Gardening gets kids physically active, too.
• Encourage unstructured play - Rebecca Clay, writing for the American Psychological Association, terms unstructured play “a fundamental necessity for children to thrive physically, emotionally, mentally, and socially.” Pediatrician Blair Rolnick, in a video on her YouTube channel The BeeHive Doc Talks, presents a guide for parents on how to encourage independent or unstructured play, which she defines as “directing their own play without any external input.” She includes strategies and reasonable expectations based on age and outlines some of the benefits, including that it “helps children with some executive function skills like problem-solving, creative thinking …as well as learning to not need constant stimulation from another human being…”
Build a simple summer learning routine
An ideal educational summer routine balances short learning sessions with plenty of free time to maintain consistency without causing burnout.
Here are a few tips
• Create a flexible weekly schedule that includes a mix of activities – Talkspace advises parents to “Resist the temptation to micromanage every hour of the day. Using a time-blocking approach that’s tied to the natural rhythm of your household is much more effective.”
• Keep learning sessions short, varied, and engaging to hold attention.
• Balance structured learning with unstructured free play.
• Adapt routines based on your child’s interests, energy levels, and progress
• Consider establishing daily themes to help make planning easier and the day more exciting, e.g., Library Tuesday or Fun Friday.
• Involve kids in building the schedule together, using a visual chart to give them a sense of ownership, reducing resistance.
Make this summer educationally high-impact without the pressure
On the one hand, keeping learning going over summer to avoid summer slide is important. On the other hand, learning doesn’t need to feel like school to be effective. Small, consistent, and enjoyable learning activities can make a big impact while keeping kids curious and motivated. Consistency matters more than perfection. Start small and build gradually.
Let School Zone help create summer brain boosters and fun educational activities for kids. Check out our Think Big Blog, DIY Learning, print products, eBooks, Windows downloads, and Anywhere Teacher online learning program.
Yes, school-aged kids can go on vacation without letting last year’s skills and knowledge “leave the building.”
