“Summer is a great opportunity to take a break, but it’s also an opportunity to spend a few minutes every day on academic skills in order to make a difference,” says Dr. Stewart Burgess, developmental psychologist with The Children’s Museum of Memphis (CMOM). “Research is really strong and consistent in showing that summer learning loss is a real thing, and we see an academic slide when kids are not practicing academic skills day to day.”
Dr. Burgess offers numerous tips and tricks on how to engage young children in a fun way which can help them take a big academic step over summer. One tip is to find a topic, such as soccer or dolphins or reptiles, that the child really loves and get books around that topic area and at the right reading level.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
“Go to the library or google it and get books on the topics that your child really loves,” Burgess explains. Burgess uses this trick all the time and talks about the example of a rising second grader who didn’t like reading. “He really had all the equipment he needed to do the reading, but he just didn’t like reading. He would read a couple of pages and just put the book down.”
The child loved everything and anything about dogs. “We did a search on books at the right reading level that had a dog on the cover, or in the title and in the first few pages, or was a central character,” Burgess says. “The kid read the entire stack of books, cover to cover, that was purchased for him because he loved the topic. As a result, his reading skills just took off. All we needed to do was figure out how to make it rewarding for him.
“Families often think that math is something that happens at school and not at home,” Burgess says. “Toddlers naturally play with math — they sort, they group, they look at patterns across multiple objects, and those are really pre-dimensional building blocks for math.”
Once children are out of the toddler phase, they tend to stop playing these math-based games, but if the kids can be engaged in spatial learning games, they can continue to grow. “If you look at the profiles of kids doing well in math, their families usually reinforce math skills at home,” Burgess says. The trick here is to find fun math-based games where kids can use mental pictures and compute.
Another recommendation by Burgess is to find out the math skills of the upcoming school year that your child is going into and use the summer to teach them some of those concepts. This will give them a head start, and they can then lean in on the skills with confidence and boost their learning. “A little bit of exposure repeatedly goes a long way,” Burgess explains. “I do a combination of looking at what topics will be covered in the next school year and having fun with it, and it goes a long, long way.”
Burgess stresses the importance of reading skills and the fact that the entire population of the world is expected to read. “Almost everything academically filters through reading. In order to write, you need to be able to read. To do well in Social Studies, you have to read,” Burgess says. “Even if you are wired to do super well in other areas besides reading, if you don't have strength in reading, it really hurts you academically.
“Data really shows that families that read to their kids starting early, continue to read to their kids aloud even after kids can read, families that read for their own enjoyment, the fact that [the kids] see magazines lying next to the bed, those kids have better success long term.”
Burgess stresses the importance of daily practice and exposure to reading as a key to long-term reading skills and academic success. “Read a book to the kids and then have them read it back to you so they know the story already and they heard some language,” Burgess explains.
CMOM is giving away free, take-home enrichment kits this week (through July 15) while supplies last. These kits promote National Summer Learning Week, which focuses on the importance of summer learning as it pertains to the summer slide.
For more information on CMOM, visit cmom.com
For more information on National Summer Learning week, visit summerlearning.org/summer-learning-week/