Beating Summer Learning Loss (Without Losing the Summer)

We've had beach days, pizza nights (only the stuff from the supermarket — not the expensive stuff), friends over for a barbecue, football in the garden, trips to the park, and endless amounts of drivel on TV, YouTube, and whatever social media platform you'd like to insert here. We have done Summer Holidays!

With the oncoming prospect of September rearing its sober head and wagging its finger at us, I thought I'd write a little bloglet about Summer Learning Loss.

What Is Summer Learning Loss?

This term essentially means that children lose some of their reasoning, verbal, and calculation skills over the holidays, and come back in September further behind than they were in July. The loss can be anywhere between one and three months, hitting hardest in maths and reading. As a sad irony, it's often the children who made the greatest progress during the year who lose the most over the break.

As both a teacher and a mum of three, I think it's terrifically important for children to have holidays — to experience new things and just have fun. There must be fun, and things gone to and tried out, otherwise when can you make these brilliant memories?

However. There are things you can do to ease them back into being school-ready, without stopping the fun or making them work at September level.

Reading

First and most obvious (I'm an English teacher, please forgive me): get them reading. See if they can engage with a summer reading programme, usually run at the local library. School reading lists, or just moseying around the children's or YA section of a library, will guide you toward something they'd genuinely enjoy.

Did They Have Targets for the Holiday?

One of my daughters, who loves dancing, decided she wanted to learn to do the splits. She started out well, perhaps got a little drowned in Roblox in the middle, and is now back on track to improve her splits!

Was there anything your child wanted to do or achieve by the end of the holiday? Are they on track, or could they get back on track? Reading a certain book is always a good one. Or making a certain model, trying meditation, baking bread, learning a song on the piano — you get the idea! It's all about using their skills — problem-solving, hypothesising, calculating, adjusting, changing approach — skills that can lie slightly dormant during the holidays.

School-Suggested Work

Try to get the summer challenges sent out by the school completed. If they've suggested using some of the online resources regularly used at school for homework or extra-curricular work, get your child back into it for half an hour here and there — nothing arduous, just enough to keep the skills ticking over for September. Resources like Educake, Sparx, Dr Frost Maths, and Language Nut, to name but a few, are really useful ways for children to build and test their own knowledge. You could even download Duolingo for free and get them working on whatever language they're studying — they can even do it on their phones.

Broaden Horizons

Is there a museum you can visit? I absolutely love museums — I love all the stuff that's in them, I love that they're around when it rains (very common for dear old Britain), and I love that they're free. Heading to a museum and talking about it afterwards is mentally stimulating and widens a child's knowledge and understanding of the world.

I once took my kids, all Key Stage Two at the time, to the National Portrait Gallery, and they decided to count all the naked bodies. It went up to several hundred, if you're curious. In amongst naked bodies and cheese sandwiches on the Trafalgar Lions, they saw plenty of different artists and had things to talk about on the way home.

Exercise

Ha! You didn't think I'd include something like this, did you? It's suggested that students lose up to 80% of their school-time fitness over the summer, and this has several knock-on effects. Lack of exercise can affect a child's mental wellbeing and their ability to handle stress. Perhaps most importantly, it affects a child's ability to concentrate. Many students — particularly older ones — return in September having actually exercised very little. Human beings aren't meant to sit hunched over for hours studying, so get out there and get tired out!

Have a Wonderful Rest of the Holiday

They're never exactly relaxing, but we love the hols. We're on the home straight — we've done a brilliant job, and now we're buying shoes and glue sticks and making the most of what's left of summer. Have a wonderful and stimulating time. I hope your kiddies, whatever age they are, absolutely storm it when they get back in September.