The summer slide is real! What is the summer slide? It is the academic decline that happens in the summer when students don’t maintain their academic skills. Students, especially students who struggle to make progress during the school year, lose skills over the summer if they don’t do anything to maintain skills. Research shows that the achievement gap has less to do with learning from August to May and more to do with what happens between June and August. The good news is that avoiding the summer slide is surprisingly easy and requires minimal work. Studies have shown that access to books, keeping a schedule, and enrichment activities help prevent the summer slide.
Some teachers assign summer reading or summer homework in the hopes that it will help kids hold on to what they have learned. Some families tackle all of the assignments head-on in June and get them done. That is not recommended. It is best to do assignments all summer long.
What should you do before summer break? Try these:
- Educate parents. Create some urgency with parents about developing their child’s abilities over the summer. Here are some reasons why:
- to prevent the child from losing the progress they made during the school year
- to provide them with a head-start before returning to school in the fall
- to help the student build their confidence
- Offer resources. Let parents know about local summer programs, library reading programs, school incentives, and what you will be sending home.
- Educate children. Regardless of their age, you can explain to the child what the summer slide is and why it’s important to keep up the skills they worked so hard for during the school year. Show them fun activities at the local library or online.
Here are some suggestions for parents to help with summer learning without a battle:
- Make recipes from cookbooks
- Discover a new author or series
- Read in a tent, fort…anywhere novel.
- Listen to audiobooks when traveling
- Act out books
- Read a book and watch the movie afterwards
- Practice spelling sight words with sidewalk chalk. Then, erase the words with a spray bottle.
- Use food to do math problems
- Play hopscotch with sight words
- Write reviews of movies, books, or tv shows
- Do fun science experiments
Try this fun reading challenge.
Looking for some resources to give your students? I have a digital summer review pack that you can assign on Google Classroom or email to parents. Click here to grab it from my blog shop.
I have a printable summer review for kindergarten students entering first grade and one for first graders entering second grade.
Your students can beat the summer slide! I know they can.
