Fun Activities to Keep School Skills Sharp During the Summer

Just like athletes who continue to practice and train during the off-season, children need to keep practicing their academic skills during the summer vacation from school.  Nearly every child suffers from summer learning loss. Many students lose one to two months’ worth of reading and math performance during the summer.

By Jill Jolton
 
Fun ways to strengthen math skills:

- Number Challenge is a great game for school-age children to play and at the same time practice their addition, subtraction, multiplication and division facts. Begin by having each player write the numbers 1 - 18 on a piece of paper. Each player should also have 18 pennies. The first player rolls three dice. They must use any combination of addition, subtraction, multiplication or division to come up with one of the numbers on their paper. When they have performed the arithmetic for the group, they use one penny to cover the number that was the sum of their equation. The next player does the same thing and so on. The game is over when a player has covered all of their numbers.

- Find fun ways to practice fractions: Use measuring cups on the beach, at the playground or at the pool to introduce fractions to young children. Or use the small segments of a Hershey bar to teach equivalent fractions to older school kids.

- Kids can learn about money by having a lemonade stand in their neighborhood or budgeting for a day at the movies and conducting all the financial transactions at the theatre themselves.

- A deck of playing cards can be used to encourage number recognition and concepts of greater and less than.

- Help the kids mix up a batch of homemade playdough (recipe). They will practice reading and measuring while making the dough and then can use the dough to make shapes, do size sorting, and make counters to aid in simple math problems.

- Go online for fun math games and more! Many sites offer fun game-like worksheets that parents can download and print out. Or kids can play a bunch of on-line games that involve solving age appropriate math problems!

- Many board games involve math or reading skills and the kids will be having so much fun that they won't realize that they are learning at the same time! Check out classics like Yahtzee, Boggle or Scrabble.


Reading, writing, social studies and more:

- Madlibs is a fun game for older kids to practice their vocabulary and parts of speech. Great for travel!