The Importance Of Continuing To Learn On Vacation
During school holidays, especially summer holidays, it often happens that our children, if they do not continue with some learning activity, experience a decrease in their levels of knowledge. It is what is known as ‘the slip of summer’. To avoid this, it is important to continue learning on vacation.
When children are living their summer vacations, it is essential to keep their minds busy looking that, when the vacations are over, they are ready to start the next school year. Ready to avoid the dreaded ‘ Summer Slide ‘.
There are several studies that have shown that many children lose some level of what they learned during the course if they do not engage in some educational activity during the holidays. As a result, many teachers have to spend 4-5 weeks at the beginning of the school year reviewing what children may have forgotten during the holidays.
Is it important to keep learning on vacation?
Here the doubt arises. Many adult people have spent the summer months of their entire lives without studying at all and nothing very serious has happened when it comes to going back to school. But if we ask any teacher, they will probably tell us that they have enough content for the course and that they would be delighted not to have to spend the weeks at the beginning of the course reviewing what was forgotten on vacation.
Some studies have shown that children, during their vacations, can lose up to a third of the information they have learned during the previous year. This is a lot of information, since we are talking about sixty days of each school year. Children who do not spend time learning on vacation or practicing information already learned will be at a clear disadvantage with those who do.
What does the data show?
The data speaks to the importance of continuing to learn on vacation. Researchers on the subject conclude that students who do not participate in learning activities during the summer tend to have worse results on a math test taken at the end of the summer, compared to those they obtained when the summer began.
Taking steps to avoid the loss of knowledge and skills gained during the course helps improve student learning, and makes them more likely to choose behaviors that include learning in the future.
The solution
As tempting as it may be, we must not get carried away by the laziness of letting our children do nothing all summer long. It is important to dedicate some time every day to work and improve children’s skills, to continue learning on vacation. It would be enough to do simple things like read together, spend time at the local library, or even cook together.
It is not about doing homework, because learning also consists of living, discovering, doing real experiments, observing. Being summer, contact with nature is important; living new experiences or discovering new things is possible. We can capture all this with the children in a summer journal that we will do together.
If all this seems little to us, we can introduce 10 minutes of simple mathematical exercises into the day . With only ten minutes, we can ensure that at the beginning of the course their knowledge has been maintained, that they have not lost the habit.
Experts in pedagogy assure that the most important thing is that the child does not get bored. For example, not letting them spend the day doing things like just watching ‘TV’. Summer is the most necessary time for parental involvement in this regard and it must be taken advantage of.
