Did you know that kids often lose much of what they learned from the school year over summer time? This is because most of the time during the summer we don’t spend much time stimulating the brain and keeping them active. It’s typical for kids to lose between two and four months of learning over summer and kids who are already struggling can lose between four and six months!
In as little as 30-60 minutes a day, you can prevent your kids from having summer learning loss and they’ll still have a bunch of free time.
Step 1: Daily, Weekly, and Monthly Planning
Planning is a HUGE part of growing up. If you don’t have a plan together, you are often just getting carried by the wind as life happens around you. Let your kids buy into their own success by having them plan their day, week, or month. Feel free to give them suggestions or some ideas, but push them to want to be productive or to get the most out of their summer and not have it pass by without doing the things that they wanted to do.
During the school year, most of the planning in their lives is already taken care of with school and specific after school curricular activities like sports, scouts, or music. Instilling planning over the summer will be one of the real first chances they’ll get to making their own structure of their time.
Our at-home, online Summer Reading Program instills planning along with other executive function activities. Each week, we also have a special Week In Review form that revisits what you did over the week, what you did the best, where you could use some improvement, and what do you want to tackle the next week. Registration is now open.
Step 2: Take Family Field Trips
Take those planning skills to work and get your kids involved into taking family field trips. You don’t even have to go anywhere far, but try to make a habit of going someplace every week. This can be going to a different park, the river, trails, museums, or the next town over. You can even visit different businesses. Call ahead and see if they mind you stopping by to say hello and to get an understanding of what it is that they do.
Set aside an afternoon or evening where the whole family brainstorms ideas of places that you want to go see or do. Let everyone have a chance to contribute their ideas. Write them down. Then, plan on a calendar when you want to go where. Do a little bit of research before you go to learn about the place and how to get there.
While you are on your field trip, make sure to take pictures! Also, try to take a couple of moments to think about the smells and sounds where you are. Ask questions!
When you finish the adventure, have your kids write down a few simple summary paragraphs of where you went. Have them write down what they liked and didn’t like. Have them draw a picture. Graphic organizers, like those in our Summer Reading Program, can help with this to make it easy to fill-in-the-blank.
Having your kids write down what they have done increases your kid’s ability to make multiple connections and memories with the activity. It will help your kids remember the field trips quite a bit more, and the summary paragraphs work great for making a scrapbook.
Step 3: Enroll in our online Summer Reading Program
Our comprehensive Summer Reading Program focuses on boosting not only reading skills, but planning, executive function, brain-body, and overall learning skills. We give you step-by-step instructions of what you should do with your kids each day. Each day there are 4-5 different short activities that you do for a total of 45-60 minutes.
Our 6-Week Summer Reading Program includes:
- Reading Fluency Training
- Spelling and Phonics Lessons
- Reading Comprehension Lessons
- Executive Function Activities
- Brain-Body Connection Activities
- Video and Audio Lessons
- Weekly Schedule and Planning Forms
- Graphic Organizers
- Easy Online Access
- Help and Support
Our Summer Reading Program is the ultimate learning program that you can do over summer. We have designed it with the secret sauce to help your kids use their brains more efficiently and actually improve their reading skills over summer. Summer learning loss can now be a thing of the past.
Sign up for our Summer Reading Program.
Who is Scholar Within?
Scholar Within was founded by learning expert Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET. Bonnie started designing and developing her own custom educational tools when she started her private learning center in the 1990s. Teachers kept asking what she was using with the kids that saw her because of the dramatic improvements that the kids made in school. From here, Bonnie decided to make her materials available to teachers and families worldwide.
Now, Bonnie Terry has turned her materials into a full-service online program that you can follow step-by-step at home and on your schedule. School alone is not enough anymore. Bonnie’s programs boost your kids overall learning skills by focusing on improving the auditory, visual, and tactile processing areas of your brain to make it work more efficiently.