Schools out for the summer…a tune your youngster may be singing and dancing to around the house right about now. Although they are happy about spending their days having fun, it is ten weeks where your student’s skills can become dull. What can a parent do about it?
Research shows that students can lose up to 2.6 months of math facts over the summer lag, which translates to almost 1/4 of the school year. As a result, teachers end up spending about six weeks at the beginning of each school year reviewing from the previous year. Students need to practice skills, especially math, to retain them. We have all, at one time, memorized a phone number or address of a friend or family member. If you do not use that information on a regular basis, at one point you will have to look it up again. Just think of all the information you’ve forgotten from your school years as a child: parts of speech, historical dates and events, chemical formulas, algebraic equations, etc. It’s because most people do not need to recall this information in their daily job.
So, what are the options for parents looking to keep their child’s skills sharp? There are summer programs around the area that work on academic skills. You need to check with your own school district to see if there are any available. Syracuse University, LeMoyne College and OCC offer programs for school-age children. There are learning centers around and many private tutors (myself included) who will work one on one with your child also.
All of these options are great but there are other ways that you, as a parent, can inexpensively help your student practice their skills. It does not need to involve long, arduous and painful hours chained to a desk. And, dare I say it, it can be fun for the child as well.
Making practice fun is as simple as asking them math facts while driving them to an event or the babysitter or creating a contest of how fast they can answer the questions, like seeing how many facts they can do before the light turns green. Personally, I grew up with card games. These are great for math. War teaches children greater than, less than. Blackjack, or 21, practices their addition facts. Gin rummy is good for categorizing (3 of a kind, 4 in a row). Rummy 500 helps with adding after each round trying to reach 500 first. My favorite card game is Spit, which I have played with children as young as five. Not everyone knows how to play it. It is a fast paced game but I start off slow with children. Unfortunately for me they get so good at the game they start beating me. Then I go faster and show no mercy (well, maybe a little bit).
Many of the board games, such as Uno, Trouble, Sorry, and Connect Four teach strategy. Depending on the age of the children, many games develop skills as they are being played, such as figuring out how much money $200 is as they pass GO in Monopoly or what color they need to win in Candyland. Besides developing their skills, these games are classics and a lot of fun. Make a family game night once a week or on those rainy days. They won’t even know they are learning.
There are also numerous websites for math fact practice. A lot are set up as games for children. Some websites are: www.funbrain.com, www.coolmath4kids.com, www.mathisfun.com, and www.math.com.
There are many suggestions of how to help your child, from learning centers to games of Rummy. Making the time and effort will pay off the most for your children. We all remember summer vacations and the fun we had, but a week is 168 hours long and using 30 minutes about four times a week, still leaves them with 164 hours for everything else. Just keeping my math skills sharp! (See? It works!)
