Jess Marous

It’s that time of year again, summer is fast-approaching! 

Of course, with all the eagerly anticipated fun of summer break comes the nagging threat of “Summer Slide.” On average, students will lose the progress they achieved during the entire last month of school over the summer months. Other students will forget up to 30% of the knowledge they obtained in the prior school year. So how do we manage to combat the summer slide and preserve academic progress while still protecting the magic of Summer?

It can be tempting to shelve anything resembling academics for these sunny months. After all, isn’t the entire point of a school vacation to give students time to stretch their legs and grow in other ways? It is possible, however, to adopt a balanced approach to academics over the Summer that allows students to maintain their knowledge with streamlined efforts. Below, we’ve outlined three ‘watershed’ subjects that will keep students sharp without overwhelming them during their break!

Foreign language This offers a cornucopia of cognitive benefits to support students’ wider academic outcomes. These benefits include improved memory, concentration, processing skills, task management, critical thinking capacity, creativity, and problem-solving capabilities. Students who have studied a foreign language have been shown to outperform their peers on standardized testing in every subject all the way through the ACT and SAT, indicating the cognitive benefits obtained through foreign language study transcend time and material. Foreign languages are therefore a wonderful way to support elementary and early middle school students’ performance!

Reading Of all the skills we learn in school, reading comprehension might be the one we rely on most throughout life. It’s no surprise that your child’s reading level is one of the metrics their teachers will be looking at closely when they return to school! Regular reading practice is vital over the summer months. For children grades Pre-K and Kindergarten, this means exercising phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, and early phonics. Children in grades 1-3 should regularly be studying structured literacy and phonics to support decoding skills and reading fluency. After this, students transition from ‘learning to read’ into ‘reading to learn,’ so grades 3-4 increasingly dedicate focus towards higher fluency levels and reading comprehension. As students finish elementary school and enter middle school, more learning will happen through reading assigned outside of class. Thus, their ability to adequately access ideas and information in every subject will hinge on these reading comprehension skills.

Predictably, the most effective method to support reading comprehension is daily reading. Research indicates that 15 minutes of reading a day is the minimum a student should complete in first grade, but this amount should certainly increase as students matriculate. Students who read twice as much (30 minutes daily) don’t simply learn twice as many words, but their receptive/expressive vocabularies are actually over nine times broader. Starting a daily reading practice early is one of the most critical habits a child can build.  Ultimately, like foreign languages, reading is a skill that underpins achievement across subjects and grade levels. 

Math Everyone agrees math is important, but few people offer a fully articulated explanation as to why it’s important. When students ask how often they’ll actually have to use math as adults, the response usually begins with “If you choose to work in [insert STEM field of your choice] one day…” or “When you do taxes, or buy a house…” These are seldom a very convincing or compelling justification in the eyes of a student. Luckily, there is a better answer.

Regular study of mathematics improves reasoning and problem-solving skills in all areas of life by exercising the breadth of cognitive functions supporting these processes. Researchers have found when students step away from studying math, the key chemicals supporting plasticity in the brain drop in regions handling logic/reasoning, memory, problem solving, and learning. It isn’t necessary for students to study math because they’ll be regularly solving the same problems in adulthood, rather, it’s necessary for students to study math because it fuels the brain development which will enable students to reason, plan, and tackle challenges in any area they plan to pursue. In short, as long as humans depend on our problem-solving capabilities, math will be a foundational and necessary practice.

—Jess Marous is founder of Ennis Education Services.