How to Combat the Summer Slide For some parents, summer is a welcome break from waking up at the crack of dawn, scheduling school pick-ups and drop-offs, and arguing about starting homework. There’s no onslaught of messages from the school, meetings with teachers, or trying to figure out why your student is struggling with math. It’s a time for play, travel, and sleeping late and the last thing you want to think about is academics. But the phenomenon is known as the “summer slide” is lurking. The term describes the learning loss that occurs when the kids are out of school for the year. Some studies, like the one reviewing data for 3.4 million K-8th grade students who took the Northwest Evaluation Association Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) reading and math assessments between 2016 and 2018 found more than three-fourths of students experience some learning loss over summer vacation in either subject. The average median losses were roughly two months, which increased in higher grade levels. Others, like the 2016 study of over half a million 2nd through 9th graders found that, on average, students lost 25% to 30% of the learning they gained during the school year. Combating the Summer Slide at Home While it’s understandable that the last thing your student wants to do during the summer is more school activities, there are things you can do to combat the summer slide. Here are 10 ideas to get you brainstorming: 1. Encourage your student to read a little bit every day. 2. Head to your local library at least once a month to stock up on books that kids and teens can choose themselves. 3. Use math worksheets at least once or twice a week. 4. Plan regular family game nights that incorporate brain-boosting games. Check out this list of store-bought games that are designed to exercise brain skills. 5. Limit screen time and stock up on brain-boosting workbooks that encourage reading and math skills. Extra support for students that struggle with reading, math, or attention Some students, such as those who struggle with math, reading, or attention, can often benefit from a more robust and targeted program that targets and trains cognitive skills. These are the core skills our brains use to think, read, learn, remember, reason, and pay attention. Together they take incoming information and move it into the bank of knowledge that we use every day at school, at work, and in life in general. When these skills are strong, learning, reading, and remembering are easy. In fact, most learning challenges are caused by one or more cognitive skills that need strengthening. At LearningRx, we start with a Brain Skills Assessment to measure overall cognitive performance and individual skills. Using these results, we build a custom learning plan for your student, targeting the cognitive skills with the most room for growth. We offer a choice of in-person training or online training, both of which will have your student matched with their own personal brain training for the duration of their one-on-one brain training program. Each session uses brain games, cognitive drills, and mental exercises designed to target and strengthen specific cognitive skills. The average training plan is about 24 weeks with a few training sessions per week. This schedule allows your student to build skills in a relatively short period of time. In research studies, our graduates have shown improvements in their cognitive performance by SEVERAL YEARS compared to their peers. Learn more about our results If you’d like to see our results for yourself, we encourage you to review our brain training results for more than 21,500 learners. These results include outcomes for kids, teens, and adults, as well as clients with learning differences. You’ll also find data on individual LearningRx programs, plus results from 25 peer-reviewed studies on brain training. Ready to get started? Find your nearest LearningRx brain training center on www.LearningRx.com and schedule a Brain Skills Assessment. The affordable test only takes about an hour and the results can be truly enlightening! You have nothing to lose and strong brain skills to gain!