The JumpStart Blog

-From the Desk of Heather Tuttle, Curriculum Writer-

As the month of May comes to a close, your little ones have probably already begun their countdown to the much anticipated summer vacation. As much as your studious pupils deserve some fun and relaxation, it’s important that their brains don’t take a break all summer long. Research shows kids in grades kindergarten through sixth lose between one and three months of learning, or about 45% of what they learned during the school year, throughout those long summer days. This summer slip in learning happens when kids don’t get a chance to engage in educational activities during their vacation. Prevent a brain drain this summer and keep your kids’ minds in gear all summer long with these fun and simple brain boosting activities for kids of all ages!

Math

Since kids lose more math skills than anything else over the summer, try to incorporate some math-related activities into the daily routine.

• Help your kids mathematically monitor and keep track of a summer sport. Research your favorite team’s statistics, averages, and rank and keep a chart monitoring the team’s progress.
• Cook a meal together, letting your child follow the recipe and use measuring spoons and cups.
• Hang a thermometer outside to track the temperature throughout the summer.
• Make paper airplanes or egg parachutes and measure their flight paths and distances.
• Let your kids help you shop. Tell them how much money you’re aiming to spend and let their estimating go to work as you throw items into the shopping cart. Be sure to get their estimated total before you get to the register.

Writing

Help your child’s vacationing brain build creativity, writing skills, and vocabulary with these activities:

• Fill in summer’s special days and events on a homemade calendar. Use pencils, drawing paper, and rulers to create, decorate, and fill in a personalized summer calendar for your family.
• Make the summer a time to relive for an eternity by creating a scrapbook of summer events and memories. Your kids can fill pages by writing details of their experiences, adding photos and captions, and placing any items they collected during the summer months inside. Add their artistic and creative skills to this project, and you’ve got a brain building memory to last a lifetime.
• Writing made-up or real-life accounts of summer adventures is always a fun way to get the imagination and the mind going. Work together to create a ‘choose your own adventure’ book where the ending is always unknown.

Social Studies

It’s easy to learn about history, geography, and culture without even realizing it during the summer months. Here are few ideas to make studying social studies simple.

• Help your kids set up interviews with older community members or relatives. Delve into lives of the past and learn firsthand about history and how things used to be.
• Help your child make a map of the places and landmarks she’s visited. Color the places visited in one color and shade in the places that she’d like to visit someday in another color.
• Visit a historical monument, a national park, or a history museum.
• Your kids will feel great ownership and quite proud when they help you map out and plan a family vacation or day trip. Let them help you research activities by poring through brochures and websites. Make it a math lesson as well when you give them a shot at budgeting the family entertainment, dining, and lodging.
• Take your kids to an international market or an ethnic restaurant. Try new foods and research the country or region the foods came from.
• Be a tourist in a new city- explore, navigate, and learn together.

Stay tuned for more ‘Brain Drain’ prevention techniques next week, when we’ll look at building the summer brain through reading and science!