Beating the summer slide during the long summer break needn’t be hard. But before we go into how this can be done, let’s clarify what does ‘summer slide’ mean in the first place.

The term indicates that due to being away from school during the long summer vacation, students have kind have forgotten what they learned. This however needn’t be the case if children were to spend just 15-20 minutes of their day engaging in some fun learning activity. Reading daily and doing a couple of math activities would help maintain their learning stamina and keep them mentally alert till it’s time for the regular routine of school again.

A key to keeping children engaged on learning tasks during their summer break is to provide them with fun interactive activities. For instance, the sheet below targets the skill of number identification and tracing and all through a fun medium of spinning a spinner and seeing what number the spinner lands on. Students will love flicking the pin and will even predict the number it will land on – I know my students do!

Visuals too play an important role in arresting a child’s attention. In the sheet below, students have to identify the greater number and color the representing scoop. My students enjoyed coloring their ice-cream scoops different colors and learned to differentiate between the greatest and smallest number in  the process.

Here’s another one on writing the number before and after a given number.

These interactive sheets are definitely  more visually appeasing and fun to work on than plain old boring ‘worksheets’ – don’t you think?

You will find more fun interactive activities in this 60 page Numbers 1-20 Summer Review Pack:

Wish you and your children a super summer without the slide!