Keeping Your Child's Mind Sharp This Summer

Just as the famous lyrics in the rock song say, 'School's Out For Summer.' The children have worked tirelessly all year and are ready for the big break. While they should be enjoying the summer's rays and grazing the beach looking for unbroken shells with their siblings, their brains must stay sharp. In order for the children to retain all of the knowledge that they have swept in under their tidy or untidy hairstyles, they must stay on top of the ball and practice what their teachers have been piercingly preaching all year long. Multiplication facts, sentence grammar, and historical timelines can be turned into fun while they take some time outs from the UV rays. As an educator, I understand the importance of this. When children come back from the summer, many times they have forgotten even simple things such as how to structure a simple sentence.

One way for your child to maintain all of his/her hard work from the school year is to keep a journal. This may sound like tedious and unneeded work, but it is so important for students to learn to focus on a specific topic and to write about it using as many details as they can. For example if your family is taking a trip to the Jersey shore, have your child write about the experience driving there. If they know that they will be writing a journal about the travel, they will begin to pay more attention to the small things. Perhaps they will notice which states they had to travel through to get there and will use a map to locate all of those states. This will get young children thinking about direction such as North, South, East, and West as well. Older children may want to jot down how much money was spent just on the travel to reach the destination. They could keep track of gas, food, and tolls that accrue. This is definitely a great way for them to understand and review the concept of money. By downloading graphic organizers online, you can help your child organize his/herthoughts. A good site to do generate graphic organizers can be found on Houghton Mifflan's page,www.eduplace.com/kids/hme/k_5/graphorg/.