A few years ago, I learned some interesting statistics about how summer vacation impacts a child’s knowledge retention.
- Between 70% and 78% of students experience a decline in math skills over the summer across elementary grades.
- The summer between 5th and 6th grades is one of the worst, where 84% of students demonstrate summer slide in math.
- Students starting 5th grade who have been most affected by summer learning loss in the earlier years can lag behind their peers by 2.5 to 3 years
(Source: Learn.com)
With a daughter going into fifth grade this year, one of the things we are determined to do this summer is beat the slide. Below are a few of the things we have started:
Summer Brain Quest Workbook
For the last two summers, we have done workbooks to help keep our skills fresh. The problem is, most of them have been boring. This year I found the Summer Brain Quest Workbook.
Common Core aligned, the workbook has hundreds of fun activities, exercises, and games broken down into quests. A map guides the activities and provides an opportunity to reward through stickers. Topics include reading comprehension, writing, decimals, fractions, earth systems, American history, and more.
In just the first week of doing the workbook, I was able to discover skills my daughter was struggling with. The best part, because each lesson is short but fun, she actually asks me to do the workbook. Each day we do 2 pages out of the Brain Quest Workbook and spend approximately 15 minutes doing the activities (sometimes less).
Kumon Math Workbooks
I also purchased the Kumon Math Word Problem Workbook. The thing I like about the Kumon workbooks is they’re skill specific. My daughter is struggling the most with Word Problems, and has most of her elementary math career. So this year we decided to utilize their Word Problems workbook. Because Word Problems tackle all of the other skills, we get the best of both worlds.
Every other day we do one page out of the Kumon workbook. We do these on the days we aren’t doing math exercises in the Summer Brain Quest workbooks.
Free Math Facts Apps
To help with practicing addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division math facts, we downloaded a few free apps. We play them together “as a family” on our individual devices and race to get the best scores.
- Sushi Monster (iOS – Free)
Scholastic’s app offers children multiplication and addition problems. They’ll have to reach a target number by picking the correct factors and addends listed on different pieces of sushi. Sushi Monster meets 1st – 3rd Grade Common Core Math Standards. Students practice skills by feeding the monsters numbered plates of sushi, creating a number sentence to reach the monster’s requested number. Download for Free - Math Ninja (iOS – Free)
Math Ninja is free but comes with ads. It is a fun app that allows you to open treasure boxes for solving math sentences. Download for Free
Reading for Fun
ThriftBooks is our “go-to” place for books, but we also often find good deals on Amazon used books.. Every night we read for 20 minutes. This summer we are reading through the following series:
- Judy Blume’s Fudge Box Set
- Beverly Cleary’s Ramona Box Set