Summertime’s mystique can create the ideal atmosphere for helping students learn. Creativity skyrockets and everything feels a bit more laid-back: perfect conditions for learning. Keeping lessons fun, light, interesting, local, and relevant sparks deep connections to the subject matter. When kids are enjoying their activities, they may not even realize they’re building skills in reading, writing, science, and math. From great books to swimming lessons to making art to noticing nature, summer learning can take many forms.
Summer instruction acts as an extension of the school year to support continued learning. According to test scores, students tend to backslide over the course of a typical summer break, with the average student losing up to a third of the learning gains and skills they acquired in the previous year. Summer learning loss or “summer slide,” can affect students as early as K–1 and can set back months of instruction time. The ideal scenario looks like this instead: throughout the summer, students practice the skills they learned the previous year, so they start a new school year ready to learn, rather than requiring significant time spent reviewing the skills they lost. Even just a few hours of practice per week throughout the summer can make a big difference toward encouraging overall learning, maintaining academic skills, improving in areas of focus, boosting brain power, and preventing the slide.
The summer slide wastes knowledge students gained during the previous school year.
The slide requires teachers to spend more time re-teaching content from last year.
Learning gaps tend to increase and summer is a great time to work on closing them.
Addressing learning loss or accelerating learning progress sets students up for success as the new school year begins.
Stopping the summer slide can contribute directly to better futures for students, academically, professionally, and personally.
Educators and policymakers have historically depended on summer school programs to fight summer learning loss and help close learning gaps. School-based summer educational programs vary in their effectiveness; countless meta-analyses demonstrate that such programs produce the best outcomes when they rely on science-based instruction, when students attend regularly, and when activities and tasks have an academic focus. Home-based summer school programs can also produce positive outcomes when they rely on science-based curriculum for summer learning.
Summer learning programs improve skills and increase the desire to learn. Students who participate mitigate summer learning loss and often display gains. Most kids in summer learning programs develop their comprehension and memory skills. Programs that also include multisensory learning approaches work to address any learning challenges and help student’s brains function efficiently. Reinforcing learning throughout the summer months helps keep students on track.
Focus on preventing the slide by engaging students in learning they enjoy. Students burned out from the school year need to feel excited about a topic if it’s going to register in summertime. Educators can take this as an opportunity to ask students what they want to learn about and encourage them to pursue things they’ve always wanted to know more about or try doing. Questions like these can send kids off to have fun researching and reading, which is part of the goal, but it’s also a great idea to include activities that connect to their interests. (As a bonus, activities can serve double duty, helping avoid screen time while preventing the slide; and even better, students engaged in a project or something they can solve or accomplish collaboratively or independently are practicing project-based learning.) Give students agency by allowing them to co-develop what their learning will look like.
Build and strengthen skills.
Increase desire to learn.
Bolster self-esteem.
Prevent summer learning loss.
Improve learning comprehension.
Boost memory skills.
Between the end of one school year and the start of a new one, summertime interrupts learning, causing many students to slide or experience a degree of summer learning loss. This loss doesn’t need to happen and can even be replaced by learning gains. Educators and district leaders can take simple steps to promote learning throughout the summer. Here are a few ways educators can help prevent summer learning loss and promote summer learning:
Effective summer learning programs lead to well-documented gains in student learning and can act as a real solution to the summer slide. School leaders can make their district’s summer learning programs more impactful by considering these tips for success:
Explore a wide range of approaches for inspiring students to show up for learning. For example, consider including programs in music, dance, crafts, and art instruction, along with field trips to local museums and performances. Sporting events, zoos, aquariums, and parks can all be used to illustrate STEM principles or practice literacy skills. Enable activities like nature walks with corresponding writing projects or scavenger hunts outdoors with maps for kids to read. Maintain an educational environment that feels positive, supportive, relaxed, and full of opportunity so everyone can enjoy the experience of summer learning.
Provide extra compensation for educators and invest in teachers from start to finish. Highly effective teachers who are incentivized to teach during the summer yield better outcomes. Many districts already raise pay for teachers working during the summer months. Teachers can also benefit from summer professional development courses. Happy teachers with small class sizes and strong summer learning curriculums create ideal environments for students to make strong learning gains. Districts can also publicize their commitment to effective summer learning programs, increasing their own ability to attract talented teachers.
Make sure your summer curriculum includes daily math practice. Kids who don’t practice can lose the equivalent of more than two grade levels of math skills over summer break. Math skills need to be kept sharp. Fun math games are easy to do every day, and they’re remarkably effective for preventing the summer slide in math.
Summer Math Tip: Fun math practice is still math practice! Cultivate summer learning with gardens. Help students learn math along with a wide range of STEM skills and useful practical knowledge, by allowing classrooms to plant gardens. Choose from limitless garden options, including simply starting seeds in trays, in a raised bed, or in pots. Students will learn how soil, sun, and water combine to help plants grow under various conditions. They’ll also learn more about where their food comes from.
Ensure that your classrooms practice daily literacy as well. Choose summer learning programs that support the science of reading and provide plenty of literacy instruction options, with support for summertime reading and writing practice. Build a book-sharing initiative to encourage reading over the break, or partner with your local library to create summertime activities or participate in existing summer programs.
Summer Literacy Tip: Fun writing practice is still writing practice! For example, writing assignments can walk students through the steps of the writing process (brainstorm, outline, draft, edits, revision) for a creative story, informative text, or opinion piece while they think they’re (respectively) making up a better ending to their favorite summer movie, helping someone understand the rules of baseball, or trying to persuade their parents to increase their summertime allowance.
Get students excited about learning. Promote an environment that rewards curiosity. Instead of just focusing on remediation or closing gaps, try to use summer learning to connect students with their interests and passions. Encourage student attendance by providing incentives.
Promote learning and inspire healthy competition by creating goals for classrooms to pursue over the summer or contests for students to compete in. Announce the achievements and winners when school starts again and reward classrooms with certificates, prizes, an award ceremony, pizza party, or something else that would motivate students to get involved.
Recruit students to take part in summer learning. Many of the students who would benefit from summer learning programs, tutoring, or other forms of summertime education won’t pursue these avenues on their own. School leaders must play an active role in communicating the details about summer programs to families and reaching out to individual students.
Help caregivers take steps to improve outcomes over the summer:
Give them materials to help prepare for the coming year, including information about local museums, language classes, tutoring programs, educational camps, and other opportunities for summer learning.
Inform caregivers about the causes and effects of the summer slide and provide them with information about how to better prevent the slide with simple activities that promote everyday learning.
Support students with special needs over the summer by giving caregivers suggestions for activities aimed at building fine motor skills, maintaining routines, improving social skills and communication, and anything else that can help students have a productive summer.
Remind caregivers: read and practice math with kids over the summer. Encourage reading even on vacations and talking with kids about what they’re reading; and remember just a few minutes spent on a handful of simple math exercises a day is enough to make a major difference.
Build a strong summer learning program on research-based curriculum. Be sure academic content also includes plenty of hands-on learning and recreational activities.
Support learning disabilities and students with dyslexia by implementing research-based multisensory learning programs and summer curriculums built on the Orton-Gillingham approach to instruction, ideal for students with dyslexia, striving students, and students at every level.
Summer is a time of rejuvenation and growth. Students starting the next grade in school need to feel prepared when they start the new year. Summer learning curriculum investments reward district leaders by helping educators addressing learning differences, close learning gaps, provide necessary interventions and remediation, support tutoring efforts, enable successful acceleration techniques, and lead to positive student outcomes. Districts can continuously plan ahead to ensure that each year, the coming summer is a time of growth for all students.