Tutorfair : Avoid the summer slide with top tips for children’s summer learning

I LOVE the summer holidays. I love not having to get up early, rush around and do the school run twice a day. I love being able to spend time with my girls, doing whatever we want, with no ties to education. However, it is important, that over the summer holidays, children are still learning. Learning comes in many forms and that includes play. According to psychologist Harris Cooper, a lack of learning over the six weeks of school holidays can set children back by a month in their education and up to 2.6 months in mathematics. This I called the “summer slide” and teachers spend the first 4-6 weeks of term, reteaching what the children have forgotten over the summer.

What can you do to prevent the summer slide?

Tutorfair have come up with some tips to help

1. Look up next years curriculum (most schools have this on their website) and start introducing your children to those topics. I know my own daughter loves looking things up on Google and watching educational videos on YouTube, so we plan to give her a headstart with that.

2. Reading. Take some books out of the local library, so your child has some new reading material. Encouraging them to read four or five books over the holidays, will keep their mind active. Challenge them to read something different to the reading material they would get at school. They could also take up the Summer Reading Challenge, which many libraries run over the summer.

3. Add mathematics into every day conversation. For example, that question that we parents enjoy hearing so often on day trips… “Are we nearly there yet?”… You can get your children to calculate how many minutes it will be until we get there, or if they are older, how long it will take to get there if travelling X miles at X MPH. You can get them to calculate weights and measures in cooking or add in fractions, multiplication or division if you are altering the recipe size.

4. Writing. Encouraging children to write stories, keep a journal or even write postcards, will engage their creativity and their handwriting skills.

5. Get scientific. There are many ways of engaging children in science over the summer, whether buying a science kit, or just using natural resources – such as drawing chalk circles around puddles and talking about evaporation or trying to identify different types of leaves or flowers.

6. Summer tutoring. Whether your child is a keen learner or one who you are worried may fall behind if not stimulated enough over the summer, hiring a private tutor can be a great way of preventing the summer slide and giving your children a kick start into the new term.

Tutorfair allows you to search online for tutors in your area and look at their qualifications, credentials and videos, to help you decide who is best to work with your child. Browsing, booking and payments are all easy and able to be done online and they offer a money back guarantee if you aren’t satisfied with the tutor after the first session. What makes Tutorfair stand out from other tutoring agencies though, is their charitable stance: For every student who pays for tutoring, Tutorfair give free tutoring to a child who cannot afford to pay for it. That is why they are called TutorFAIR. So not only would your own child be learning and avoiding the summer slide, but you’d be helping a child in poverty to do the same.