A blip from Gannett News reminds us that summer break can diminish academic skills, and lists suggestions for avoiding the summer backslide.  I have to admit that I would have written it differently, since their list sounds as "not fun" to me as it would to my kids.

Summer school?  Plan a trip with an educational theme?  Ick.

Summer is a time for kids to kick back and be kids, but that doesn’t mean there can’t be learning or academic exercise involved; as a parent, though, you just shouldn’t make it seem so overt.  Working a child too hard, for too long, can build a resentment toward academics in general, and will backfire.

Younger children in particular are into modeling the behavior of adults.  If my child sees me stretched out in a comfy chair on the deck with a good book, the odds are pretty high that she’s going to look for a book of her own and join me.  We started a long time ago calling that "mom and baby read time," although given that she’s almost as big as I am and has fully grown into my shoes already, she’s hardly a baby.  Still, as the youngest, that’s how she thinks of herself — the baby.  A couple of summers ago I let her get her own library card as a reward for accomplishing some task, and we’d go as often as she needed to stay intrigued.  Last summer, I think she read every book about dragons ever written.

Last weekend when we made a quick trip to DC and back for our niece’s graduation, we took a few hours to tour some of the museums at the Smithsonian.  The lure to Natural History was that we could see the Hope Diamond, but that naturally involved the rest of the gems and minerals exhibit, as well as a cruise through the dinosaur bones.  It certainly wasn’t planned as an "educational trip," but we worked in as much educational activity as anything else. 

A few years ago, a leisurely trip to the beach brought us the opportunity to see the baby sea turtles hatch.  The kids spent hours that night scooping up the baby turtles who crawled toward the beach houses, carrying them to the water’s edge, and beating back more than a few sand crabs trying to get the baby turtles.  While there, we made a trip to an estuarium, where they could learn more about the sea turtles, as well as about the jellyfish we unfortunately encountered.

Math is one skill that does need refreshing over the summer, but it shouldn’t seem like a chore.  Fractions are easily worked into cooking or baking, geometry into building things, and there are an abundance of computer games and puzzles that are math-based, but seem like games.  Sudoku is a favorite around here (and the geometry teachers at ORHS regularly assign these puzzles as homework).

Scrabble and Boggle are a couple more family games that are definitely academic skill-builders, but also seem more like games than study.  Yet, they build vocabulary, spelling, and arithmetic skills.  You’d be amazed how quickly a child can multiply  in her head when putting a word with a "Z" in it on a 3X tile in Scrabble!

Everyone needs a break, and summer is the time for relaxed schedules and more family fun time.  There’s no reason for it to seem like work.