What Can Parents Do To Prevent "Summer Slide" Learning Loss?

The new school year is approaching - is your child prepared?
Many parents are not aware that through the "Summer Slide" phenomenon, children are entering the new school year unprepared, to the degree that teachers are spending up to 6 weeks re-teaching material from the previous year.

It's Known as the Summer Slide: Parents and Students Seek Ways to Stay Academically Engaged Over Vacation
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/7/prweb10967255.htm


This phenomenon is attributed mostly to a lack of intellectually engaging activities during the summer break. What's interesting to consider here though is that if the material from the previous year was actually in fact learned effectively, for example at the level that we know that 1+1=2, then even if the child did not read any books over the summer, or did not do any academic exercises, they should still have the information integrated. I mean, how many of us regularly practice our times tables every day? Lol, probably almost none of us. However, we can see that the things we indeed learned effectively -- we still know and we know we will never forget it.

In Washington we have the 4th largest class sizes in the US. In a classroom of 20, 25, 30 kids obviously children are learning at different speeds and there is not sufficient time and resources available to the teacher to regularly assess and remediate each student to make sure that the material is really sinking in. And obviously parents can only do so much during the summer break because - parents are not trained in the school curriculum and thus are for the most part not equipped to assess and remediate their children sufficiently.

The fact that children do show a natural learning ability which enables them to integrate information effectively, again in the example of the basic times tables and also we can take the example of learning to ride a bike or learning to walk -- goes to show that it is possible to learn at a level where it is not forgotten, even if you're out of practice with riding a bike for instance. And in these cases the effectiveness comes from effective repetition which seems to function in a way where the information / understanding is placed beyond just 'memory', directly into the 'knowing' level.

So it would seem prudent for educators and parents to investigate ways of facilitating additional repetition of the foundational vocabulary and knowledge, in order that it is not forgotten over the summer, which would serve to prepare students more effectively for the next school year.