Anticipated by students and teachers alike, summer break is a great opportunity for children to take a break from the daily routine of school, relieve stress, and reconnect with family and friends at home. While time away from the classroom has many benefits, it can also lead to a decreased understanding of the educational material students learned in the previous academic year. This is commonly referred to as summer learning loss or summer slide. If your child experiences summer slide, they might find it more difficult to excel academically at the start of the new school year.
Avoiding Learning Loss
Good news! Parents and students can work together throughout summer break to avoid learning loss by practicing skills at home. In addition to reading books from your home or local library, plus completing any prepared work your student’s teacher may have sent home, your child can practice the skills they have learned by working with manipulatives. Manipulatives are a hands-on educational tool used to practice a wide variety of educational subjects, including cognitive skills, mathematics, language arts, problem solving and logic.
Eureka® offers a wide variety of manipulatives for children of a variety of ages. These affordably priced teaching aids make it easy to bring the classroom into your home with the remaining weeks of summer vacation. Brightly colored and featuring fun characters and shapes, Eureka’s spelling tiles, counting bears, learning clock and more will engage your child and help turn learning into a game. Younger children will love self-correcting puzzles, especially those featuring their favorite character from Dr. Seuss™ books. In addition to manipulatives, Eureka® also offers flashcards that span beginning skills, such as practicing shapes, phonics and counting through more advanced skills, such as division and multiplication.
Keeping Your Child Motivated
While manipulatives and flashcards are a fun, engaging way to practice academics at home, you may find the pull to the local park or a get together a friend’s house distracting. Keep your child motivated in between exciting summer outings by using additional Eureka® educational tools. Goal setting charts in a large poster format or a small personal format can help your children identify what skills they hope to maintain and track their progress as the start of new school year gets closer. As they reach important milestones, reward them with stickers, recognition awards, scratch off rewards and more!
Your Chance to Win!
Ready try Eureka® manipulatives and other educational tools with your child? Whether you use them in these last few weeks of summer or throughout the new school year, you will find they are a great way to learn at home. Enter Eureka’s Macaroni Kid giveaway for your chance to win a $25 credit and free ground shipping to use at EurekaSchool.com! Ten winners will be randomly selected. Giveaway ends on August 31, 2015. To enter and see full contest details, click here.
