If you’re not familiar with summer slide, it refers to the learning loss that many kids suffer over the summer. And ‘kids’ refers to anyone from kindergarten to a senior in high school. If you pay attention, you will see that most kids are on their screens during the summer months. It’s a time for them to unwind and play video games, communicate with friends on social media, watch movies, or scroll TikTok. What they and their parents might not realize is that they’re losing a percentage of what they recently learned in school. Unless they’re just chasing a degree, this defeats the purpose of an education.
Your brain is a muscle. When you go to the gym, you gain strength, but a lot of that has to do with muscle memory. While a short rest is good, if you take too much time off, you will lose that muscle memory, which will make you weaker. In other words, the brain does require short rests like any other muscle, but it must remain engaged to sustain it’s strength and grow.
In order to prevent summer slide, you need to go to a summer camp that promotes fun learning. The key word there is fun. Most learning is boring, such as reading a science book or listening to a lecture on history. The key to promoting learning is to make it fun. You can find more information on this on sites like mysmartskid.com. Regardless of where you look, you want to find certain things for promoting summer learning.
Some camps will use the STEM program. This means they will be teaching Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. Other camps will toy with that acronym. For instance, you might find a summer camp offering a STEAM program. This means they teach Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math. Adding a Art is important because it motivates all the creatives.
That said, motivation should be a key word for every camper. And the only way a kid is going to stay motivated is if they’re having fun. The best summer camps for preventing summer slide know exactly how to keep it fun. For example, for math, they might go for a hike and use the leaves on the trees to determine how many leaves there could be in the forest. This will become a conversational piece for the kids as they hike through the woods. The kids will be hiking and not even realize they’re learning. On that same hike, they might learn about the different birds they see and how to identity them. Later that night, they might sit around the campfire and tell stories to promote the creative side of their brains, which would be the right side of the brain.
In all, the kids that attend camps that promote fun learning are going to stimulate brain growth, learn how to work as a team, and network with other kids. Those networks could turn into business relationships in the future.
Conclusively, summer camps that prevent summer slide are a genius concept and will keep your child on the right path.
